Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology and God 9781350985995, 9781786732958

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— Elaine L. Graham, Grosvenor Research Professor of Practical Theology, University of Chester, author of Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture

‘Scott Midson’s book blazes a new path for theology in its pursuit of the trans- and posthuman. This is cutting-edge work that we need to start to include in our academic curricula. It speaks powerfully to the world we inhabit.’ — Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford

Scott A. Midson

The concept of the cyborg, or cybernetic organism, has led to notably creative explorations of the ambiguous relationship between human beings and technology. In particular, Donna Haraway argued in her famous 1991 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ that people, since they cannot escape the influence of machines, can themselves be conceived of as cyborgs. This striking idea has had considerable influence within critical theory, cultural studies and even science fiction (where it has surfaced, for example, in the Terminator films and in the Borg of the Star Trek franchise). But it is a notion that has had much less currency in theology.

CYBORG THEOLOGY HUMANS,

In his innovative new book, Scott Midson boldly argues that the deeper nuances of Haraway’s and the cyborg idea can similarly rejuvenate theology, mythology and anthropology. Challenging the damaging anthropocentrism directed towards nature and the non-human in our society, the author reveals – through an imaginative reading of the myth of Eden – how it is now possible for humanity to be at one with the natural world even as it vigorously pursues novel, posthuman technologies.

TECHNOLOGY AND GOD

— Peter Scott, Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology and Director

The result is a fresh and imaginative reading of salvation history that develops and deconstructs Haraway’s thinking even while it conceives of human beings as being part of creation, not damagingly separate from it. In the process, even as much is communicated about cyborgs and myth, Midson shows his readers how a sophisticated application of cultural theory can enrich theological understanding even as theology in turn enhances cultural studies. Offering nothing less than a retrieval of human personhood, this bold and original monograph will have considerable interdisciplinary appeal: to theologians, to philosophers and to students of social and cultural theory.

of the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester

Scott A. Midson

www.ibtauris.com ISBN 978-1-78453-787-6

9 781784 537876 Jacket image: Robotic endoskeleton of a T-800 cyborg used in the film Terminator 2 on display at ‘Fantastic SyFy Objects’, the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid, 25 February, 2011 (photo by Eduardo Parra/Getty Images)

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‘Utilising the concept of the cyborg, Midson brilliantly explores the shifting boundaries and coupling relationships between human and machine. The result is a tour de force. Midson’s is a new and compelling voice on the theological scene.’

CYBORG THEOLOGY

‘Scott Midson’s book will encourage readers to reflect not just on the impact of advanced technologies on their everyday lives, but also on the deeper questions about what it means to be human in a world of hybrid beings and fluid boundaries.’

HUMANS, TECHNOLOGY AND GOD

Scott A. Midson is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester, where he obtained his PhD in 2016. Specialising in religion and technology, and religion and posthumanism, he is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology, where he delivered a paper in 2016 on the topic of ‘Black Mirrors’. Cyborg Theology is his first book.

Scott A. Midson is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester, where he obtained his PhD in 2016. Specialising in religion and technology, and religion and posthumanism, he is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology, where he delivered a paper in 2016 on the topic of ‘Black Mirrors’. Cyborg Theology is his first book.

‘Scott Midson’s book will encourage readers to reflect not just on the impact of advanced technologies on their everyday lives, but also on the deeper questions about what it means to be human in a world of hybrid beings and fluid boundaries.’ – Elaine L. Graham, Grosvenor Research Professor of Practical Theology, University of Chester, author of Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture ‘Scott Midson’s book blazes a new path for theology in its pursuit of the trans- and posthuman. This is cutting-edge work that we need to start to include in our academic curricula. It speaks powerfully to the world we inhabit.’ – Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford ‘Utilising the concept of the cyborg, Midson brilliantly explores the shifting boundaries and coupling relationships between human and machine. The result is a tour de force. Midson’s is a new and compelling voice on the theological scene.’ – Peter Scott, Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology and Director of the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester

CYBORG THEOLOGY Humans, Technology and God

SCOTT A. MIDSON

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2018 Scott A. Midson The right of Scott A. Midson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Library of Modern Religion 56 ISBN: 978 1 78453 787 6 eISBN: 978 1 78672 295 9 ePDF: 978 1 78673 295 8 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Stone Serif by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Margaret and Murray Midson

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION Why Cyborgs and Theology? Technologies and theologies What is a cyborg? Engaging theology with the cyborg Theoretical foundations: (Hi)stories

xi xiii

1 1 5 9 12

PART I 1.

Imago Dei: Anthropogeny & Theological Anthropology What does it mean to be ‘human’? Theological models of the human Substantive interpretations: Essentially human? Functional models: Performing the human? Relational models: Assembling the human? Beyond relational models: Critiquing the human?

2.

Nature & Human Nature Nature, humans, technology Nature and otherness: Eden Nature and humanness (1): Imago dei

19 19 24 27 32 38 44 48 48 53 57

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3.

Nature and humanness (2): Freedom and Fall Nature-as-essence: Substantive interpretations

61 65

Posthumanism: The End(s) of the Human? Pluralising the posthuman Expansions of the human: Transhumans Limits of the human: Evolutionary posthumans

71 71 74 78

Querying the human: Critical post/humans Alternative articulations of the human: Cyborgs

83 86

PART II 4.

Cybernetics and Organisms: Fusions Systems and cyborgs Astronautic cyborgs ‘Healthy’ cyborgs SF cyborgs

5.

Figurative Cyborgs: Confusions Non-teleological cyborgs We, cyborgs Natural-born cyborgs Post-cyborgs?

93 93 97 100 105 112 112 119 123 126

PART III 6.

Creation, Creatures and Creativity Creative cyborgs and created co-creators Imago dei and creativity Cyborgs, god(s), and goddesses

7.

Eden: Return or Refigure? Ruptures: Eden/cyborgs Continuities: Eden-cyborgs Implosions: Cyborgs in the garden Articulations: Return to Eden?

137 137 143 156 164 165 171 176 184

Contents CONCLUSION Doing Difference Differently: Towards a Cyborg Theology Cyborgisation Fabulation Implosion

ix

189 189 193 196

Notes Bibliography

201 229

Index

243

List of Figures

Figure 2.1 Venn diagram to express the interrelationship between humans, nature and technology

66

Figure 3.1 Venn diagram to show the interrelationship between humans, nature and technology in the broad field of posthumanism

86

Figure 4.1 Venn diagram to show human – technology dynamics in different expressions and understandings of cyborg figures

110

Figure 5.1 Diagram to show the cyborgian interrelationship between humans and technologies as fusions and confusions

127

Acknowledgements

No cyborg acts alone: that is the message that is at the forefront of this book. And so, it is fitting to open by acknowledging some of the people without whom this book would not have come together, and to whom I extend a deep and sincere thank you. This book began as a PhD thesis undertaken at the University of Manchester (2012–15), which was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and a President’s Doctoral Scholarship (PDS). The wisdom and guidance of my supervisory team (Susannah Cornwall, Kaye Mitchell, Chris Shannahan, and Peter Scott) during this time is hopefully (!) still preserved in these pages, and I thank them wholeheartedly for their inputs. I also thank Sigurd Bergmann and Michael Hoelzl for their invaluable advice about making the transition from thesis to manuscript. There are many, many more names to cover that span this period – far too many to list here unfortunately – but the communities of the Graduate School (of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures), the Lincoln Theological Institute and the Department of Religions and Theology have been particularly supportive of this research. I have also had the privilege of teaching at the University of Chester while preparing this book, and colleagues in the department of Theology and Religious Studies were encouraging and helpful. It has been a pleasure to write the book as part of these communities, working among inspiring researchers. I also thank Dympna Gould and Canon David Holgate of Manchester Cathedral for the invitation to present some of my

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work on cyborgs and theology as part of Manchester Science Week 2016. Albert Radcliffe and his congregations at St Chad’s Church, Withington, also extended a kind and generous invite to present at and participate in their fantastic Religion and Science seminars. Audiences here and at conferences where I have discussed, and had the opportunity to develop, some of my chapters have provided invaluable feedback – as well as a list of sci-fi recommendations that I’m still only scratching the surface of. Additional thanks go to Emma Britain and Sonja Bernhard and the Widening Participation and Schools Outreach teams of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Manchester, as well as teachers and pupils of the classes that I have had the pleasure of talking all things technological and posthuman with. I appreciated classes’ lively responses and comments, which ranged from asking how we can distinguish humans from God, to designing soft and huggable robots; and from exploring whether we are posthuman, to having a heated discussion about whether Beyonce´ is a cyborg. I also thank students of Theological Studies in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Manchester, whose responses to my lectures on matters of theological anthropology and human and nonhuman ethics have inspired me to take my work in further new and exciting directions. I have been particularly fortunate to have had the love and support of friends throughout the book-writing process: they have helped to celebrate successes and to rebound from less-thansuccesses; usually with both involving copious amounts of cake. I wholeheartedly here thank, among others, Katie Zakis, Naomi Billingsley, Esther Webb (and Grace Church, Manchester), Miri Jakel, Johannes Lotze, Kate Crouch, Dorian Campbell, Jenni Jackson, Alison Jackson, Kayla Hillier, Anna Vickerstaff, Rosie Edgley and Chloe Thornton. Particular thanks also go to Katharina Keim, who has patiently and enthusiastically passed on advice and encouragement, and Tim Tams, and who has spurred me on throughout the highs and lows of balancing writing and life. I also thank James Grant for putting up with my cyborgian (and ‘omniborgian’) ramblings, and for offering much appreciated support that has enriched the writing process, and that I hope has in turn enriched my arguments and their articulation here.

Acknowledgements

xv

My biggest ‘thank you’ and acknowledgements in putting this book together go firstly to Alex Wright, Sara Magness and the team at I.B.Tauris for taking an initial and sustained interest in my research, and for making my first-time publishing process so enjoyable. Secondly, to Peter Scott, who has guided and helped to develop my ideas, and from whom I continue to learn much about theology and its role in the contemporary academy and world. Through detailed conversations with Peter during my academic journey in Manchester, I have been able to continually refine and sharpen my critique about cyborgs and my awareness of theological tools, and I am very thankful and grateful for his shared expertise and valuable inputs. A final thank you goes to my family for their love, and for their support of my research and work (even if it’s not always been the easiest to follow!). Jacquie, Shane, Ash, Darryl, Liam, Poppy, Dolly and Molly have all taught me the value of hard work, and the importance of valuing everything that goes into it and comes out of it: the most cyborgian lessons of all that I advocate. These are, furthermore, values that have been passed down from my late grandparents, Margaret and Murray Midson, who have been with me every step of the research and writing process, and to whom I dedicate this book.

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26–7 (NRSV)

The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, 151.

INTRODUCTION

Why Cyborgs and Theology?

TECHNOLOGIES AND THEOLOGIES In general, and thanks largely to popular sci-fi depictions of them, cyborgs are associated with advanced technologies that look set to characterise our future societies and world(s) – indeed, our very existence. Of these technologies, we might identify things such as: artificial intelligence; deeper immersion into virtual and augmented spaces; and smarter devices that can handle mass streams of data, using them to make algorithms that map out broader behavioural trends. In order to survive and even to flourish in these worlds, a pervasive argument is that we shall need to undergo radical enhancements to the body via ‘smart’ prosthetic devices that make us into human – technology fusions, or ‘cyborgs’. But are cyborgs just about such radical enhancements to future humans? What else might they suggest? In other words, how much of this general attitude is an accurate or useful portrayal of cyborgs, or indeed of the technologies and humans that are part of their development and identity? As a starting point, take a moment to look around you. How much technology do you share your environment with? And how can you tell what is technological from what is not? Do you regard the book in your hand, for example, as a piece of technology? Would it be more or less technological to read this on an e-ink screen, or on a tablet or laptop computer? What are the criteria used for making any such judgements? These questions are important and they will be explored here in attempting to construct a critical appraisal of

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technology – which needs to be understood and contextualised in order to more fully engage with the figure of the cyborg, particularly insofar as it is generally regarded as a technological entity. Before developing a critical appraisal, though, we need to pause and reflect on our understandings and mode of contextualising. Put differently, the question is not just about how we come to recognise something as technological, or indeed as more or less technological if by degree rather than by clear-cut category, but it is also about how broader attitudes and ideas influence those conclusions about technology. Although this could suggest a notoriously vast enterprise given the range of attitudes that could be examined, for the purposes of this book, particular attention is given to the role of theological motifs that not only influence our approaches to technology, but that may also be called into question or even fundamentally challenged by new technological developments. In Judeo-Christian creation stories (cosmogenies), for example, humans were made and homed in a paradisiacal garden, Eden, among other animals and life created by God. We no longer live in such a setting. We live in environments of our own forging, with various degrees of urbanisation, but where the human and technological hand is certainly traceable. We also live among beings that are at least partially created, or re-created, by humans: genetically modified crops are more commonplace; splicing of DNA material across species produces new hybrid forms of life; and we can even re-wire brains, at present of rodents, so that they can be controlled by use of lasers via a fairly recent technology known as ‘optogenetics’. All of these technologies raise profound questions about the place of humans in the world. Should we be able to manipulate lifeforms in this way? Are we intervening too much insofar as we are creating new forms of life? These questions are becoming increasingly prominent in theological reflections on contemporary society, where the ethical dimensions of advanced technologies are duly noted. To be sure, these questions will not be ignored in the present investigation, but will be brought to an exploration of the cyborg figure that conveys more of our ontology – the understanding of who we are – amidst technologies and other beings. This has ethical ramifications, certainly, but these will not be

Introduction

3

the primary focus of this work and will be more derivative from other conclusions. Going further still beyond these questions of technological intervention in life, particularly nonhuman life, we can note that we are in a world where digital personal assistants are embedded into the functionality of nearly every smartphone or computing device, and where robot companions are developing capabilities that were once beyond our wildest dreams. How much of these dreams are human? How much of them should remain just dreams? And how much might our reflective dreams of Eden inform our technological developments themselves, as well as how we critically think through them? This last question provides the investigatory focus throughout this book. It might appear to be a striking question to pose, given that explicit references to Eden are not a prevalent feature of our increasingly seemingly secularised world. But, as I want to argue over the coming chapters, this is by no means equivalent to saying that theological notions and motifs such as Eden have no lingering influence over our contemporary (as well as historical) attitudes. The symbolism of Eden in particular, and the appeal of a pristine and natural world that it suggests, is still resonant in the ways that we think about ourselves, our place in the world1 and the ways that we create and use technologies to connect and problematise the two. What is deficient from our assessments of technologies here is a critical awareness of the traditions that influence our attitudes, which is what this book seeks to offer. It should be noted at this stage, however, that it would be a troubling oversimplification to totalise the influence of one symbol or idea such as Eden or Genesis mythology, as this would be to make us determined and entirely conditioned by the logic of that one narrative, thereby disregarding even the more diverse range of readings possible of that text. Indeed, the complexity of Genesis as a theological but also cultural resource is something that will be equally emphasised by this book and, in elaborating this argument, attention will be given to Eden but also to the broader context and other notions that influence our reception of it. The aim is not to totalise a reading of one theological text, then, but rather to

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illuminate the ways that theological notions exemplified by one particular text, Genesis – which is often misunderstood possibly as part of a decline of theological awareness in society – continue to shape our attitudes to contemporary phenomena such as the current state of technologies. This text, however, as I shall argue here, can also be rethought – fruitfully – by a critical reflection on our assumptions about technologies and ourselves. The influence of Edenic symbolism and the appeal of going back to a pre-technological paradise can be traced in many places. One place may be in many films that feature technologies as part of their narratives. Particularly in narratives of technologies-gone-awry or of catastrophe, the resolution tends to offer some kind of Edenic reference, which is an important point that will be returned to later in the discussion. Discerning this symbolism perhaps closer to home, and to return to the exercise that I opened with, this may manifest somewhat in how we critically appraise the technologies that surround us. Are you, for example, happy with the amount of technology that you’re surrounded by? Is there too much? Do you notice it all (and does this make it better or worse)? Often, notions of nature are used to assess technologies and their prominence, particularly, for example, in contrast to the nontechnological and pristine topos of Eden. The notion of ‘nature’ is an interesting one insofar as it allows us to think about our own place in wider nature, as well as our own human nature. Do technologies coincide with either of these, or do they stand apart from what it is to be human or to be a part of the natural world, particularly if we take the notion that technologies are about artifice and thereby contrastive to the natural? Again, critical reflection on the theological and cultural symbolism will be useful in order to attend to these questions, and to cast light on how we regard technologies, as well as to examine how helpful these approaches are. A useful starting point and observation, then, from this initial reflection on the immediate environment and the suggestion of critical questions that will be used to guide and focus the forthcoming discussion, is that technologies are everywhere. They surround and abound us, and they even help to define us in certain ways, and mediate how we understand or perform ourselves in relation to the world and to broader and more abstract (or at least less tangible)

Introduction

5

notions such as other beings, the future or God. None of this, I suggest, is particularly new or novel, and this will be significant for my analysis of the resonance of Edenic symbolism in contemporary culture. Technologies have always surrounded us, although the ways that we figure and relate to them may make us critical or wary of them. A notable example of this, which will be the focus of this book, is represented by the figure of the cyborg. Cyborgs embody or at least present us with the possibility of radical fusion with technologies, such that technologies don’t merely surround us, but actually constitute a fundamental part of who we are, in our bodies and in our selves. How much of this predicament is new or novel, or, to return to the idea of cyborgs sketched out at the very start of this book, how much of this predicament is still confined to the distant imagined lands of sci-fi or ‘the future’? And in any case, how are we to respond to it?

WHAT IS A CYBORG? Upon seeing the word ‘cyborg’ in the title for this book, you may have already had an image or idea of what a cyborg is. The most common understandings of cyborgs mediated through popular culture include hyper-masculinist figures such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s infamous Terminator character from the eponymous film series, or the superhero Cyborg from the DC Justice League series, or even the crime-fighting titular protagonist from the Robocop franchise. What do these characters have in common that makes them cyborgs? Going back to the etymology of the term ‘cyborg’ can be a useful starting point here. There is a necessary combining of the cybernetic, or machinic, and the organic, and so one would expect this to be a key feature of these cyborg characters. The Terminator himself voices support for this in declaring, ‘I’m a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.’ The Terminator is depicted as fundamentally an artificial intelligence with core machinic components – ‘cybernetic all the way down’ one might say. The organic parts are clearly distinguishable from the living tissue that guises such metallic elements, and it is this that gives the cyborg his humanoid appearance. This also demonstrates something of the challenges that cyborgs can pose to our taxonomies: are we to regard

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the Terminator as a living being by virtue of its agential thought processes and organic parts; or would it be better to see it as nonliving given that it is machinic at its core, and so is no more living than, say, a toaster? This is the derogatory remark used to refer to Terminator-like humanoid machines in the Syfy series Battlestar Galactica. Some of these beings, ‘cylons’, can blend seamlessly among humans, raising the question of whether there is any fundamental difference between humans and machines, or how cyborg forms might mediate the distance between the two. In Battlestar Galactica, cylons are referred to – mostly by humans – as ‘toasters’ in a bid to salvage a sense of distinction, and to clearly mark their threat for the unique identity of the human. What, then, of cyborgs that start with the human rather than the machinic? The Terminator, as well as cylons, are presented in some way as human-like in appearance, but as made of fundamentally different and mostly non-living material. In one sense, then, a distinction is thus not too difficult to draw, although, as shall be made clearer over the course of this book, it is not necessarily one that is espoused here. By means of comparison, though, Robocop, another well-cited example of a sci-fi cyborg, was a human policeman whose body was technologically reconstructed. Given that this cyborg started off as a human, are we to regard him as more or less machinic or human than the Terminator? Again, questions of ‘aliveness’ factor into reflections on cyborgs as Alex Murphy, who became Robocop, was killed by a street gang, and so it is not merely an augmentation that Murphy undergoes in transitioning towards his identity as Robocop, but it is a stronger rupture: a kind of rebirth, or perhaps even reincarnation. Indeed, in the film’s narrative, the lines between Murphy and Robocop, between life and death, and between birth and re-creation are all established and explored. Cyborgs, it seems, dabble and dwell in these borderline spaces. The question about their continuities and discontinuities with humans and human identities is a lively one that will feature prominently in the forthcoming analysis of cyborgs beyond introductions to these figures in sci-fi narratives. Are there any other traits that can be discerned of cyborgs from these initial sci-fi examples? In another notable sense, all of these

Introduction

7

cyborgs incorporate elements of superhuman strength that is imbued to them via technological means. This point about enhancement also says something about the stories that we tell about cyborgs and technologies in relation to humans, and suggests a sense that cyborgs may be somehow more powerful and adept than humans. This is something that is celebrated and feared in relation to such cyborgian characters, which in turn may indicate that we don’t have the easiest or most unambiguous relationship with technologies, particularly when they produce something similar to, yet ultimately not quite human.2 Another trait in many narratives featuring cyborgs is the looming presence of large and often insidious corporations: in Terminator, Skynet monopolise technologies and therefore play a major role in curating the bleak future that cyborgs emerge from; in Robocop, a large company that exerts enormous control over Detroit where the film is set is responsible for ‘hijacking’ Murphy’s body, making him into a cyborg largely in the company’s own corporate self-interests. Although there is therefore a wariness of cyborgs and technologies in these films, it is the dehumanised business interests that spawn them that is perhaps more concisely critiqued. Daniel Dinello aptly makes this point in his deeply insightful book Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology, noting how there is a strong tendency for sci-fi to reinforce ‘our concerns about the misanthropic humans who serve as technology’s collaborators in domination.’3 What is significant here is that Dinello taps into the ways that technologies are generally prefigured as other to the human, which underscores something of the danger of the cyborg figure. Pithily, on this point, Dinello writes, ‘science fiction expresses a technophobic fear of losing our human identity, our freedom, our emotions, our values, and our lives to machines.’4 The cyborg, as a borderline figure, can be assimilated within the figure of the human, but more typically it provides a marker of difference, or at least of our concern about difference. This then raises the question about how we understand humanness as a precursor to what Dinello describes as our technophobia about cyborgs, and it is this question that connects my exploration of cyborgs to that of theology, specifically theological anthropology and Edenic symbolism and narratives.

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Before introducing the theological parameters of this investigation in greater detail, it is worth noting that the cyborgs presented here of popular sci-fi franchises are not representative of the wider and diverse range of cyborgs and (non)human engagements with technologies. As Dinello goes on to say, ‘beyond techno-anxiety and paranoia, science-fiction also suggests how our intimacy with technology might be used as a launch pad for liberation from macho, military, and religious visions of the cyborg.’5 Although sci-fi deals primarily in fictions and presents the cyborg as something from the perhaps not-yet-possible, on the one hand these stories can be used to reflect something of our own attitudes to and concerns about technologies and large corporations, as we have seen, but alternatively they can also use imagined scenarios to offer a means of critical probing and encouraging introspection on those embedded attitudes. As such, cyborgs need not be simply ‘othered’ from the human in these narratives, but they can cast light on the process by which we label such figures as other. From this, we can develop a more nuanced understanding of what it is to be human. Thus, in Battlestar Galactica, although perceived as a threat, many humanoid cylons consider themselves to be more human than cylon, which sparks tensions when deciding ‘allegiances’. Likewise, in Blade Runner, the ability to differentiate between humans and humanoid machines, or ‘replicants’, becomes increasingly difficult. The point highlighted by these films that nuance the separation of human and machine through the generally unstable and malleable figure of the cyborg is that we may lack an adequate understanding of what it is – or indeed isn’t – to be human, though we use ‘humanness’ even as a basis for discriminating against the ‘inhumanness’ of cyborg technologies. One theorist in particular, Donna Haraway, has taken this point to develop a profound and persuasive argument about cyborgs: namely, that if we cannot ultimately tell the difference between humans and cyborgs in sci-fi, then the distinction cannot necessarily be upheld in everyday life either. Resultantly, as presented in her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, for Haraway, we are all cyborgs: In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in

Introduction

9

the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic.6

What Haraway highlights in declaring us to be cyborgs is the inadequacy of previous modes of taxonomy and categorisation as a result of the proliferation of information and computer systems that engage with them. All of these systems ensconce us with the effect that we cannot abstract ourselves from them: we are constituted, comprised, and compromised by these vast systemic flows of information to such an extent that it is more fitting to consider ourselves as cyborgs rather than as the deceptively vague and abstract notion of ‘humans’. It is this understanding of the cyborg that is at the forefront of critical analysis here: what does it mean to say that we are cyborgs rather than humans? How can this manoeuvre help us to reflect on our place in the world and our future, if at all? What problems might such an undertaking generate?

ENGAGING THEOLOGY WITH THE CYBORG One significant problem, particularly for theology, can be identified through Haraway’s critique of the human via the cyborg. Emphatically and unambiguously, Haraway declares that the cyborg ‘would not recognise the Garden of Eden: it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.’7 Relating this back to the discussion towards the start of this chapter, in one sense this makes it plain that there is no possibility of a fantasy of escape from our current situation as cyborgs. Cyborgs, for Haraway, then, are anti-utopian: she does not deploy them as a gloss to reframe our situation in order to encourage us to be wholly content or embracing of technologies, as we shall see, and she is particularly astute at noting various political (at least in her earlier works) and ecological issues that cyborgs must contend with. Equally, though, we are denied a ‘going gets tough and the tough get going’ mentality, and this for Haraway makes us better poised as cyborgs rather than as humans to address the realities and real issues of our situation. In other words, we cannot dream of a verdurous

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Cyborg Theology

utopia and place our hopes for salvation in that vision, which Haraway relates to Edenic symbolism. Related to this, nor can we act as though our actions have no bearing or consequence on other species and lifeforms, which would be to espouse an innocent standpoint in relation to the world. Elements of this innocence can be discerned, for example, in Christian ideals that served as a foundation for various forms of vegetarianism and veganism, where abstaining from meat-eating practices was seen as a way of recapturing virtue and innocence in the sense that these diets were far less consequential ecologically.8 Such ideals, however, do not accord with actual practices: soya crops, for example, are agriculturally intensive and farming practices are not always sustainable, owing to political and economic pressures. Moreover, consumers will soon be given an option to eat a new kind of burger that is made using lab-grown tissue cultures without the slaughter of animals: are these actions inconsequential? Are they ‘natural’? Clearly, visions of Eden and escapism from consequences abound in our culture and everyday practices worldwide, but the cyborg is not persuaded by them. The cyborg is firmly embedded in the here and now and must irrefutably and inevitably face up to that in its choices and conducts. As well as this characterisation of Edenic symbolism, it should also be evident that not all of Christian theology advocates such a vision or elevation of Eden, and certainly not necessarily in terms of escapism. Practical and political theologies advocate placing us firmly in our contexts and situations and contending with them as they are, rather than diverting attention away to another world or realm and providing an opiate for the masses. Marx once infamously critiqued this of religion, and it is a critique that can also be traced in Haraway’s discussion of Christian theology. A theological appraisal of Haraway’s reading of Eden and cyborgs, then, is important: there is an opportunity to learn from some of Haraway’s analyses, as well as to help cyborgs in turn to learn what a worldly ethic that is not distracted by Eden can be. This is, in other words, a conversation that theologians cannot exempt themselves from. And yet, it will not be an easy conversation to engage in, given the extent of some of Haraway’s critiques and the apparent

Introduction

11

tension between Genesis-based theological anthropology and technological cyborgs. In order to develop this conversation accurately and fruitfully, close attention must be given to the nuances of ideas and theories forwarded by both cyborgs and theology. Donna Haraway, for example, provocatively claims in her Cyborg Manifesto, ‘at the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg’.9 On the surface, Haraway declares her position to be blasphemous: a profanity against God, and so in accordance with a structural Durkheimian model that distinguishes the sacred from the profane, the cyborg stands against religious ideals.10 On a deeper level, though, blasphemy can be about taking seriously that which is under scrutiny; rather than a separation, then, what is suggested is a close interaction with theology, and it is this equally Durkheimian spirit, where society connects the sacred and the profane, that is pursued in the analysis here. Haraway declares an ‘ironic faith’ that cannot be overlooked, as this enables a dialogue with disciplines that explore the nature of faith rather than excluding them from reflections on technologies, where such exclusions have been assumed by some leading proponents and developers of new technologies.11 With this point about blasphemy in mind, it is possible to sharpen the analysis further. Haraway’s blasphemy is reflected in how the cyborg challenges key attitudes to the human that she sees as rooted in theology. In particular, Haraway queries: (1) the strong anthropocentric tendency inherent in Christianity; and (2) the overemphasis on (human) nature as discrete and as opposed to technology or artifice. In my estimation, these challenges have thus far been largely inadequately responded to in theology, and so this book will attempt to clarify and expand upon our current understandings by drawing on interdisciplinary insights. Cyborgs, in short, are extensive and so cannot be seen to be contained or ‘resolved’ by any singular discipline; conversations and engagements across different subjects must be a precursor to richer understandings. The technologies encapsulated within the notion of the cyborg, and the theories and assumptions of them, are complex and diverse. As such, readers should not expect a comprehensive theory of technologies here but rather an exploration of how

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they are approached by cyborgs and humans. I contrast and favour perspectives that are open to technologies, which are seen as ubiquitous, against perspectives that reify the category of ‘technology’ by marking it in contradistinction to nature, such as non/human nature, or nature-versus-artificial. Between these perspectives, technologies can affirm, reshape, or challenge boundaries. Haraway’s cyborg, I propose, does the latter, which prompts my investigation. Put briefly, if the cyborg challenges boundaries, then can theology – specifically theological anthropology – accommodate for such challenges; and if so, what would such a theological anthropology look like?

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS: (HI)STORIES In order to explore these issues, a certain theoretical foundation needs to be established. Before exploring an interaction of the cyborg and the human, and investigating our understandings of technology and theological anthropology and how they might co-shape one another, there needs to be groundwork to express how that interaction is to be considered. Every approach, every position, and every perspective is inseparable from its context, and has necessary, inevitable methodological constraints. We cannot escape the influence that our surroundings have on us in how they shape our attitudes; to this extent, we are firmly embedded in a contextual milieu. A useful way to conceive of this relationship between us, our ideas, and our surroundings might be to metaphorically envision how we literally embody such contextual relations. Thus, for Katherine Hayles, ‘we do not leave our history behind but rather, like snails, carry it around with us in the sedimented and enculturated instantiations of our pasts we call our bodies.’12 In this example, contexts – in terms of the ideas that shape us – are very much a part of us, and we cannot deny or escape them. Tropes like this of snails are a powerful tool for articulating the way we understand and relate to the world. Haraway uses them widely in her writing, as a means of reminding us ‘that we might have been otherwise, and might yet be, as a matter of embodied fact’.13 Haraway takes the etymological ‘swerving’ associated with tropes ‘to mark the nonliteral quality of being’,14 by which she seeks to develop a

Introduction

13

means of critiquing that which is immediately present. For example, humans are seen as a dominant species according to Haraway’s reading of Genesis-based anthropologies and anthropocentrism. This assessment of humans is related to how we use technological means to enact that dominance over other species, and yet when it comes to technologies there is also a fear that technologies will overpower humans, thereby jeopardising that same sense of dominance. Using tropes, Haraway investigates alternative ways of exploring our self-conceptions and our interactions with technologies and other species. This is part of where the cyborg enters our theorising: Haraway suggests that the cyborg is a figure for our lives; it is metaphorical for how we are interconnected in the world.15 While the cyborg is a powerful trope in Haraway’s work, it cannot be overlooked that the cyborg has also been passed down to us in sci-fi as a hypermasculinist killing machine, the Terminator. That iconic figure itself wears as the ‘shell on its back’ the earlier developments of cyborgs for military purposes: it has ‘layers of histories’.16 Equally, though, the Terminator is part of our collective imaginary. It is fictional, and it may be tempting to contrast it against the ‘real’. However, crucially, this does not mean that it influences our attitudes any less. Likewise, to return to Hayles’ comments, we are not literally snails, but such metaphorical language is no less ‘real’ in its bearing on our self-conceptions. My point is that the fact that something is fictional is irrelevant when it comes to understanding how we relate to and approach the world. Elaine Graham discusses this in terms of ‘fabulation’: ‘by creating alternative narratives through fantastic or utopian writing, fabulation enables its readers to consider the possibility that, like its fictional alternatives, the known present is also an artifice’.17 While ‘artifice’ (and ‘utopian’) may overstate the point, fabulation nonetheless deconstructs the assumptions that we have of ourselves and the world in a manner concordant with Haraway’s methodology of troping and diffraction. Developing this, Haraway (and other writers, including Margaret Atwood) advocate the use of alternative terms rather than ‘science fiction’ to refer to the genre from which characters such as the Terminator derive. They emphasise not the

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fictional component but the ‘speculative’, the ‘fabulated’, the ‘fantasy’, the ‘figurative’, the ‘fact’, the openness (the ‘so far’).18 Effectively, these writers broaden out the genre and emphasise its connections with our own lives by labelling it ‘SF’ to encapsulate these alternative terms alongside the ‘science’ and the ‘fiction’. According to Haraway, bringing these notions together, we live ‘nonoptionally, in really real SF histories’.19 ‘Fact’ and ‘fiction’ interweave and are of equal significance in shaping histories. My own methodology accords with this by emphasising the importance of stories that sediment and become histories, and so I also employ the term ‘SF’ throughout this investigation. SF presents stories in a world of stories, and we cannot help but continue to tell stories.20 The context that informs our attitudes, sedimented as the shells on our backs, is a composition of stories and narratives, both non-fictional and fictional. We cannot escape these stories but must make ourselves aware of them in order to critically examine them. This expresses my methodological orientation in the present investigation, which explores, via the cyborg figure, the stories that we use to narrate and articulate our relationship with ourselves, the world and God. The significance of theology here is in how it tells particularly pervasive stories that shape our attitudes and understandings, even without us perhaps realising so at a more manifest level. We tell ourselves stories about how we are secular, for example, but this does not negate the theological stories, such as the Edenic myth of origins, that continue to underwrite our outlook to things like technologies or other animals, both of which are important to the cyborg that tells a different story about our relationship to these beings. Haraway narrates through the cyborg how the distinction between humans, animals and technologies is misguided, but she is equally aware of the narratives that prefigure her critiques.21 Pithily, she writes how, ‘just as the cyborg is a child of militarism and Big Science, I am a child of Catholicism and the Cold War’.22 Working with these mythological and metaphorical narratives of theology and the cyborg (respectively) is at the heart of my analytical framework. Although it relates to Haraway’s own methodology, it will not prescribe a reading of theology but, as I will demonstrate over the investigation, offers a

Introduction

15

level playing field upon which all of the various narratives, of theology and of other disciplines, can be usefully and critically interacted. Finally, I have opted for the term ‘(hi)stories’ to describe my methodology because it captures something of the significance of stories, even at the meta-level of bigger histories. We cannot understand either the cyborg or the human aside from these histories,23 and they are constantly reshaped and retold through stories that are non-fictional, fictional, mythological, metaphorical and everything in between.24 Again, Haraway: Metaphorically speaking, I imagine a historical person as being somehow like a hermit crab that’s encrusted with barnacles. And I see myself and everybody else as sort of switching shells as we grow. But every shell we pick up has its histories, and you certainly don’t choose those histories [. . .] You have to account for the incrustations and the inertias, just as you have to remain accountable to each other through learning how to remember, if you will, which barnacles you’re carrying.25

There are some inconsistencies to be noted here, including the sense that we switch shells albeit apparently without choosing them. How do we decide which shells to adopt if not in an agential way? Furthermore, if we switch shells, is there a sense that we can shake the histories from our backs and start anew? I am not entirely convinced by this position, as any new ideas we take on would surely interact with previous histories. A stalagmite might be a better analogy, where drips slowly sediment into a column that grows in accruing layers rather than being switched and substituted. Perhaps something of the limits of metaphors is also here to be noted, given how they depend on a subjective kind of swerving that places the interpreter firmly in the meaning-making process in an involved, even cyborgian kind of way (returning here to the immersive and non-escapist politics that Haraway advocates through the cyborg figure). To be sure, these limits are not negative but rather helpfully remind us that the totalisation of any position ignores subjectivities, and thereby renders such positions of limited use. The point that Haraway is most attentive to in the passage above, though, is that these (hi)stories impact us (and others) almost in the same instance that we narrate them, and that is inescapable. We can become aware

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of the stories and re-articulate them, and hence there is perhaps more ‘choice’ in a sense than is suggested by Haraway, which is the approach that underlies my constructive analytical work towards the end of this investigation, but first we must be attentive to them. What stories, then, does theology tell about us and the world? And how might these impact our understandings of the cyborg and the human? Thus far, I have presented how Haraway frames the cyborg against a certain understanding of the human that is favoured and advocated by Genesis-based theology and theological anthropology. In the following set of chapters, I give closer attention to the understandings of the human presented by theological anthropology in order to ascertain the issue and to establish a stronger sense of the theological context than is deducible from Haraway’s own work. Then, I look at how these understandings of the human inform and interact with different forms of posthumanism, which can be broadly regarded as a set of theories and figures that explore the human and its others, including technologies, and among which the cyborg can be counted and contextualised. After establishing this, I trace the (hi)stories of the cyborg and the finer nuances of its symbolism, before interacting all of these ideas in the final part to explore the implications for key theological notions such as creation and creatureliness, and investigate what significance cyborgs might have for notions of how we relate to and image God according to imago dei. Finally, in the conclusion, I draw these ideas together to make suggestions towards a theological cyborgology, and reflect on why this is an important task both theologically and culturally.

Part I

CHAPTER 1

Imago Dei: Anthropogeny & Theological Anthropology

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE ‘HUMAN’? If you were asked to describe or explain humans, what words would you use? Would you emphasise human uniqueness over other animals, appealing to traits such as language, bipedalism, the ability to develop more abstract things like culture and religiosity or spirituality? Or would you draw attention to human craftsmanship and tool use that enables construction of the world? Or would you suggest instead that humans cannot be separated or abstracted from their surroundings in terms of the networks in which we find them? Are any of these a truly satisfactory answer to the question ‘what are humans’? Although a difficult question, the issue of what it is – or perhaps isn’t – to be human, particularly in a world rife with technological developments that are advancing at an exponential rate (or at least if technologist Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are correct), is central to this investigation. The cyborg, as already suggested, represents a profound way in which our understandings and assumptions about what it is to be human are challenged. Indeed, for Donna Haraway, ‘cyborg anthropology attempts to refigure provocatively the border relations among specific humans, other organisms, and machines’.1 In order to more fully appreciate the critical work that is being undertaken via the cyborg here, it is necessary to explore how the

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human is constructed and conceived, particularly in terms of the ‘border relations’ where the cyborg critique is most acute. In other words, the question that is raised sharply by Haraway’s cyborg figure is one of how we regard the human, and especially how we discern it against the nonhuman. There is a strong sense that what we recognise as ‘human’ is ascertained by identifying what is not human, in a dialectic process that makes conclusions by means of thesis and antithesis. For example, one might posit that humans are distinct from animals: we have the ability to use abstract thought; animals (to our knowledge) do not; abstract thought is thus a marker of human difference and humanness. Or, in a more technological context, we might look to the differences between humans and robots: humans have emotions and complex feelings; robots (to our knowledge) do not; emotions thereby help us to understand what it is to be human in a world shared with increasing numbers of robots. What is interesting to note in each of these cases is that we are able to dialectically arrive at some understanding or sense of what it is to be human only insofar as we actively seek to identify the nonhuman, the counterpoint to constructions of the human, in the first place. Put differently, we seek to produce a difference, and as such we bring assumptions to our explorations of non/humanness. To sketch out another brief technological example of this, consider the term ‘artificial intelligence’. Embedded in this label are certain underlying attitudes: there is, on the one hand, the foregrounding of intelligence as the defining feature of these beings. This may, in a weak sense, be used to discriminate against other forms of life, or more likely, other technologies that are non-intelligent. Yet, on the other hand and in a stronger sense, ‘artificial’ more readily lends itself to the contrast between the non-artificial, or natural. From the term ‘artificial intelligence’ alone, then, there is suggestion of an assumed difference: we want to recognise this form of intelligence in some way as different, and the idea of artificiality provides a way of securing and qualifying that difference. An important way that Haraway theorises and uses cyborgs is to challenge such boundaries and markers, or presumptions, of difference. Why are boundaries and differences so important to the human and to our understandings of what it is to be human? This is a broad

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question that encompasses a great deal of religious and philosophical reflection since the earliest evidenced parts of human history. To attempt to fully resolve it here, or indeed anywhere, would be a futile and dangerously misleading endeavour. It would be dangerous because of what such a definitive understanding of humanness would suggest: to presume to have resolved the complex matter of humanness would be to totalise one assumption or set of assumptions, whereas human nature is not something static or immutable. And yet, this is what we have tended to do with our striving to locate and buttress notions of human difference against animals, technologies, even nature. Theology and the understandings of the human that it presents, in a sub-discipline referred to as theological anthropology, are here important. This may seem like a striking statement, given that much scholarly attention – particularly in the social sciences – has been given to the argument that society has become increasingly secular. Secularisation presents a complex debate, however,2 and in spite of discernible trends that might suggest a waning influence of religion in certain spheres of society, it is a key contention of this book that the cultural and even tacit influence of religious and theological motifs has far from faded. Although the present western context is often characterised as ‘secular’, then, given the parallels between Edenic narratives and general attitudes to humans and the world, I argue that theological resonances are ongoing. This should come as no particular surprise, given that, as explained in the Introduction, we live in a context shaped by (as well as continuing to shape) (hi)stories. Of these, theology is a significant mythological narrative. The Judeo-Christian tradition depicts humans as having been created in the image of God (imago dei) (Genesis 1:27). Because of this, the first chapters of Genesis that document God’s creation of the world are an oft-cited set of passages in theological reflection. What is specifically relevant for the discussion of the boundaries of the human raised so far in this chapter is that it is only humans that are (explicitly) presented as having been made according to God’s image, and so this may provide a theological incentive to identifying a sense of human difference from, for example, animals.3 Furthermore,

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in Genesis 1:26, the matter of ‘dominion’ is raised as connected somehow to the notion of imago dei, which has led to understandings of humans as not only different from animals, but moreover as above them in a hierarchical sense. This has led to scholars such as Lynn White to regard Christianity, due to its undergirding Genesis-based anthropology, as being ‘the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.’4 Animals are in a sense ordered-to the human who is ranked somehow above them, and so the ramifications of this structure have been negatively regarded by a number of critics, including Haraway, who voices her concerns and her search for an alternative perspective through her cyborg figure. According to sociologist Steve Fuller, and concordant with the points made above, we have a ‘lingering sense of theologically-based ontological privilege’.5 In declaring this, Fuller connects theological understandings of the human to our present general attitudes that manifest in political, ecological, and social acts. Thus, in everything that we do – from genetic modification of crops to destruction of ecosystems, from investing in fossil fuels to pursuing or protesting fracking, from seeking to augment ourselves with prosthetic appendages to patenting new hybrid animals – we enact a certain interpretation of what it is to be human. This is theological, or at least by virtue of (hi)stories is theologically informed, whether or not we directly believe we were made in God’s image. That there are numerous critics of this humanocentrism, particularly prompted by pressing contemporary concerns such as climate change, means that we must address the roots and dynamics of these trends. For many, these trends can be referred to as ‘humanism’, which, like the cyborg, has branched off into many forms and variations. Overall, though, humanism places humans as central and declares a marked commitment to the welfare of that figure, often at the detriment of other species and beings. For John Gray, the link between theology and humanism is blatant: ‘humanism is a secular religion thrown together from the decaying scraps of Christian myth’.6 Humanism, for Gray and others, cannot be understood without its Christian heritage,7 and so it may usefully be labelled ‘post-Christian’, where the term ‘Christian’ remains in order to demonstrate that it still is significant.

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Attentiveness to the resonances of this theological tradition challenges the notion it is ‘decaying’ but invites us to question our relationship to it. Within a post-Christian framework, the uniqueness of the human (against the generalised ‘nonhuman’) is regarded by Gray (among others)8 as ‘Christianity’s cardinal error.’9 It is so considered because of the embeddedness of this uniqueness in our general attitudes. Gray takes this substantive human core as a root of humanism, because humanism outworks a human identity that is predicated on difference and the ability to discern the non/human.10 The cyborg, though, as Haraway articulates it, makes a significant rupture with this particular Christian legacy that deals in substantive notions of humans, nature and technology: ‘Haraway is looking for a figure of humanity outside the narratives of humanism. Cyborg myth is a narrative of permanent possibility, of accommodation of the nonhuman in the fabric of the social.’11 Where Haraway declares that she rejects the notion that we are human,12 she is using this as shorthand for rejecting the embedded legacy of humanism that our understandings of the human are so caught up with. Developing this notion, Rosi Braidotti writes, ‘the human of humanism [. . .] spells out a systematised standard of recognisability – of Sameness – by which all others can be assessed, regulated and allotted to a designated social location. The human is a normative convention’.13 The cyborg, on the other hand, de-centres the human, who can no longer be regarded as ‘human’ in the humanist sense against its background cast of nonhuman objects that now share in the limelight rather than being relegated to the periphery. What is to be emphasised, though, in this dramaturgical analogy is that it is chiefly the stage dynamics that have changed: ‘we’ still act, but we are not enacting the humanist drama by ourselves any longer. The cyborg narratives that Haraway articulates give due emphasis to the diffusion of roles and performances across networks of actors, who are no longer humanocentric or humanist. A theological engagement with the cyborg and its alternative narratives is not only possible, but important and fruitful. In order to challenge problematic notions of the human, as Haraway does with her cyborg figure, it is not enough simply to identify and point blame in one direction, namely towards theological traditions. What is

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instead needed is a way to reflect on the problematic legacies of certain attitudes in their complexity and manifestation in different spheres, rather than tracing them back to a singular origin: the irony of Haraway’s rejection of myths of origin while tracing problems back to a point of origin should here not be lost. In my alternative proposal, theology is to be recognised as part of a problematic legacy insofar as its dominant anthropological perspective has lent itself well to humanocentric notions of human dominance, but it is also part of the way that we must rethink our understandings. As such, I echo Sigurd Bergmann’s calls for a ‘theology that both examines and overcomes the ecological crisis’.14 The position sought is one that is deeply introspective and (self-)critical, but that is also able to recognise the connectivity of ideas and identities in a way that foregrounds relationality. How this connects to theological anthropology is the focus of the rest of this chapter. THEOLOGICAL MODELS OF THE HUMAN Christian theology features a number of images of the human. These range from being workers to being neighbourly, and from being fighters to being loving. Arguably, though, all of these labels can be related to the notion of imago dei, which encapsulates the idea that humans were made in the ‘image of God’, and so in some way they bear a resemblance or ‘likeness’ to their Creator. For some commentators, this means that God and humans are closely linked: humans, who have dominion, are in a sense God’s representatives on earth. For others, we should be cautious about overemphasising similarities between humans and God because this may challenge the sovereignty of God that humans are to be distinguished from. Concomitantly, we might seek to use imago dei to affirm a difference between humans and animals, as previously discussed, but there are likewise concerns that this might overlook similarities and commonalities such as that humans and animals alike are created by God, and so share in a sense of ‘creatureliness’. Rather than resolve these discussions here, they are highlighted as a means of framing the discussions surrounding imago dei as a cornerstone of theological anthropology that will be explored throughout this book. From these

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initial observations and analyses, imago dei seems to be about understanding various boundaries that surround the human, including being aware of the tensions between similarities and differences, particularly those pertaining to the one whose image we are made according to, namely God. What is striking about the significance of imago dei for Christian theological anthropology, though, is that the concept itself features little in Scripture, and particularly not beyond the first chapters of Genesis. Asides from the plainly stated notion, then, that ‘God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’ (Gen. 1:27) we know little of human nature through references to our origins. In more technical terms, it is difficult to establish a clear sense of anthropology through anthropogeny. And yet, regardless of this, imago dei remains an influential theological concept expressing what it means to be (created as) human. Approaches to theological anthropology that give priority to anthropogeny, or creation, such as those focused on imago dei, can be characterised as producing what Marc Cortez labels a ‘prototypical’ vision of humanity.15 If this view is taken as a model for understanding humans, then the structure according to which God creates and populates the world is rendered significant. Emphasis is here given to how it is uniquely humans who are seen as made according to, or bearing, God’s image. The notion of imago dei thus lends itself well to supporting claims of human uniqueness, which combines a sense of difference and hierarchy in relation to the nonhuman as briefly referred to earlier in this chapter. Humans are linked to God in a vague way as a significant part of understanding what it is that makes us different from animals and other nonhumans that do not seem to share in imago dei. These are not the only narratives that might reveal something about human nature in Christian theology, however. As well as prototypical visions associated with original anthropogeny as part of the wider cosmogeny where God creates the world, there are also episodes of rebirth and renewal of human nature. Cortez alludes to these by noting a second set of ‘eschatological’ visions of humanity. These look more towards a goal that is future-oriented, and suggest a

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sense of humanness as something to be fulfilled rather than something innate. For example, there are narratives associated with the Fall, which marks the origin of sin and suggests a new kind of human who has been exiled from Eden and must live up to the consequences of freely disobeying God.16 Further examples include moments of renewal associated with the Flood and God’s Covenant, and moments of redemption brought about through Christ. In each of these cases, there are different understandings of humans that are introduced. What is already being sketched out here is a sense in which anthropology is a vast category with many different aspects in Christian theology alone. Anthropogeny plays a significant role in these, although we must be aware of not only original accounts of creation, but also ongoing episodes of re-creation that encourage, as Cortez identifies, a different attitude to understanding humanness. That said, in some ways these narratives can be traced back to the original creation of the human: notions of a redeemed humanity respond to narratives of sin and Fall; these stories in turn relate to humans who committed original sin in the Edenic setting. These lines of questioning can be pursued back to the start in a prototypical fashion, and so Haraway’s critique of certain understandings of humanness through Eden and theological anthropology is apt. Equally apt, though, are the critical questions that Cortez raises that can help to assess the finer nuances of imago dei and Genesis, as well as the theological anthropologies that derive from them, namely: ‘When and how were humans created? How do different creation stories influence our understanding of what it means to be human?’17 David Clines touches on these questions in his 1967 Tyndale Old Testament lecture where he provides a useful overview of the concept of imago dei, following Barth’s point that these views can be contextualised.18 Drawing on Stamm’s historical survey of imago dei, Clines identifies five classifications of the theological concept in terms of how it has been interpreted and applied to notions of human nature: (1) It corresponds to a spiritual quality, or faculty, of man; (2) It legitimises human ruling over other creatures;

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(3) It speaks of an immediate relationship between God and man; (4) It relates in some way to man’s form; (5) It is concerned with external, physical form.19

Clines then notes how Stamm drew a dividing line in 1940 (between [4] and [5]): everything prior to this dealt with intangible, spiritual qualities; and things after this take physicality more into account. At the risk of perpetuating a dualistic approach in the classification of interpretations of imago dei – particularly as, like Clines himself notes,20 it is difficult to uphold the distinction between spiritual and material when they are both so coinformative – I will not be sustaining Stamm’s typology entirely here. Instead, I shall develop his first three classifications into a working typology that finds support elsewhere.21 Thus (1) is indicative of a substantive account; (2) is indicative of a functional account; and (3) is indicative of a relational account. From Clines’ article alone, it is clear that these adequately illuminate many of the interpretations and tensions of imago dei. The remainder of this chapter expands upon each of these three classifications, with a view to gauging the issues and tensions that the cyborg responds to, or can perhaps be critiqued in the light of.

SUBSTANTIVE INTERPRETATIONS: ESSENTIALLY HUMAN? One of the earliest and arguably most pervasive interpretations of imago dei is known as the substantive interpretation. It is so titled because this view regards humans as bearing imago dei innately, by virtue of their creation by God. As Noreen Herzfeld astutely notes, according to this approach, ‘the divine image, as a human quality, becomes a part of the substance of our very being.’22 There is, in short, something perhaps intangible yet intrinsic to, and constitutive of, the human that defines it, and this is to do with how humans were created. Exactly what that quality is that the imago dei represents has been much scrutinised, but due to the fact that it is only humans who explicitly bear imago dei, theologians have looked to the differences between humans and nonhumans in identifying this imaged quality. Typically, that difference has been read on the grounds of rationality, which in turn has helped to cultivate an understanding of humans

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and God as cognitive beings, over animals and others, which, lacking the imago dei, are regarded as lesser, material beings.23 The discussion that this chapter opened with, then, is exemplary of a substantive approach, which demonstrates something of the pervasiveness of this way of reading imago dei in terms of how we understand humans and their distinctiveness from nonhumans, including animals. The logic of substantive interpretations of imago dei here with regards to animals is that ‘animals are included inside the system as a figure of the outside’.24 Animals, in short, exist as a broad category as a foil to the human. In demonstrating what the human is not, animals fulfil a negative dialectic that allows the human to ascertain what it is. That substance, though, that definitive essence that may be seen to establish a clear sense of humanness, exists only insofar as the ‘other’ does. In this sense, substantive interpretations of imago dei necessitate difference in coming to any kind of affirmative identity, which is exposed as only affirmative in the light of the negative dialectic means of revealing it. Theologically, this view that both seeks and promotes a clear demarcation between humans and nonhumans can be linked to Augustine, for whom ‘beasts, trees, and stones are incapable of enjoying this blessing’ that humans exclusively receive from God.25 It is also possible to discern this view, as animal rights advocate and theologian Andrew Linzey does, in the scholastic work of Thomas Aquinas, as well as to trace this view further back to the Hellenistic philosophy of Aristotle.26 The significance of this lineage (shared with Judaism) is that it demonstrates how: Genesis is interpreted in terms of the Aristotelean pattern which sees nature as a hierarchical system in which it is assumed – as with human society – that the male is superior to the female, the female to the slave, and the slave to the beast and so on in declining intellectual order.27

Not only here do we see how the necessitation of difference between humans and ‘beasts’ is most prevalent and discernible, but we see it manifest in multiple kinds of paralleling dichotomies and hierarchies that imply subservience. As a consequence of this kind of thinking, though, that seeks to differentiate and rank, emphasis on rationality or other qualities

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may also exclude other groups or at least finds them wanting. For example, the lines of personhood drawn on grounds of rationality, agency and accountability may problematically exclude some humans with Alzheimer’s or other neurological conditions.28 The substantive approach, then, has significant shortcomings. The markers of difference may become associated with ideal types of the human that correspond vaguely to God who is being imaged. These essentialised images, however, are constrained insofar as they are static, and in turn they place too many constraints on the diversity of identities and experiences that enrich what it might mean to be human in a more moral and humane sense. Building on this, and with regards to divisions and hierarchies that Linzey cites above in relation to what I have labelled as a substantive approach, we can ask and critique on what grounds they are predicated. Feminism and abolitionism (and disability activists) have challenged the ranking of human subjects, and now animal and posthuman studies are making similar critiques beyond that fraught category of the human. The issue, to reiterate, is commonly one of a limited idea(l) of which subject is worthy of ethical rights: for feminists that subject has been androcentric; for abolitionists it has been western-centric or has been closely affiliated with ‘white privilege’; for disability activists it has been a certain view of ableism; for animal rights writers, it has been always too narrowly human. History, religion, and science are identified as being at the root of these attitudes, and theologically, a substantive interpretation of imago dei seems a viable culprit. For Bret Stephenson, ‘the imago dei all too often has been associated with internal and ultimately static qualities of the human mind, namely a disembodied rationality’.29 There is not only a humanocentrism operative here which underscores perceptions of animals as ‘other’, but there is also a dualism where abstract and intangible qualities are favoured as uniquely defining human nature. The human, we can deduce, is typically split within itself as well as from others such as animals, in a hierarchy rooted in abstract and idealised types and models.30 Human/nonhuman demarcations based upon a substantive interpretation of imago dei, then, range from mind–body dualism on the one hand, to gender hierarchies, to discriminations against other

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species that apparently lack such advanced cognitive functioning. Needless to say, in light of these demarcations, recent theological critiques of substantive interpretations of the imago dei have been commonplace. This partly owes, among other things, to the fact that, through developments in biology, any strong distinctions between humans and animals have been genetically disproven, or in the least sense, severely undermined. Yet in spite of these trends, when it comes to technologies, a substantive approach remains compelling for many. Part of this may be in response to how technologies challenge associations of human specialness and uniqueness that are packaged together with imago dei. With technologies, we are either making things in our own image, or are remaking ourselves in our own image. Where is the image of God here? For Julian Offray de la Mettrie, writing against a substantive theological anthropology, not only is there no experientially verifiable difference between humans and animals on the basis of imago dei,31 but this is also the case for humans and machines. In essence, humans and machines are the same: the title of Mettrie’s essay reveals this in referring to ‘L’Homme Machine’, or ‘Man a Machine’. In making this parallel, Mettrie posits a deeply materialistic and secular account of the human that was intended to counteract the Christian spiritual account. Mettrie critiques those who ‘have taken for granted two distinct substances in man, as if they had seen them, and positively counted them’,32 which was notably the case in Augustinian theology. By rejecting this premise, Mettrie concomitantly rejects distinctions between humans, animals and even machines, because there is no hierarchy of natures upon which to oppose them. Instead, Mettrie uses mechanism to guide his monistic materialism.33 Mettrie’s opinions were controversial at the time of his writing, and even now remain largely unpopular. Particularly in a world where robots are increasingly prevalent and look increasingly like us or mimic any number of what were once thought to be exclusively human traits, the concerns and anxieties that we tend to proclaim suggest something of our ongoing need to recognise the separateness of humanity. Indeed, more commonly than espousing Mettrie’s philosophical attitudes, throughout history humans have sought to declare their essential difference from machines, which are presented as subhuman. There is a

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worry that machines, that are closely associated with restricted and routinised patterns of labour, stand in contrast to the freedom of the human, and this anthropological note is again traceable to how God made humans in his image as having free will (evidenced most clearly in original sin and the free choice to disobey God, which is explored further in the next chapter). To be compared to a machine is thus to have this freedom called into question, and to risk being dehumanised in some sense. An apt example of this can be taken from Charlie Chaplin’s speech in The Great Dictator (1940): ‘don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!’ This passage, like many other narratives that feature robots and humans and the threat of machination, champions human freedom in contradistinction from machine (as well as bovine and animal) automation, and sees machine-like (as well as animal-like) tendencies as impinging on essential humanness. While Mettrie’s mechanistic materialism begins to deconstruct difference, however, it does arguably far less to challenge or resist hierarchies established within the human subject. That there is a common nature to humans, animals and machines as a proposition by itself has almost no consequence in the sphere of politics or ethics. It does not even challenge the theological anthropological view per se: we find it plainly stated in the second account of creation that humans and animals alike are formed of the same dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7; 19). As such, the divisions that are read out of imago dei are not necessarily negated by Mettrie’s atheistic, materialist critique. Conceptual constructions of difference remain possible in other substantive ways. For example, although we are of the same material, different natures have been appealed to in establishing political distinctions between genders, sexualities, races and so on. (Everyone – everything – is made equal, but some are more equal than others.) In these dynamics, one group is perceived as threatening and is heavily critiqued, which is usually the purpose of such dialectic identity patterns. Indeed, the threat may be exacerbated as a result of the similitude that Mettrie highlights: the difference is posited and appealed to in order to make the uncanny sense of sameness less daunting.34 Technologies such as cyborgs can be read into these

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patterns, threats and fears as well, which indicates that work cannot end with Mettrie’s account but must continue to challenge the issues of sameness and difference. What Mettrie’s work suggests is a possibility of undermining the difference between humans and nonhumans. As such, it usefully begins to disrepute the substantive assumptions that mark the accentuated uniqueness of the human albeit in a striking and controversial way. In theological anthropology, while substantive accounts of imago dei certainly remain valid alongside a re-emphasis on human and animal commonalities in their being made of the earth, it has increasingly been noted, as David Fergusson writes, that ‘the imago concept does not enable [. . .] some shortcut to identifying a single property or function that differentiates us from the other animals’,35 and I would add, in the light of Mettrie’s comments, from machines also. If human separateness were still to be upheld, it would seem, then the boundary between humans and nonhumans would need to be policed rather than merely assumed, and this more active interpretation opens the way to functional accounts of theological anthropology.

FUNCTIONAL MODELS: PERFORMING THE HUMAN? Taking heed of the critiques of substantive interpretations of imago dei, many theologians turned towards functional interpretations that are more engaged with ongoing human activity in the world rather than focusing only on origins or the distinct essences that separate humans from nonhumans. Alistair McFadyen characterises the shift as moving from the image-as-noun to image-as-verb, where action rather than essence becomes more emphasised.36 Functional accounts of theological anthropogeny thereby provide a way of grounding ethical judgements based on human activity in the world, rather than being concerned with abstract, static qualities that comprise any kind of distinct or discrete essence, especially given that such claims are not as easy to uphold from Genesis narrations of anthropogeny and cosmogeny as might first appear. In particular, functional interpretations of imago dei address more fully the task of stewardship that God commanded of humans. This derives from Genesis 1:26:

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Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’

Functional approaches take scriptural insights such as this, and apply them to how humans interact with, and ‘rule over’, other animals. They deal with a notion of humanity defined by what it does according to God’s will, rather than what it is according to His creative command. One of the key merits of a functional over a substantive approach is that humans are not seen as predesigned with any kind of divine essence. Imago dei is not abandoned, to be sure, but it is expressed differently and as something that is to be developed and expressed by our conduct rather than by our nature, which in an important sense is shared with animals by virtue of being created of the same matter and bound to the same earth. Under the substantive view, the aspect of predesign potentially permits a hubristic arrogance, leading some, including perhaps most famously Lynn White, to criticise Christianity with the charge of being the root cause of our present ecological crisis.37 Instead, in the functional approach, ‘man is not simply to reflect, but to realise the image of God’.38 In other words, humans must enact imago dei through their charge, which is commonly taken as one of duty and compassion towards animals and their environment. To this end, dominion is largely taken as stewardship by theologians, which involves a responsible ethic towards the world rather than one of reckless consumption. Imago dei in these functional accounts is not a permitting of what Terry Eagleton refers to as ‘bovine anthropocentrism’, which Eagleton sketches out by borrowing a phrase from George Eliot, that we ‘take the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves’.39 It is more a mandate for humans to care for and manage God’s creation and to maintain its original goodness. However, on closer analysis, the functional interpretation does not necessarily correct the key shortcomings of the substantive view, and instead may perpetuate them. Most notably, regarding the charge of care towards animals, this duty begins by granting a degree of power to the human over their animal kin. This arguably presupposes a

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latent sense of essential difference between humans and animals, and in this sense, imago dei is not properly transferred to something performed but remains predicated on the ability to be enacted in the first place. In other words, although it may seem that ‘this obsession with performance shows a shift from understanding ourselves in terms of who we are to understanding ourselves in terms of what we do’,40 what we do is still ultimately who we are, and what we do is measured against predetermined and expected norms that define who we are. Thus, we have not circumvented essentialism or substantiality; we are merely expressing, or performing it differently. The functional view, then, I propose, is best seen here as an extension, rather than a correction, of the substantive view. Put differently, in Cortez’ classification of models of imago dei, a forwardslooking eschatological perspective that emphasises action in a functional way is revealed to have more in common with a prototypical perspective that defines the limits and capacities of such action in a predetermined and substantive way. The point where the functional interpretation of imago dei becomes more significant for the present analysis is where it is read in the context of a technocultural milieu. If the functional view addresses human action as enacting or indeed as defying imago dei, then human action regarding the development and use of technology is a central theological concern. From this, if ‘to be created in the image of God implies that humans can be the vehicle for grace toward the creation, in a way that is somehow reminiscent of God’s graciousness’,41 then how are we to gauge what is acceptable within the bounds of imago dei, and what practices take us beyond it, in turn jeopardising the image? How are we to understand God’s graciousness, and our role as a vehicle for grace, as a prescription for ethical activity in the world? Do technologies contribute to this sense of stewardship that we should strive for according to a functional reading of the biblical account, or like with the substantive account, do they pose problems for how we think through theological anthropology? Technologies problematise our ability to rely on an originary set of ethics because of how they transform, to various degrees (depending on the technology in question), their surrounding environment. That is not to say, of course, that humans have not attempted to think

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about technologies alongside origins. As I have suggested in the previous section, we have a notable tendency to rely on mythicaltheological assumptions about origin to make assessments of ourselves and nonhuman others. Many technologies are actually produced out of these assumptions and worldviews. For Andrew Linzey, genetic engineering of animals is a prime example of this. He writes, ‘genetic engineering represents the concretisation of the absolute claim that animals belong to and exist for us [. . .] Biotechnology in animal farming represents the apotheosis of human domination’.42 Here, a substantive view that discriminates humans from animals informs a use of technology that is concordant with a functional view of humans as enacting domin(at)ion over nonhuman creation. This returns us to Eagleton’s charge of bovine anthropocentrism: a substantive difference between humans and world/nature/animals is used to tacitly legitimise harmful and humanocentric practices that have human ends in sight. With regards to climate change, a substantive functional approach that equates to bovine anthropocentrism is also traceable. This is perhaps most clearly evidenced when we engage in activities such as changing ecosystems and climates in the interests of obtaining depleting stocks of fossil fuels for economic and industrial development.43 What of examples of more positive, sustainable engagements, however, such as the use of renewable energy resources? I would argue that, for the most part, these may still evidence a functionalsubstantive understanding of anthropology. When we implement technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, hydro-electric power (HEP) dams, these are still constructed with human ends in mind. Here, to see technology as able to ‘fix’ our problems by allowing us to continue our current practices with less fear of environmental or ecological consequence is to operate with assumptions about technologies serving humans, about humans as able to competently develop such technologies, and about humans as able to confidently understand the processes and outcomes of their intervention. All of this suggests a functional interpretation of imago dei that relies fundamentally upon a substantive view, because humans are seen as having the unique capacity to enact change via technological means.

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Alternatively, though, the functional view can also be taken in a different direction, namely one that Linzey sees as evading the trappings of the anthropocentric, substantive view that leads more readily to domination, and that is instead more in favour of remaining faithful to a creaturely ethic encapsulated by the notion of dominion. Linzey, for example, writes against the patenting of animals, as this would be to confirm their nature as property for humans (and that would accord with the substantive view by discriminating between persons and property as sharply defined categories).44 Instead, for Linzey, ‘maintaining and promoting the good that already exists [in creation] is an essential task of stewardship’.45 Here, the shift is away from a humanocentric view of stewardship to a creation-centric one, where technological change for the sake of the stewards alone is condemned. Even in this view, though, the duty of care is placed on the stewards alone, who are divided from the rest of creation in a decisive and substantive manner. A substantive approach tells us about the essential role of the human and the essential goodness of creation in terms of how they were divinely made, but it does not offer ample guidance for functional, ethical practices. What this suggests is that there are resonances but significantly also tensions between a substantive and functional view, and these are to be noted in critical assessments of the two. Technologies expose these tensions, which Paul Hansen alludes to in his discussion of intensely technological milk farms in Hokkaido, Japan. For Hansen, cattle are hybridised entities owing to their literal and extensive connectivity with machines.46 Do these practices enact imago dei? Or, from the fact that the public image of these farms downplays the technological element and suggests ‘natural’, freeroaming cows happily choosing to give away their milk, should we be alert to practices that in fact are a detriment to imago dei, as read in a functional sense? Put differently, are humans being ‘good stewards’ by using technology to manage these cows and their resources, or does the nonreality of the public facade betray our confidence in using technologies responsibly in this way?47 With emphasis on a functional interpretation of imago dei, we lack the ethical measuring sticks with which to discern the answers to these sorts of questions. Effectively, humans become the judges rather than God.

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However, in an advanced technological world that humans steered with their developing of tools, where human enhancements are now a very real possibility, the identity of ‘the human’ is problematised. As Linda Woodhead puts it, the tensions arise because the starting point of a ‘cataphatic anthropology’ such as the substantive one I discuss ‘often becomes self-fulfilling, fixing us in the nature it claims to describe’.48 Technologies change us and the world at the same time that we struggle to maintain a clear self-identity. These tensions underlie the fraught ways we see ourselves as rooted in a certain nature, and as developing towards certain ends. Broadly, these ways that we see ourselves are tethered to substantive accounts that underwrite functional views of ourselves, and they are strongly influential for how we interact with technologies and other animals. To elucidate this point with more specific regards to technology, consider Asimov’s relatively well-known and influential Three Laws of Robotics. First presented in Astounding Science Fiction and popularised through I, Robot (2004), these Laws were intended to set out an ethical code in the interests of harmonious human-robot relations: (1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. (2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.49

At first glance, the Three Laws correspond with a functional approach because they provide ethical instruction and contend with a dynamic set of technologies and beings. On closer inspection, though, the laws are founded on key differences between robots and humans, where robots are presented as subservient to masterful humans. This reveals assumptions about humans that are rooted in something more abstract and unchanging. Humans are unique, for example, not only because they create robots, but because they have the capacity to maintain control. It is specifically this capacity that connects substantive and functional interpretations: only humans have such a capacity for creation and

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control (this is substantive); but what we do with that capacity remains open (this is functional). In this vein, humans are seen as ‘persons’ who ‘share in a common rationality; therefore, they are legally accountable agents’.50 This is a cornerstone of ethics and politics insofar as agential, rational subjects are held accountable for their actions. The question of agency and accountability of machines and robots, closely related to a question of free will or ‘personhood’,51 highlights our reservations about being unable to distinguish ourselves from machines as Mettrie proposes, because this would undermine a fundamental part of our political foundations. On this note, a recently published EU draft report detailing proposals for civil laws on robotics advocates creating a category of ‘electronic persons’52 that designates robots as distinct in some way from humans in terms of agency, autonomy and selfawareness. Indeed, robots are ordered-to humans in the proposals, espousing a strong substantivism that undergirds functional attitudes about ethics and interactions in political and moral spheres.53 Against this, what I suggest is required is a stronger focus on our ongoing engagements with technologies that does not presume human dominance. Particularly as technologies advance, it will be increasingly more difficult to maintain the sole culpability of humans contra other agents. Thus, the more that we can make ourselves aware of substantive assumptions that espouse such presumptions, the more that we can critique them and seek alternative articulations of our conduct in the world. In my estimation, the most viable resource or approach that can offer this in non-substantive terms is a relational interpretation of imago dei, which I now consider.

RELATIONAL MODELS: ASSEMBLING THE HUMAN? A third categorisation of the ways of interpreting imago dei is the relational view. Here, theologians attempt to move more emphatically away from the shortfalls of substantivism that, as I have attempted to show, are mostly continued rather than corrected in the functional interpretation. As Noreen Herzfeld writes in her detailed excursus of these three models of theological anthropology,

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A relational interpretation of the imago dei obviates these criticisms. First, it presupposes no essential difference between humans and other creatures, just as it does not posit an essential similarity between humans and God. Instead, it focuses on the calling of human beings to be in relationship.54

The focus in a relational view is no longer on a distinguished identity, for example on beings that bear imago dei versus those that don’t. Approaches rooted in substantive interpretations of imago dei, as Herzfeld usefully indicates, tend to dramatically overemphasise sameness and difference between humans, God and other creatures as essentialised characters. The relational approach attempts to correct this overemphasis by reworking what it is to be different and similar through the multiple relationalities and networks in which we immerse ourselves. In this sense, as Anna Case-Winters notes, ‘human beings, like every other reality, are co-constituted by their relationships. Relations are internal’.55 While these trends connect with a broader philosophical and anthropological turn to relationality – which is marked by trends inspired by quantum physics and the complex inter- and intraactions of different beings,56 and is theorised by scholars including Karen Barad and Bruno Latour – they also have particular significance in a theological anthropological context and framework. A relational approach here suggests a deep evaluation of substantive interpretations of imago dei. While the relational turn is not hostile to Christian theology,57 given the embeddedness of such substantive attitudes in western thought, it certainly demands careful consideration as key concepts will need to be rethought in an appropriate and sensitive manner. The notion that humans, as well as all other species, are formed by their relations means that attention needs to be distributed across all relating actors and parties, rather than reducing the ‘other’ to a mere object against which the subject is dialectically defined. The latter is predominantly the case as we have seen with the substantive human subject, yet a relational approach insists that a discrete view of that subject is not possible: it can and indeed should be deconstructed into a fragmented yet emphatically interconnected set of constitutive parts. Power and focus are thus conceptually shifted from the subject

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in question, typically the human, and are dispersed throughout networks of relations. In the networks, nothing can be abstracted, including the human, in the light of the connections that shaped species’ (hi)stories as coincident with each other. Donna Haraway suggests something to this end in her theory of ‘companion species’ that is something of an addendum to the cyborg (see Chapter 5 for a detailed and critical discussion of this). Haraway writes, ‘once “we” have been met, we can never be “the same” again’.58 Relationships change who we are in an ongoing way, by shaping and reshaping our identities as we make new connections. Identity – at a range of levels from the species (‘humanness’) to the individual – is thus not static or essentially stable, but is dynamic and processual. Haraway says that we can never be ‘the same again’ after having been met: the same as what, though? Does this assertion not presuppose a human figure that has been met prior to its relationships, a notion that would risk veering back into a substantive view of humanness? Evidence for this could arguably be traced in certain relational accounts: Herzfeld, for example, establishes hers upon a Barthian perspective where relationship is seen to demand otherness modelled on the alterity between creator and created.59 According to this model, the fundamental difference between man and woman, suggested by Genesis 1:27, is taken as the basis for relationality. Following along this line of argument, then, a relational approach to imago dei could in fact be used to perpetuate or emphasise (inter-)human difference rather than challenge or overcome it. For example, as Anne Kull, who is a theologian working in this direction, suggests, ‘what will count as human and as nonhuman emerges only from relations, by engagement in situated, worldly encounters, where boundaries take shape and categories sediment’.60 Notions of the human and the categorically broad and abstract ‘nonhuman’ remain in this relational depiction of (id)entities. A relational interpretation, then, may have the merit of uncovering the plasticity of difference, as something that is contingent upon connections, but it does not necessarily do anything to overcome that difference. Consider here humans and animals: we exist in and define ourselves through relationships with animals, which is the cornerstone of a relational approach. However, we meet (meat?)61

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animals in ways that we determine and control using technology,62 and this suggests a functional account of imago dei. If we presume the identities that prefigure these relationships as something static and essential, then there is a risk of lapsing into a substantive approach, as demonstrated in the previous section. This need not be the case, to be sure: relationality emphasises fluidity and dynamism rather than stasis and essentialism, but the point about the persuasiveness of even tacit substantivism is worth raising and being attentive to. Of course, a functional-substantive interpretation of imago dei is not the only way relationality is discernible in theological anthropology, and to conclude otherwise would be reductive and misleading. Some theologians, such as David Cunningham, note that ‘the biblical text never denies the attribution of “image of God” to any other element of creation.’63 Although the significance of the Bible’s silence on the matter of extending imago dei to nonhumans cannot be downplayed, we must equally bear in mind that, in support of Cunningham’s claims, beyond Genesis, the Bible remains also largely silent on the matter of humans bearing imago dei. This may be the impetus for a more creaturely ethic, where, as Philip Hefner suggests, ‘human beings, who are of much more worth than the birds and the lilies and the grass, ought nevertheless to identify more closely with these lower kin’.64 Although I take issue with the derogatory tone applied here to nonhumans, which betrays the call being made for a more considered sense of relationality, and which I critique of Hefner in Chapter 6, the gesture towards creatures that takes account of a broader creaturely relationality with God is compelling. Reflecting on creatureliness is a necessary move in overcoming anthropocentric interpretations of imago dei. We need, in short, to move beyond a strictly theological anthropology and consider the relations that co-constitute not only us, but also others. Part of this anti-anthropocentric endeavour must entail a refusal to rank creatures. Even if all creatures are understood to represent the goodness of God’s creation or, as Cunningham suggests, if they all manifest the imago dei in some way, as was suggested with Mettrie earlier, the principle of sameness does not necessarily occlude the possibility of discrimination and hierarchy, and so caution must be exercised to prevent this. As Celia Deane-Drummond writes, ‘if other

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animals are to be thought of as only weakly bearing the image of God, it still seems to put other animals on the same hierarchical scale as humans, and they are then found wanting’.65 It is the Augustinian sense of hierarchy66 that needs to be combatted in truly relational accounts of creation, going beyond a strict anthropocentrism. There is a further sense in which the relational view is tested in a technocultural context, and that is in terms of our relationality with our own creations – from golems to robots, and from tools to artefacts. Even though animals are not necessarily, as Cunningham suggests, excluded from imago dei, particularly not in a relational (or even functional) view where humans must enact that image through their relationships with them, the same cannot be said of our own ‘artificial’ technological creations, which are not referred to in the Genesis chapters at all. As Anderson observes, ‘there are no categories within natural creatureliness to deal with unnatural behaviour in a positive sense’.67 One of the tasks presented to us here is to rethink on a deep and fundamental level what we mean by ‘natural’ and ask how useful the concept is, given its stretched and various meanings. Our techno-creations can on the one hand make us anxious about how we see ourselves as either creaturely or creative, or alternatively they can pose an opportunity to rethink these substantive accounts of theological anthropology. In the former view, ‘a society that focuses primarily on the work accomplished through the use of computers runs the danger of viewing humans through the lens of our own creation’.68 This approach gives priority to one lens, namely one that excludes technology from our self-conceptions in accordance with God’s creation. In the latter view, though, we accept that there are necessarily different lenses and stories, and they allow us to articulate a different account of the ways that we relate to ourselves, animals, technologies and God. Relationality with technologies (such as robots or artificial intelligence) is not to be singled out as detrimental to our created nature as Anderson intimates (above), but is to be seen as an expression of a longing for partnership in many forms. It is not, therefore, a matter of technology posing a specific problem for theological anthropology: it should be the relations that are the first part of an analysis, rather than the essence or substance of any of the beings or things that are interacting. This consequently

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means blurring the lines between humans, animals and technologies in favour of an emphasis on the way that relationalities are both constructive and deconstructive of (id)entities. Haraway makes this point clear: ‘the fleshly body and the human histories are always and everywhere enmeshed in the tissue of interrelationship where all the relators aren’t human.’69 Recognition of this point means that engagement with technology isn’t limited to robots, for example, but is dispersed among our relationalities with every aspect of our world, including ourselves, and we cannot thus make neat taxonomical distinctions. Many approaches notably fail on this point, though, even before technology is factored in. Underscoring this point, Kirchhoffer notes: We are so fundamentally bound up in an infinite network of relationships (the turtles all the way down) that to even conceive of some sort of objective self or human essence verges on the absurd. And yet, here we are, doing exactly that.70

Teasing ourselves away from the lure of convenient, stable, but inaccurate substantive notions of humans and nonhumans will be a difficult, but fruitful task. Indeed, relationality seems to have the capacity for a more radical rethinking of imago dei, especially if we take heed of our multiple fusions with other beings, which would in turn make us not only in the image of God, but also concomitantly ‘in the image of animals and machines [. . .] imago bestiae et ferae, and imago artis as well as imago mundi and imago dei’.71 Here, to reiterate, the focus is on the ways that beings co-constitute one another, rather than seeing any one figure (such as the human) as necessarily central. That said, it was also noted that the foregrounding of difference as a prerequisite for relationality may continue to affirm essential and discrete, that is, substantive, identities. F. LeRon Shults makes this point in his exploration of relational theological anthropologies: ‘If being is essentially relational, however, we may still speak of the “self” as substantial and real – precisely because of the intensity its self-relationality.’72 What is needed is a relational approach theological anthropology that can more strongly resist the pull substantive notions altogether. This is what the cyborg critique both technology and theological anthropology seems to demand.

of to of of

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BEYOND RELATIONAL MODELS: CRITIQUING THE HUMAN? For relationality, and for relational approaches to imago dei, to adequately respond to the challenge posed by Haraway’s cyborg, then, the negative dialectic production of the human needs to be abandoned, as well as appeals to radical alterity as the means by which we distinguish what is (non)human. Carole Cusack discusses how, ‘in direct opposition to the cyborg theorists, Christian theologians uphold the uniqueness of the human, and the necessity of a relationship with nature to cure the malaise of an era of “technology gone mad”’.73 Here, human nature is understood through appeals to a discrete nature that is dichotomised from technology. The relationship with nature is one that others technology, regarded as a ‘malaise’, but technologies such as writing are often assimilated within understandings of human nature.74 Humans in this sense would not be recognisable without technologies; this suggests an inconsistent reading of ‘nature’. I have indicated that relational approaches, by abandoning such closed or discrete readings of nature, have the potential to give due attention to our ‘togetherness’ with various nonhumans who are, after all, not dialectically ‘nonhuman’ in the first place. This is in the same way that, according to the cyborg critique suggested by Haraway, we have never been ‘human’ in any discrete or substantive sense. One way to refer to this critique of the human is with the notion of ‘hybridity’. Avtar Brah and Annie Coombes define it as ‘signal[ling] the threat of “contamination” to those who espouse an essentialist notion of pure and authentic origins’.75 Relationality operates not just between identities, but also cuts within them to undermine a sense of pure or concrete identity in any substantive way. This is an important part of the cyborgian critique of substantivism, yet it is not without its drawbacks or considerations. As Brah and Coombes go on to say, this sense of ‘contamination’ ‘lends the term a potentially transgressive power which might seem to endorse the celebration of its traces as transgressive per se’.76 In other words, hybridity appears to be so striking because it is regarded through the lenses of a substantive approach that seeks to maintain a sense of difference between identities. The mixity that hybridity attests to, then, is predicated on an understanding of different parts that are brought together. Thus, for Jennifer Gonza´lez:

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What makes the term [‘hybridity’] controversial, of course, is that it appears to assume by definition the existence of a non-hybrid state – a pure state, a pure species, a pure race – with which it is contrasted. It is the notion of purity that must, in fact, be problematised.77

A relational approach clearly needs to guard itself against such lapses into substantivism, as otherwise transgressive figures such as the cyborg are misapprehended and the focus is given to its transgressive rather than critical value.78 The cyborg would here become an oppositional figure to the human, in the same way that animals and machines are presently substantively assessed through a binary logic of sameness and difference. Alternatively, a relational cyborg should highlight the dynamic ways that we continually shape and reshape identities. Theological resources that start with an established notion of the human are an inadequate, or at least a problematic basis to develop such a relational perspective because of the prejudgements that they bring to our explorations of the relating. This is particularly the case pertaining to technologies, because although we may note that we are relating to technologies, a presupposition of difference will influence how we regard technologies, as part two of this investigation argues in further detail. Theological resources, however, that start with an openness and an incompleteness of the human – as well as of other interactors – can accommodate for this open-ended relationality and further our critique of substantive accounts of (non) human nature. We need, in short, to move on from how: It’s as if the question is still about ‘the human’, as if that is what is under question, and categories like ‘the animal’ are used in juxtaposition in these enquiries. But ‘the animal’ is every as much a humanist abstraction, a universal, an empty, a misplaced concreteness issue, but it’s worse than that. It’s stripped of all particularity and reality and most of all, from my point of view, stripped of relationality.79

In order to take heed of these comments, we need to embrace the cyborg and critical relationality, over substantive interpretations and their legacy. This is evidently a sizeable, but not impossible, task for theology. Through the cyborg, then, it is possible to challenge certain notions of the human discernible in theological anthropology, namely substantive ones. The human, and the traditions that

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mediate and disclose it, however, cannot be discarded or completely abandoned. Why is this so? Sadie Plant frames the issue aptly; she writes, ‘the cyborg has no history, but that of the human is rewritten as its past’.80 By this, Plant alludes to Haraway’s methodology of taking up a polluted history and trying ‘to do something with [it] against the grain’,81 where here the (hi)story of the human (appropriately to be read as narrative) cannot be merely discarded. The destructive legacy of humanism, as well as its connections to substantive and Christian anthropologies, to be sure, is jeopardised by the cyborg figure and critique. A critical relationality, however, cannot negate or disregard those (hi)stories, but must bear them within itself and refigure them in non-oppositional terms (i.e., challenging the pseudo-binaries of human/cyborg; substantive/ hybrid). David Gunkel expands on this point pithily: The cyborg is neither human nor its dialectically opposed other, that is, that in opposition to which the concept of the human has been initially defined and delimited (i.e. the animal and the machine). On the contrary, the cyborg comprises a monstrous hybrid, or what Siivonen calls an ‘oxymoronic undecidability’.82

Crucially, as I have demonstrated in this chapter, a substantive interpretation is not the only interpretation of imago dei or theological anthropology that is deducible from Genesis. As such, a response to Haraway’s cyborg can begin to be developed, and it is therefore not solely theology’s place to be the object of cyborgian critique, but it can offer a response that can inform our critical and ongoing engagement with the cyborg figure. In a significant way, then, through greater attention to theological anthropology than Haraway affords in much of her own work, the force of Haraway’s refutation of Christian origin stories rooted in Genesis is somewhat undercut. Haraway must inherit certain (hi)stories, like that of the human, rather than outright reject them. Her (necessary) inheritance of Christian stories and tropes beyond Genesis can enrich our understandings of the cyborg as a figure that already bears within itself certain contradictions and problematisations in relation to the human figure, which is no longer to be read in substantive or humanist terms. This is the reason that I see some promise in a critical

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relational approach to imago dei: when not reverted to substantive interpretations, as has been overwhelmingly the case in much of (post-)Christian humanism, relational interpretations can allow us to rework and articulate the human in radically different, yet promising, cyborgian terms. Sameness and difference are rethought such that the cyborg, avoiding the substantive tendency to essentialise and binarise, does difference differently.

CHAPTER 2

Nature & Human Nature

NATURE, HUMANS, TECHNOLOGY In July 2016, reports in the media emerged about the first human death in a semi-autonomous vehicle.1 The driver was alleged to have been watching Harry Potter while behind the wheel, and so the accident was presented as being not only the result of technological error – the surface of a large 18-wheel truck on a bright day was not detected by the computational system – but also one of human error – the would-be driver was critiqued for having placed too much trust and displaced too much control unto the vehicle.2 What this reveals is that, in spite of the nickname of ‘driverless cars’, we are not at a position where we can relinquish human control over technologies. Human passivity in this context is not encouraged. Embedded here, then, are attitudes to humans and technologies that are significant and that are explored in this chapter within a theological framework. Why do we feel that we should be able to control technologies, or indeed that we are even competent enough to? And are these attitudes static: have we always sought to maintain such relationships with technologies, and indeed will we seek to or even be able to in the future? There are many profound technological changes that are defining and changing our contemporary context. Asides driverless cars, there are developments in, for example, robot-staffed hotels; 3D printing, which has the scope to revolutionise personalised medicine in the printing of tailored joint transplants, as well as the personal printing

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of commercial products; and graphene, the ‘wonder material’ that is the world’s thinnest conductor and that can have radical implications for fields as diverse as consumer electronics (in touch screens), sports (in tennis racquets), biological engineering, energy storage and so on. It is difficult to determine what impact these technologies will have, but as an indicator, one only has to momentarily consider the speed with which internet and mobile communications technologies have impacted our lifestyles in areas from shopping to sharing information about ourselves, and from leisure to learning and accessing information. Here, we find that we have given increasingly more of ourselves to technologies, and embrace them in a range of areas. Although the internet is still in its relative infancy, it would already be difficult to imagine life without it, which suggests that how we see ourselves is not necessarily static. Technologies have the power to change our self-conceptions, yet concomitantly they certainly seem to build on ideals that we have about ways in which we might improve upon the human condition. Examples here might include making information more prevalent and accessible over the internet, or developing medical care with new innovations and materials such as graphene. To cast some further light on what our self-conceptions might be and how technologies express or enhance (or indeed otherwise change) them, it is useful to consider attitudes and technologies further back in history. Humans, for example, had long dreamed of being able to fly – this manifests in classical mythology such as in the tale of Icarus – and yet now it is often easier (and perhaps even as cheap and as safe) to fly to anywhere in the world than it is to travel by any other means. One might ask, here, how long will it take before our dreams of flying further afield beyond our humble earthly home similarly take shape and change our lives along this trajectory of technological development? Although boarding a plane is a fairly commonplace activity in today’s world, the ability to fly was not typically seen as within the reach of humans. Indeed, in the mythological case of Icarus, who affixed wings of feather and wax to his body so that he could propel himself from the ground, he went too far and exceeded his own capabilities, which resulted in his literal downfall when the heat of the sun melted his wings. Many have

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deduced from this narrative that there are certain things that we as humans should not do, and to attempt them is an example of hubris, or defying certain limits. One way that these limits have been figured is in terms of human nature, which is seen as a concrete set of principles, traits or ideas that define who we are. Technologies can be read favourably or critically alongside these conceptions, yet they can also challenge the stability of such notions, which is a point that I am keen to emphasise here. Indeed, for philosopher of technology Jacques Ellul, on the one hand, ‘technical activity is the most primitive activity of man’,3 yet on the other, as a result of technological change, ‘men now live in conditions that are less than human’.4 The complex boundaries that frame and yet that are contested by technologies are everchanging, and this sparks tensions in how we think about larger, abstract and generally more static concepts such as human nature. In other words, technologies expose an inability for snapshots and static ideas of what it is to be human to fully account for the diversity of so-called ‘human nature’. With technologies, we are confronted with conflicting narratives about who we are and what we should (not) do or aspire to, and these (hi)stories resonate particularly strongly with theology. For example, certain groups who seek to better humans by making them immortal via technology operate with an understanding of human nature as self-sufficient yet perfectible.5 This can be contrasted against those who emphasise human sinfulness as a warning of hubris and self-destruction.6 The trouble is that our starting point is always certain assumptions about the human and human nature, and so that which our technologies expand upon and seek to grant us more control over, or that which they challenge and undermine, is difficult to determine. Because of our inability to fully account for the diversity of so-called ‘human nature’ in insisting upon snapshots and static ideas of what it is to be human when faced with different technologies and predicaments, then, it seems likely that the origin of our problems is the problem of our origins. What, then, might influence whether we regard human nature as limited or expansive, and how do these affect our perceptions of and attitudes to technology? A useful starting point in responding to

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these questions is that underpinning our understandings of human nature are assumptions about nature more generally. What does this mean? In one sense, it is simply that we cannot understand human nature without having some kind of grasp of the concept of nature itself. The trouble, however, is that nature is a complex and multifaceted notion that eludes our understanding as soon as we make an attempt to comprehend it. To elaborate on this point slightly, consider the three meanings of nature that ecotheologian Peter Scott usefully identifies: (1) Nature as other to the human; (2) Nature as inclusive of the human; (3) Nature as the essence of a thing.7

From these three categorisations alone, the complexity of nature can be noted: we can regard nature as distinct from humans; as a wider totality that assimilates and encompasses the human; and/or as the specific essence or defining characteristic of something. These different views can be held alongside one another or can be taken as challenging of one another. For example, definition (3) can be used to convey a kind of human nature, and this can be taken as either distinct from an ecological understanding of nature (1), or as part of it (2). Human nature, in other words, can be seen as part of wider nature: in a theological sense, this might be to place emphasis on our common creatureliness with other animals and species by virtue of the fact that God created all living beings of the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7, 19). Alternatively, human nature can be seen as distinct in some way from wider nature: a likely theological resource for exploring this, as discussed in the previous chapter, is imago dei and the fact that humans substantively (or at least functionally-substantively – see previous chapter) image God in a way that other beings do not, which may be expressed as a form of dominion over (and so as distinct from) nature (Genesis 1:26 – 27). A key point that is significant for the discussion here is that technologies interact with each of these meanings and interpretations of nature. For some, human engagement with technology is a natural expression of what it is to be human, which suggests (human) nature in the third sense. Here, to use technology can mean to create,

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innovate and to change the world in ways congruent with God’s plan for creation that humans are a part of, and this suggests nature in the second sense. Technologies, in this approach, are continuous with human nature, which is itself read within a context of wider nature: technologies mediate humans and the world to one another. As such, technophilia may be espoused because technologies are incorporated within a model of nature (2) that is seen as inclusive of humans and also technologies, by extension. These readings are deducible in Genesis, where God created humans in His image (imago dei), which is taken to be somehow indicative of human nature. Insofar as God created the world, and humans bear His image, we could mimic God’s creativity in accordance with our created nature. However, technologies are not continuous with the world in any straightforward way. This can be seen in the four models Don Ihde develops to express technological mediation: (i) embodiment relations, where technologies extend our sensory field; (ii) hermeneutic relations, where technologies are unnoticed until they require ‘reading’ much like a text; (iii) alterity relations, where we interact with technologies but they remain ‘other’; and (iv) background relations, where technologies form a subtle and embedded part of our environment. 8 In all four models, technologies are directed from the human towards the world in a decisive or unidirectional way, and we can deduce this even where technologies are deployed to measure and record information from the world, as they are designed to ultimately benefit the human. This is an outworking before it is a mediation of the world to the human, and so the world remains somewhat ‘other’ to the human in how it is made the object of technological change or augmentation. From this, it is not too much of a leap to assert a sense of human difference from the world, which may align with an exclusive model of nature (1). The world, seen as distinct from humans who make technological engagements, is taken as ‘natural’. In this figuration, then, the natural world is perceived as something distinct that is to be mediated in the first place. This introduces but some of the nuances of how we are to think about humans, technologies and nature that are salient in our theorising

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about human nature and approaches to – or rather constructions of – technology as a broad category. Going beyond this further still, it is not only a distinction between humans and external nature that can be noted from technologies: they may alienate us, as suggested earlier, from our own internal human nature. We see this particularly clearly when technologies are applied to our own bodies and identities, and allegedly threaten to fundamentally change who we are. Examples of this are prominent in SF and include things like memory augmenting implants (cf. Black Mirror), pharmaceuticals that are designed to enhance functionality (cf. Limitless), or even tiny robots known as nanobots that seek to optimise and regulate bodily functioning (cf. Blood Music). Although fictitious at present, these narratives echo and mirror trends and sentiments in our own world and lives; the cautionary nature of these tales suggests that we should share in a similar wariness of giving ourselves over to technologies. These broadly technophobic attitudes make assumptions about nature-as-given; technologies make potentially dangerous changes to our nature, which transitions from something given to us, to being something we create and change ourselves. To be sure, even where technologies and the changes that they can bring about are more celebrated, an understanding of nature-as-given continues to be espoused. Here, technological changes are seen as concordant with a view of human nature, where to create (using) technologies is a given trait of humans. In theological terms, this tends to be traced back to certain, predominantly substantive, models and interpretations of imago dei.

NATURE AND OTHERNESS: EDEN Etymologically, nature suggests a sense of givenness.9 In theology, this manifests in narratives of cosmogeny and anthropogeny, or the doctrine of Creation, which is central to Judeo-Christian theology and is outlined in Genesis. For Harold Hatt, ‘Nature refers to the original creation or the God-given form of things. Things are natural insofar as this is still recognisable in them.’10 The setting of creation was Eden, the paradisiacal garden, which is typically figured as green and verdurous. Resultantly, it lends itself well as a basis to contrast

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and critique human-built environments. Often, these demonstrate a disregard for the wider environment that we did not create and that is thereby associated with romanticised and Edenic notions of givenness.11 A notable example would be associations of technologies with the Industrial Revolution, which is now identified as a key factor in anthropogenic climate change, the effects of which are becoming increasingly apparent according to many scientists and researchers. Technology, in this view, is negatively aligned with the urban and the artificial in opposition to the natural. Through its increasing prevalence and potency, technology seems to be, for some commentators, jeopardising and destroying the natural environment. Bronislaw Szerszynski discusses the significance of Eden in these conceptualisations and attitudes: From the late eighteenth century nature started to be seen in various ways as the unspoilt, as an Edenic arena of goodness and innocence, unsullied by the artifice, alienation and corruption of modern life [. . .] nature came to take on new sacral meanings, as a counterpoint to the increased technologisation of society.12

The story that we are told of nature through Edenic mythology offers us an imaginary utopia against which we can measure and judge our technological world, replete with factories, cities and uprooted trees. In Szerszynski’s example of the eighteenth century, Eden was a readily available resource through which it was possible to valorise the natural against the sprawl of technologies that people were sceptical or anxious about. By means of contrast, nature is figured as that ‘other’ place that once was our place, before humans were evicted from the Garden, and so it is made particularly meaningful in our longings to return to that pristine, innocent and harmonious state. Paralleling and deriving from this contrast between Eden and world is one between givenness and constructedness that impacts upon our notions of nature and human nature (as well as technological nature, or artifice). The artificiality of technology is seen as going against that which is natural and given, and which is taken as purer and thereby better in that it is closer to its originally divinely created state. This functions as a powerful conceptual safety

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valve in our culture for when our technologies become too excessive or domineering, or, to return to the brief introductory explorations at the start of this chapter, when we lose control of them. As such, Eden and Edenic notions of nature allow us an escapist fantasy from the technocultural world. Margaret Atwood discusses this in her exploration of quasi-Edenic tropes in literature, specifically in SF: ‘narratives of fall feature separation from loved ones, calamities, imprisonments, tortures, mechanical beings that mimic life, dehumanisations, and deaths.’13 These are undesirable traits that can be discerned in the present technoculture, and they resonate strongly with the Genesis myth.14 Humans were evicted from Eden and were denied return to it, and so in this narratival framework, Eden is figured as the unreachable paradise that, like a carrot dangling on a string just before our eyes, we constantly carry and yearn for. Furthermore, these negative attitudes can be contrasted with alternative narratives of ascent that ‘feature reunion with loved ones, getting out of the bellies of whales, healing, nature in its more benevolent aspects, life abundant, and birth’.15 Significantly, technology is absent from these symbolic connotations that focus on notions of triumph, holism and naturalness, particularly in the sense of natality. This is important: given natures unsullied by technology are presented as more benevolent, and the technological transformation of them is what becomes problematic or associated with concerns about alienation, which is itself a key theme in our eviction from Eden and the doctrine of the Fall. What this indicates is a view of technologies in opposition to nature in an Edenic sense, which has more in common with a romanticist and Rousseaunian view than a Hobbesian one of nature that is ‘red in tooth and claw’.16 Hobbes’ views would espouse a more positive reading of technology insofar as human cultural efforts seek to overcome a nature that is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’.17 As we shall see, however, Hobbes’ vision of nature may have more in common with accounts of post-lapsarian nature in certain theologies that are themselves framed in opposition to more positive narratives and notions of Eden. Therefore, both Hobbes and Rousseau may in fact be compatible when read within a broader theological framework that accounts for multiple understandings of nature

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around the axial point of the Fall, where notions of givenness and constructedness are raised and problematised. One particularly influential theologian for the western tradition associated with such a focus on the Fall, Augustine of Hippo, was a Church Father of the Patristic period.18 According to F. LeRon Shults, Augustine wanted to defend the goodness of God’s finite and material creation. To do so, he painted a glowing picture of paradise in the Garden of Eden, and the glory and beauty of Adam and Eve.19

As part of his celebration of Eden, Augustine celebrates both nature and human nature as they were created by God. Humans, however, disobeyed God by disregarding His command to not eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and their punishment was to be evicted from Eden and made to enter the world. The world, unlike Eden, is imperfect, and so may accord with how Hobbes regards nature as essentially competitive. In an Augustinian reading, though, although we are not presently there, Eden continues to influence how we perceive ourselves, technologies and the world. Others, alternatively, have critiqued Edenic notions of nature and givenness. Highlighting the Eden-world distinction, philosopher Don Ihde discusses, in his explication of a phenomenological approach to technology, how we have moved from the Garden to the lifeworld. He writes, ‘by looking at technologies in this initially broadest sense, we can note that, in contrast to the non-technological Garden, human activity from immemorial time and across the diversity of cultures has always been technologically embedded.’20 Ihde rejects the premise of Eden as a fiction that unhelpfully influences our attitudes to technologies as something distinct from nature, and potentially human nature. The implications of Ihde’s work here present a challenge to notions of givenness, because we live – and have always lived – in lifeworlds that we participate in and construct. In these frameworks, then, it is fruitless to distinguish that which is given and thereby ‘natural’ against that which is constructed, technological, and thereby ‘artificial’, as nothing could be figured as wholly natural. In the environments in which we live, our activity has had an impact – both upon our immediate dwellings (homes, cities, countries), but also upon larger environments in terms of the impact

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of our activities, for example, anthropogenic climate change. Nature in an external and Edenic sense is thereby a somewhat misleading notion, although that is not to say, of course, that it is not a pervasive and influential one.

NATURE AND HUMANNESS (1): IMAGO DEI When it comes to human nature, the notion of givenness is more difficult to discern. This is owing to the multifaceted things that humans do with technologies in relation to their own natures and to wider nature. Going back to the discussions that opened this chapter, sometimes we use technologies in a manner concordant with our own nature and/or with wider nature; yet sometimes we use them in a more harmful or destructive way to either. Most of the time, of course, we find it hard to tell the difference between such concordant and discordant (or, by close association, positive and negative) applications of technology, which reveals much about our limited insights into the rich complexity of nature and human nature. For Augustine, the essential and defining aspect of human nature that derives from how humans were created according to imago dei is that humans have free will. It is having the freedom to act efficaciously, in a way that represents human agency and intentionality, which includes the ability to rationally and emotionally deliberate decisions and then act accordingly, that makes humans uniquely moral (or indeed immoral) beings. As such, free will encapsulates for Augustine many other traits of humans that have been discerned from a substantive approach; it is ultimately having free will that makes these other characteristics meaningful. There are notable resonances with a functional interpretation of imago dei here, to be sure, given the emphasis on acts and conduct, but this emphasis is rooted in an essentialised part of humans that constitutes human nature and distinctiveness.21 A way that Augustine’s views here might be discerned in practice is in the different ways that we regard actions by humans and nonhumans: although animals act intentionally, we do not typically see their actions as morally efficacious in the same way as we treat human actions. If a bear kills someone, we may attribute this act to the bear’s

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protective or violent nature, or to its perception of the other as a threat; if a human kills someone, we ask deeper and more complex questions about motives and whether the individual or society is to blame in terms of the socialisation of the individual, for example.22 Having the freedom to act, which includes the ability to calculate, cognise and contend with different lines of action in a reflective way, is a deeply significant human trait in Augustine’s theological anthropology, as well as in his wider theology. God gives certain commands to humans throughout the creation narrative, and elsewhere throughout Scripture.23 These commands are to be upheld, and as such they demand an active response from humans. For Augustine, this response is only theologically meaningful if it is a freely elected response: it makes no sense for God to make automata that passively follow his orders, because this would undermine other fundamental theological doctrines such as God’s benevolence, salvation and eschatology. As such, the freedom to choose places humans in the centre of multiple tensions that highlights the significance and efficaciousness of their decisions and actions, which Augustine discusses: [God] created man’s nature as a kind of mean between angels and beasts, so that if he submitted to his Creator, as to his true sovereign Lord, and observed his instructions with dutiful obedience, he should pass over into the fellowship of the angels, attaining an immortality of endless felicity, without an intervening death; but if he used his free will in arrogance and disobedience, and thus offended God, his Lord, he should live like the beasts, under sentence of death, should be the slave of his desires, and destined after death for eternal punishment.24

Human nature is, for Augustine, suspended between angels and beasts, and what underwrites this is an emphasis on humans as naturally having, by virtue of their creation, free will. On a moral plane, Augustine contends that humans are to willingly obey God in order to pursue their higher natures. There is thus something about the fullness and richness of human nature, epitomised by the image of God that humans are created to bear, that is to be realised freely and meaningfully. Human nature is thus in a sense incomplete, which may at first glance suggest openness to different possibilities and realisations. Given that Augustine presents a clearer idea of the

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trajectories according to which imago dei and human nature should be fully realised, however, Augustine’s understanding of human nature is actually prescriptive and closed. In other words, although our nature is at present incomplete, it can be fulfilled in only one direction, and this is something given and predetermined. With regards to technologies, this means that they are in principle able to be either developed and deployed in ways that fulfil human nature and allow it to flourish (which resonates with technophilia), or as able to denigrate or debase that nature (which resonates with technophobia). Augustine in places speaks positively of technologies, ‘the wonderful inventions of clothing and building, the astounding achievements of human industry’.25 There is something to be celebrated of these technologies and the benefits that they bring about to developing humankind, elevating the human condition and seeking out its perfectibility. Augustine then goes into more detail by listing specific technologies, such as the ‘ingenious devices for the capturing, killing, or taming of wild animals’,26 which are sharply demarcated from humans. In one sense, the skill and design behind these is to be noted, but in another and important sense, these kinds of technologies have been brought into question because of the harm that they do to animals, which are revealed to experience pain and thus have more in common with humans than a substantive approach would recognise. Increasingly, hunting animals for sport or products, or killing and processing them for meat, and the technology involved in these industries, is scrutinised and protested. For Melanie Joy, for example, in the meat-production industry, mass-scale factory technologies alienate us from compassion towards animals and workers alike in the vast slaughterhouses.27 There is no consistency or uniformity in how we regard any singular technology, let alone technology as a broader category. In other words, it is difficult to convincingly posit any kind of technological nature although it is certainly an appealing prospect insofar as it emerges from notions of human nature such as Augustine’s. Underlying these trends are shifting attitudes to humans, technology and nature (in this case, animals) that influence our judgements of positive uses of technology in accordance with our free

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will. In spite of these shifting attitudes, though, we continue to attempt to refer to static notions of nature such as the fundamental difference between animals and technologies, and it is the friction between the two (shifting attitudes and static natures) that sparks tensions. In the language of the previous chapter, this might be framed as a tension between substantive and functional interpretations, even though substantive interpretations often undergird and buttress functional ones. Humans substantively have free will, for example, but the issue of free will means that we must constantly reflect on and renegotiate our attitudes in a way that may challenge that substantivism. In other areas where technologies are applied, similar points can be made: Augustine also positively notes the ‘medical resources for preserving or restoring health’, yet in our present context these lead us to ask what is the nature of ‘healthiness’ and whether, for example, immortality is healthy or desirable. As we push at the frontiers of human experience via technology, we expose ourselves to new questions about who we are and our place in the world. Something that we see in one context as good is not universally so, and we therefore need to afford ourselves the scope to reflect fully and make accurate and valid assessments. We must constantly renegotiate the spheres of humanness, technology and nature: these are constructive enterprises, yet we still presume a givenness of nature(s) that is well-characterised by the symbolism of Eden, and that technologies challenge. At the centre of these tensions is how Augustine depicts humans as created free yet incomplete and poised between polarisations of angels and beasts, morality and immorality, obedience and hubris (respectively). For David Vincent Meconi, that humans were created according to an incomplete image amounts to a divine promise that ‘was also the cause of humanity’s downfall’.28 In other words, that humans were created only incompletely in God’s image meant that they would seek to complete and fulfil it; it was this striving and drive that led them to disobey God’s command and to eat the forbidden fruit. The desired knowledge that came with that bite symbolically represented a desire to be God-like, or to fulfil the incomplete image that humans bore. Humans were given a partial taste of being God-like insofar as they were created according to his

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image, but in their endeavour to actively realise that image themselves, they committed original sin. Human nature may thus have a predisposition to sin – this is by no means to say that humans were created to fall, but it can certainly be seen as an essential ambiguity of humanness. Out of these tensions, then, between givenness (where God’s creation is highlighted) and constructedness (where human activity is highlighted), and forced out of Eden as punishment for sinful disobedience, we inherit a problematic theological anthropology that sees human nature as suspended and divided. It is this that the cyborg resists. NATURE AND HUMANNESS (2): FREEDOM AND FALL Before detailing how the cyborg resists this anthropology, which will be explored later in the book, it is important to establish and make clear why it is a problematic anthropology. This can be done by exploring the question that Augustine’s position raises, namely of how, if at all, the image of God might achieve completion. It has already been noted that free will takes an ambivalent place for Augustine, and it is only through willing obedience to God’s command that imago dei might achieve its full realisation, which marks the severity of original sin. According to Augustine’s reading of the Fall: [. . .] if he [man] used his free will in arrogance and disobedience, and thus offended God, his Lord, he should live like the beasts, under sentence of death, should be the slave of his desires, and destined after death for eternal punishment.29

What this suggests is a sense in which the human condition has dramatically changed following the Fall and punishment. Expelled from Eden, though, it is not only the surroundings that have changed: humans become subject to their own desires, which indicates a change in their own natures and bodies in the form of a rupture.30 This connotes our fears about losing control to technologies, where we have dissociated ourselves from our tools and progeny to render them as ‘other’ and indeed as threatening or compromising of our sovereign will. Technologies are enticing as representations of our

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creativity, but also there is the concern about our ability to control them, and whether we make them in accordance with God’s will, or against it. Here, the trope of the Fall and the forbidden fruit returns in our culture to represent an infatuation with that which could potentially destroy us. In ‘The Second Renaissance’, for example, a short film of The Animatrix series, an image of the apple becomes rotten and metamorphoses into a brain to depict the promise and perils of a pursuit of knowledge and the destruction that it can bring in The Matrix franchise.31 This is a purposive hearkening back to particularly what Augustine saw as the spiritual destruction brought about by the act of original sin as a disobeying of God’s command.32 Similarly, in the popular Channel 4 drama series Humans, the coding for synthetic consciousness is depicted through the imagery of a tree connoting the Tree of Knowledge. Here, the ritual around the tree is presented as decisively risky for humans and synths alike. The risk for both is presented in the demands of co-existence: would humans accept their creations, their former servants, as their equals? Would synths be vengeful towards their human creators, or would they opt for harmonious partnership? The tensions here largely stem from conceptions and defences of human free will. Is it to be celebrated in the creation of robotic and technological progeny; is it compromised by the creation of new and free, or autonomous, agents?33 Interestingly and ironically, in Augustine’s work, it is humanity’s sacralised sovereign will that in the first place underwrote the escapade of original sin by disobeying God’s even more sovereign will. Now, in an increasingly prominent and advanced technoculture, the challenge of competing wills manifests itself again. These narratives, it seems, are loops and tautologies that reverb around our cultures, sedimented as both religious and secular (hi)stories. Through the Fall, then, humans experience a change in their natures – yet this is understood in the context of the prior Edenic nature that functions as a guiding principle for theological anthropology and subsequent attitudes to technology. The narrative is compelling in many ways because it legitimises ideals of perfection and perfectibility insofar as humans were created incompletely with God’s image to be fully realised, but there is also transgression,

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punishment, and guilt to complete the dialectic arc of the story. Where Eden is presented as a utopian part of our past, our nature, there will be understandable aims to return to it. This has underscored pioneering work in science and technology from key figures such as Francis Bacon, which historian David Noble discusses: Bacon’s transcendent goal, like that of his medieval precursors, entailed the recovery of mankind’s original image-likeness to God [. . .] In historian Frances Yates’ words, Bacon sought ‘a return to the state of Adam before the Fall, a state of pure and sinless contact with nature and knowledge of her powers.’34

What Bacon is striving for here is a way of using technology to combat (and not perpetuate) the alienation and rupture that was brought about by the Fall. Bacon’s reading of human nature as being in the image of God is largely consistent with Augustine’s account that is celebratory of Eden. Bacon sees technologies as continuous with human nature as it was created, and so they have a positive function in realising something of the Edenic utopia. While acknowledging the Fall, then, Bacon gives priority to the Edenic precedent that guides his technological vision. Overall, this highlights more of the ambivalence that the Eden-and-Fall narrative conveys with its allusion to multiple natures that may be continuous or discontinuous, but that often are static and totalised. By this, I mean that the Eden-and-Fall narrative presents us with a range of snapshots of humans and nature that can be interpreted in radically different ways, depending on where emphasis is placed. For Bacon, attention is given to imago dei and its unrealised potential that can be achieved via our own creativity and ingenuity in technological channels. Bacon seeks to overcome the alienation of the Fall in this regard and so he appeals to humanity’s original created nature, seeing technology as continuous with it. This creates an interesting paradox, though, given that we are now in a fallen world seeking Edenic escape from it: in Bacon’s work, humans and technologies are seen as aligned and impacting upon nature, but in a natural way that seeks to allow human nature to flourish. Finn Bowring expresses the intricacies of this position in writing, ‘to exercise our rational nature, we must defy nature in a natural way’.35 Bowring’s position conjures notions of multiple natures that may

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conflict one another but that are nonetheless held together in awkward and paradoxical assemblages. An alternative view, pithily summarised by Jurgen Moltmann writing of Flacius, is that ‘human beings are never per se’36 insofar as a coherent or singular way of rendering or regarding the human is impossible, or will at least always be overstretched. This would indicate a more critical interrogation of humanness in a manner gesturing towards apophatic, relational interpretations. And yet, dominant attitudes still favour understandings of the human that rely on images, snapshots and assumptions. Although these may be more secular, they have clear historical and ideological connections to theological attitudes. One notable example is ‘Humanityþ ’, which makes positive and generally technophilic statements about humans, technology, and nature such as the following: It is often right to tamper with nature. One could say that manipulating nature is an important part of what civilisation and human intelligence is all about; we have been doing it since the invention of the wheel [. . .] Changing nature for the better is a noble and glorious thing for humans to do.37

This claim is common among those who have visions of human perfection and perfectibility via technological means. The seed of that perfectibility may have much to do with the openness of human nature and seeking to realise it in directions of our conceptions of God, where freedom is the central motif. This is reflected in Max More’s ‘Letter to Mother Nature’ where, in lieu of what he describes as an absent Father, human qualities (i.e., ‘language, reason, foresight, curiosity, and creativity’) are praised and are seen as able to overcome flaws (i.e., ‘limited memory, poor impulse control, and tribalistic, xenophobic urges’).38 While More is critical of notions of God and even a singular model of perfection that I have traced in Bacon’s visions, it is significant that he nonetheless celebrates the same virtues – primarily freedom – and brings them to his strong espousal of technological enhancement.39 Technologies are thus congruent with certain accounts of human nature and imago dei, and in attempting to realise humanity’s untapped full potential to be like God.

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Augustine, however, gives emphasis to the Fall and to disobeying God, which may lend itself to a technophobia where we become cautious of excessively imposing our will upon external nature and the world. Here, there are concerns about technologies as changing what was originally created or given such that imago dei is not brought out via technological endeavours as Bacon sees it, but rather technologies risk changing our own human nature into something non-natural and unrecognisable in the context of Eden and creation. Technologies, then, are associated with our post-lapsarian natures and cannot offer us a way back to Eden because they are not themselves products of the Garden. This lends itself to views such as Ellul’s, who writes particularly critically of advanced and totalised forms of technology: Today the sharp knife of specialisation has passed like a razor into the living flesh. It has cut the umbilical cord which linked men with each other and with nature. The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbour because his profession is his whole life [. . .] Technique has become the bond between men.40

Against this harsh and alienating technological context, we may find comfort in romanticised notions of nature that Eden symbolism is ripe with. It should be noted here that Augustine does not make explicit statements against technology in his work, but the trajectory of his ideas can certainly be traced and paralleled with attitudes as I have done so here. The point of this exercise was thus not to make a direct or sustained critique of Augustine, but to explore and express some of the traits and issues of Eden and its symbolism in influencing our ongoing attitudes to humans, technologies and to nature. In brief, although we have left the Garden, we still find it to be influential in various ways, and this undermines claims of openness to technologies, because they are assessed with predefined lenses and assumptions.

NATURE-AS-ESSENCE: SUBSTANTIVE INTERPRETATIONS In many ways, then, the Eden-and-Fall narrative lulls us towards developing presumptive attitudes to technologies, ourselves, and the world, which undercuts attempts at openness. This is problematic if

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we are to attempt to comprehend the cyborg, because the cyborg resists making categorical distinctions such as those we find in Edenic anthropology and cosmogeny. We have seen that it is possible to read humans and technology as aligned in (hi)stories that are inspired by Genesis accounts such as Bacon’s, and yet it is also possible to read technologies as oppositional to a vision of humanity as more closely aligned with nature. The different trends are held in tension within one overarching narrative, which results in ambivalent, if not dichotomised perceptions of (human) nature and technology. One way to express some of this might be with a Venn diagram (Figure 2.1). There are different alignments of the different categories, but in an important sense, these are all made static and

HUMANS

2a

Humans-asnatural Technology-asother

1

NATURE

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No alterity Everything natural Technology-as natural Humans-asother

Humans-astechnological Nature-asother

TECHNOLOGY

FIGURE 2.1 Venn diagram to express the interrelationship between humans, nature and technology

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unchangeable. That is because, to return to a point made at the start of this chapter, there are multiple ways that nature is featured in this model. Nature (1) as exclusive of the human is found where nature is isolated, and it is here where human activity establishes itself upon nature which is figured as an external object. Nature (2) as inclusive of the human is found at the overlap between humans and nature, and this may or may not include technology depending on the interpretation. Where technology is not included (2a), this may suggest technophobia, and where technology is included (2b), this facilitates a technophilic attitude. (Where nature is excluded, suggesting a yet stronger embracing of technology, will be considered in the next chapter.) Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, nature (3) as the essence of a thing is more concealed in the Venn diagram, but may be traced in the encircled categories themselves. It is this understanding of nature that maintains our categorical distinctions, and our endeavours to maintain them even as we seek to change them. Although we have new technological practices such as robotstaffed hotels, then, and driverless cars, we incorporate these technologies within pre-existing frameworks that segregate, or at least fix the relationship between (human) nature and technology. Natures (1) (2a), and (2b) may thereby be in tension with one another, but it is (3) as a substantive interpretation that sustains those tensions in a problematic way. Unless the categories change, the tensions and our assessments of technologies and ourselves, caught between celebration and guilt, Eden and Fall, cannot change either. Here I reintroduce the figure of the cyborg. Rather than separations predicated on different understandings of nature(s) (such as human nature; the nature of technology; creation as nature – both including and excluding humans), as renowned cyborg theorist Chris Hables Gray notes, ‘cyborgism can be seen as a fullscale assault on traditional divisions (such as machine, human, animal) with an inevitable proliferation of cyborgs and other monsters’.41 Nature in all three senses is clearly critiqued here, and so the cyborg figure ultimately demands a scrutinising and rethinking of our other stories that narrate essential divisions and continuities, such as Edenic mythology. This is to be a challenging undertaking because, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr aptly puts it:

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Cyborg Theology The cyborg is the site of a categorical breakdown, a system of transgressions, and an irrecoverable one, since the conditions of cyborg existence cannot be reversed, essential differences cannot be restored with the laser-scalpel of classical rationalities.42

What this may entail in thought and practice is a scrubbing of the categories of Figure 2.1, given that they are predicated upon an understanding of nature (3). Indicating how this might be realised, for Donna Haraway, ‘what constitutes a group must be understood as a function of the question asked, not of an essential property of an innocently observed nature’.43 We must, in other words, start with the phenomena before us rather than rely on prejudgements such as those that derive from the Eden-and-Fall story as presented in this chapter. For Haraway, the upshot of this position is that cyborgs are hostile to Eden and they have no familiarity with that place or any desire or possibility to return. Interestingly, though, this does not necessitate a position that occludes the possibility of any theological engagement, and in fact, in my estimation, it serves to further highlight the importance of such a theological engagement as reflective and appropriate. The problematic elements of the Eden-and-Fall narrative considered in this chapter have been the polarisation of perfection and sin, which have in turn been correlated with technophilic and technophobic attitudes. But, while influential, Augustine’s and Bacon’s views, of course, do not account for the full range of interpretations of the Genesis cosmogenies and anthropogenies. For Shults, for example, ‘scholarly consensus holds that the Augustinian idea of a “fall” from a state of original perfection is not present in Genesis’.44 Without a notion of original perfection, the guilt and yearning to return that ensues from the transgression, which is influential on our attitudes to technologies in particular, is deemphasised. This enables a more genuinely open approach to technologies, and so it represents a key step along the way to theologically engaging with the cyborg as I have been arguing for. Although Augustine gestures towards a sense of openness in his recognition of the incompleteness of human nature, his appeal to extremes of the paradise of Creation and the sin and guilt of the Fall, and to the angels and beasts between which humans are suspended,

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always leaves us wanting, and never quite comfortable with ourselves. In real terms, this generates anxieties about the worlds that we build, the technologies that we use to build them, and the identities that are forged in these ongoing processes. More attention is given to sensationalist visions of our ideal or sinful selves, inspired by myths of origin, than the concrete interactions that we are entangled in. The latter are what the cyborg calls attention to. Nature as a point of origin is here critiqued, but I want to argue for the nuances of that critique, particularly within a theological context. While Edenic fantasies of innocence and romanticised verdure are problematic when contrasted with the realities of our situation, we cannot ignore that the realities of our situation prompt the desire to fabulate a utopian place, a positive yet unrealised topos. We must work with structures in both our present and fabulated Edenic worlds in order to make any meaningful or successful praxis-oriented reflections. This chapter has presented that multiple understandings of nature are embedded within Eden (hi)stories, and identification of them is a crucial starting point for reflection and subsequent engagement with the cyborg figure. In these models of nature (that I have attempted to illustrate in Figure 2.1), the significance and mutual reinforcement of substantive interpretations and notions of origin is to be noted. Nature is taken here as something given and as preceding our experience, and this is then reflected in norms and attitudes. In theological terms, accounts of nature contain influential dichotomies between givenness and constructedness; Eden and Fall; paradise and sin; angels and beasts. Onto these dichotomies are mapped distinctions and continuities between humans, nature and technology. These are shifting and contested dynamics, but this is difficult to realise in a rigidly structured and substantive view. What is needed is a way out of this maze, and it is the cyborg’s resistance of substantive distinctions that can be most helpful and appealing. And yet, the cyborg is by no means oblivious to these distinctions: as Don Ihde pithily writes, ‘it is the knowledge born of differences, of variations which hold the secrets to a world both wider and less innocent than Adam’s’.45 It is in this widest of worlds that we are to map the cyborg. Eden is part of this, although it is to be reflected on

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and rethought beyond its tropes that encourage technophobia and technophilia. Rather than, for example, seeing ourselves as suspended between substantive categories, alternatively collapsing everything – Eden, fall, world, angels, beasts, humans, nature, technology – into a chaotic centre could enable us to realise ‘noninnocence’, where openness is the only option and, unlike the chief problematic explored in this chapter, we do not seek to complete or impose our original natures. We need, in other words, to narrate humans, natures and technologies differently.

CHAPTER 3

Posthumanism: The End(s) of the Human?

PLURALISING THE POSTHUMAN Technologies emerge from, but also (potentially radically) change, certain conceptions of human nature. Human nature, as was revealed in the last chapter, can be seen as expansive, and technologies can emerge from this approach to realise new possibilities for our human lives. On the other hand, human nature can be seen as limited, and to go beyond those limits by technological means can result in becoming something nonhuman or inhuman. Finally, as with the cyborg figure, human nature could be critiqued along with notions of nature (as caught up with substantive appeals to origin) more broadly. All of these trends can be considered within the context of posthumanism, which is an emerging and interdisciplinary field. Cary Wolfe, in his book What is Posthumanism?, writes: Posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentring of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatics, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.1

Although ‘posthumanism’ is a notably broad and perhaps too encompassing term, the consensus on the emerging field of study is that it addresses technologies, or at least the dynamism highlighted in a technocultural context, and how these change our conceptions of humans and others.2 For Wolfe, this suggests a decentring of the human, which is a significant strand of posthumanism, but it is

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important to realise that it is not the only strand. Other variations of posthumanism, including transhumanism, use the types of networks that Wolfe identifies to further highlight the centrality of the human, which has different implications. In all strands, posthumanism can be interacted with theological anthropology as affirming and challenging various conceptions of humanness, and this is important to establish in exploring a specific engagement of theology and the cyborg, which is a figure located within posthumanist discourses. Conventionally, the posthuman figure is seen as ‘other’ to the human, but there are also senses in which the posthuman is a way of articulating a critique of humanism and of undermining our assumptions about the human. This distinction is difficult to maintain, however, and there are numerous inconsistencies in the literature on posthumanism. At root beneath these is what some have referred to as the ‘impossibly slippery, unstable notion of the human, the risky entanglement par excellence’.3 In other words, in spite of its substantive guises, as the previous chapters have begun to indicate, the notion of the human is far from absolute and is open to various expressions as well as forms of critique. With this in mind, I draw attention to the different narratives and (hi)stories of humans in order to investigate their resonances with different strands of posthumanism. If different posthumanist figures interact with, or articulate the human differently, then understanding these in order to contextualise more fully the cyborg, and to realise the nuances of its critique of the human, is a worthwhile undertaking. Yet equally, I do not intend to overstate the distinction; there are still slippages between figures and technologies, and these need to be taken into consideration when making tentative, analytical commentaries. With this need for distinction in mind, I offer two strands of posthumanism that have been influential but also conflated across other theorists’ work, where the distinction can help us obtain a clearer reading of posthumanism and the posthuman, as well as its corollary figures (i.e., the human, transhuman, cyborg etc.). Firstly, there is evolutionary posthumanism that broadly sees that ‘our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nano tech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species’.4 Within this strand, to be sure, there are also

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those, such as some transhumanists, who regard this evolutionary pattern in a more positive light. Thus, for Nick Bostrom, from an evolutionary and adaptation-favouring point of view, ‘the permanent foreclosure of any possibility of this kind of transformative change of human biological nature may itself constitute an existential catastrophe’.5 Yet other technologies such as superintelligence, without ethical checks, may represent a greater existential risk for humans,6 which Bostrom as well as others including Stephen Hawking have argued in their open letter on AI.7 It is this field that is referred to in the figure of the evolutionary posthuman. Secondly, there is a strand of critical post/humanism that picks up on Neil Badmington’s work in arguing that ‘anthropocentrism is stalled as it is installed, rewritten as it is written, deposed as it is imposed. The subject of humanism is an impostor’.8 This sort of approach scrutinises the humanism at root in much of our thinking. It thereby places greater emphasis on analysing the ‘humanism’ of ‘posthumanism’, whereas the former approach, ‘evolutionary posthumanism’, takes that humanism largely for granted and suggests a more linear focus implied by the ‘post’ of ‘posthumanism’.9 I see the critical strand as relating closely to the cyborg, and expand on this view here also, before moving to the final part of this chapter, that attempts to tie these arguments together in questioning what, if anything, of the human remains in all of the posthumanist diffractions that have been presented. Overall, then, posthumanism usefully attends to a dynamism as both expression and contestation of the human, yet the vagueness of this may mean that the ability of ‘posthumanism’ to function as a coherent, useful label is undermined. As Jeanine Thweatt-Bates notes, ‘there are multiple possibilities, and some visions of posthumanity are more human than others’.10 It is important to be aware of the multiplicity of these visions because misleading slippages between figures or a poorly defined posthumanist subject will result in erroneous conclusions. My task in this chapter is to highlight the different interpretations of posthumanism and the complex ways these interpretations interlace, in order to further sharpen a critical understanding of the cyborg. As part of this, I comment on theological (mis)understandings of posthumanism. Brent Waters,

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for example, in spite of recognising that posthumanism and the posthuman ‘resists any common definition’, responds to a fearful vision of ‘a day when humans will virtually merge with their technology, thereby creating a new and superior posthuman species’.11 To be fair, there is a branch of evolutionary posthumanism (and transhumanism) that seeks the future that Waters fears, but not all portrayals are consistent in seeing that future as including humans or not; or as utopic or not. It is a matter of denoting the different models of the human that are taken as a basis or point of critique for different versions of posthumanism. We have already seen something of how Eden and imago dei feature in nuanced theological anthropologies here, and these will be brought to an exploration of posthumanism in order to establish a context for assessing and engaging with the cyborg. EXPANSIONS OF THE HUMAN: TRANSHUMANS One of the most common or obvious ways to consider technologies is in terms of enhancement. For Noreen Herzfeld, Technology has one purpose – to change the world, to reshape ourselves or our environment. Through technology, we seek to stay safe from the elements, from predators, to make our lives longer and more comfortable.12

Technologies are broadly about change, which I have previously suggested accords well with a functional view of humans because it corresponds to ongoing activity in the world. Yet, as Herzfeld goes on to say, technologies are designed with certain human ends in mind – comfort, safety, longevity – and these represent normative assumptions about humans and technologies. In general, technologies are developed largely with a view to increasing something, such as ability or productivity, and to thereby making some kind of betterment. According to one particular strand of posthumanism, namely transhumanism, the notion of the human is unchanged by such technological augmentations, but is instead more fully realised. There is an undergirding belief here that ‘humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealised’.13 This has much in common with Francis Bacon’s idealist views of human nature that can be re-perfected from its post-lapsarian

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state via technologies. As such, it is unsurprising that the first use of the term ‘transhumanism’, by Julian Huxley in 1957, is to refer to ‘man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realising new possibilities of and for his human nature’.14 The technological betterments made to, or for, human nature are products of human nature. Transhumanism, then, has much to do with the central concept of the human, and indeed it expands and builds upon that human figure via technology. The prevalent secular understanding of the human can be shown to have resonances with, and derive from, the theological anthropological figure presented in the first chapters of Genesis, where God created humans ‘in His image’. Connecting these arguments, then, it seems that there is a trajectory from Christian anthropogeny to transhumanism, via secularised notions of the substantive human in humanism. We have seen throughout much of the investigation so far how the human is able to be distinguished in dominant Christian thought, where a substantive view is instructive. Similarly, there is a humanism in transhumanism that also remains.15 For Thacker, The humanism of extropianism [which is a key strand of transhumanism] places at its centre certain unique qualities of the human [. . .] just as the human will be transformed through these technologies, it will also maintain, assumedly, something essential of itself.16

That essential part, I have argued, can be traced back to Christianity and to substantive interpretations of imago dei, demonstrating that the Christian legacy is far from over in our post-Christian context. At the root of the parallel between transhumanism and Christian anthropology is how the transhuman fulfils the criteria that theologians have long read out of (or into) imago dei, such as creativity, rationality and intellect. The transhuman therefore cannot be read as disjointed from the human figure that it allegedly attempts to surpass. Rather, there is continuity between humans and transhumans, and traits such as the insatiable human quest for continually more knowledge are uncompromised. Overall, the human remains, and it is specifically a dualistic, abstract and substantive understanding of the human that endures: the working notion of the human is cognitive and closely linked to

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the mind and to knowledge and reasoning.17 In this vein, Stephen Garner develops an appraisal of Christian transhumanism by appeal to imago dei. Garner claims that ‘in the transhuman differences or demarcations are blurred or obliterated’.18 The difference between the transhuman and human is certainly overcome with an emphasis on the expansive core to the human and humanism.19 However, given that conceptually human traits still remain central to the transhumanist project, certain demarcations and differences, namely between the human and nonhuman (and between mind and body) are maintained. This is concordant with the substantive human figure of Genesis and theological anthropology, interpreted through imago dei. Many transhumanists, however, reject the idea of theology or religiosity in their writings. Unlike Christianity, ‘transhumanism posits no “beyond”: there are no gods, or supernatural powers or principles. Most typically, transhumanists embrace a naturalistic and purely secular worldview’.20 On the other hand, though, transhumanism places great faith in the human powers of progress and in the capability for technology to deliver it. In this sense, it cannot be overlooked that ‘transhumanism has emerged from a culture shaped by Christianity’.21 The conflict between transhumanism and Christianity may in fact reveal a deeper similarity between the two insofar as they both offer a totalised worldview and teleology, and transhumanism might thereby function as a quasi-religious movement.22 Closer analysis of the teleology of transhumanism, however, reveals a concrete vision of the movement that can be regarded as slightly yet significantly different to the undergirding substantive interpretation of the human. While this foundational assumption of human nature can be used to link Christianity, humanism and transhumanism, the transhumanist vision of the future reveals a more nuanced understanding of the human that may compete with the Christian eschatological vision. Transhumanists ultimately seek to use technology to bring about a largely humanocentric utopia, but in these futures, the human is fundamentally changed and may not be regarded as ‘human’ in any conventional sense any longer. Dreams of the ‘good’, which

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Antje Jackele´n discusses in the context of techno sapiens and the inauguration of the Kingdom of God,23 in other words are predicated on an emphasis on human will. When that undergoes profound transformation, the theological trajectory of imago dei is arguably profoundly impacted, if not jeopardised. To elucidate, some transhumanists advocate a future featuring human uploads to a sort of cyberspace, where we will enjoy an incorporeal existence in an alternate, digital universe of almost infinite possibility. Others discuss the ‘singularity’ as a point where humans are vaguely and irreversibly changed (typically for the better). Others yet seek to overcome the ‘evils’ of ageing and strive towards immortality. Common to each of these is a sense of directionality with regards to technological changes and augmentations to the human: they point towards something that is typically regarded as posthuman. In this usage, as transhumanist Nick Bostrom writes, It is sometimes useful to talk about possible future beings whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards. The standard word for such beings is ‘posthuman’. (Care must be taken to avoid misinterpretation. ‘Posthuman’ does not denote just anything that happens to come after the human era, nor does it have anything to do with the ‘posthumous’. In particular, it does not imply that there are no humans anymore.)24

Bostrom’s comment suggests that humans are still present in the posthuman era, but only ambiguously so. The technologies could be considered as a stepping stone towards something more radically nonhuman, that is, something teleologically posthuman. Here, the technologically transformed being is seen as notably different from what we once were as humans, which, by comparison, are seen as merely appendaged by technology in that human nature is prioritised and maintained in spite of technological augmentation. If technologies are constantly changing humans though, as according to the transhumanist view, at what point do we make the transition from ‘human’ to ‘transhuman’,25 and more particularly, from ‘transhuman’ to ‘posthuman’? How are we to understand the posthuman?

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LIMITS OF THE HUMAN: EVOLUTIONARY POSTHUMANS These questions introduce us to the figure of the posthuman, which itself is vague and malleable enough to refer to a number of often conflicting understandings and applications. Part of the confusion may result from the fact that the overarching term for the discipline, or branch of study, in which we find all of these figures, including the cyborg, the transhuman and the posthuman, is posthumanism. Perhaps the most common understanding of the posthuman, through the popularity of SF movies that require some kind of antagonistic, alien(ated) other, falls under the strand of what I term ‘evolutionary posthumanism’. The ‘evolutionary’ label derives from the fact that the posthuman being, including robots, ‘artificial intelligence’, and aliens, is in some way more advanced than the human, and this underscores the threat of the posthuman in survivalist terms.26 The ‘posthuman’ part of the label derives from the fact that such beings are typically born out of a human world and/or by human tools.27 Frankenstein’s monster, then, is perhaps one of the classic archetypal evolutionary posthumans that we have become familiar with in popular culture. He was described, by his creator nonetheless, as ‘a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery’,28 and who had also embarked upon a path of murder and destruction. Closer inspection of the Frankenstein story, however, reveals a certain misunderstanding of the monster, leading us to question who was truly monstrous: the creator, or the created? The reader is invited, throughout the text, into the creature’s consciousness (a telling move) to discover his antipathy for his creator: ‘“Unfeeling, heartless creator! you had endowed me with perceptions and passions, and then cast me abroad an object for the scorn and horror of mankind.”’29 Shelley pithily pre-empts here the posthuman in terms of the various threats that it marks for humans. The evolutionary threat of the posthuman is relatively obvious from the creator’s perspective. There is a risk of human extinction, and this is a theme that is common to SF explorations of the posthuman in calling human troops (with all of their military zeal) to face up to and annihilate this posthuman predator.30 Humans find

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themselves combating posthuman antagonists, such as: the eponymous Terminator and his techno-brethren in various sequels; machines and Agents in The Matrix franchise; undesirable and disposable ‘mechas’ in A.I.; malevolent artificial intelligences such as Ultron (Marvel’s The Avengers series) or HAL (2001: A Space Odyssey); technologically altered species in the Jurassic Park or The Planet of the Apes series (particularly the prequels of the latter); a digitally uploaded and unstable consciousness such as in Transcendence; rampant tracker robots called ‘Sentinels’ in Marvel’s X-Men series; and so on. We also find in these films conveying popular culture posthumans a strong sense of the anthropological genesis of the posthuman that is opposed and portrayed as the true object of fear.31 Margaret Atwood, for example, explicitly explores this in her MaddAddam trilogy, which follows a small group of humans who have survived ‘The Flood’, a virulent ‘bioform’ pandemic. In the first book of the series, Oryx and Crake, human society is likened to ‘a sort of monster, its main byproducts being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over’.32 The threat of the posthuman here becomes the threat of the human. It is the creator’s will to create, rather than the posthuman’s will to destroy, that is threatening.33 The human that is threatened by evolutionary posthumanism has its roots in theological anthropology, and the threat is thereby one pertaining to the ethical upholding of imago dei. Operative here is a functional approach that sees the image as somehow viable to collapse, but that is also deeply informed by substantive interpretations, which, as we have seen, are persuasive even in apparently secular arguments, such as those forwarded by Francis Fukuyama. For Fukuyama, there is a fear of technology insofar as it threatens to change who we are: Biotechnology will cause us in some way to lose our humanity – that is, some essential quality that has always underpinned our sense of who we are and where we are going, despite all of the evident changes that have taken place in the human condition throughout the course of history. Worse yet, we might make this change without recognising that we had lost something of great value. We might thus emerge on the other side of a great divide between human and posthuman history and not even

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In this sense, the shift from human to posthuman is a linear transition, but in the process, as Fukuyama fears, we lose something that makes us essentially human. Fukuyama’s comments, characteristic of others who voice fears and concerns about the (evolutionary) posthuman, demonstrate a strong sense of boundaries. While my argument of substantive interpretations of the human means that something of ‘the human’ in terms of creativity is carried as a (hi)story into the posthuman, Fukuyama fears the loss of something human in another sense. In the division between humans and posthumans, Fukuyama does not see a continuation of the substantive self throughout technological changes, as transhumanism would emphasise, but he sees something as catastrophically lost. If transhumanism is about continuities and evolutionary posthumanism about difference, then what is the ‘thing of great value’ that does not cross the technological gulf into posthumanism? In order to answer this question, we might usefully compare Fukuyama’s fears about changes to human nature with Augustine’s reading of original sin and the changes it brought about to a fallen human nature. Both arguments connote discussions around ‘hubris’ as an alienating, disruptive and sinful act. This supposes an alternative evaluation of human nature to that which connects Christian anthropogeny to humanism and transhumanism. The latter has more in common with Bacon’s visions, yet importantly both derive from a similar root and thus may be seen as two sides of the same Edenic coin. As Ted Peters notes of this ambivalence: The single concept of nature has performed a double duty over the centuries, pointing to the goodness of God’s creation while locating as inborn at least some of the temptations towards sin. No wonder confusion has occasionally appeared.35

Substantive readings of theological anthropology perpetuate a conflicting account of human nature that leaves us with a troubling sense of unease and ambivalence when approaching technologies. The tensions between these substantive interpretations of human nature emphasise a human proclivity to sin that emerges between creatureliness (i.e., the goodness of creation) and godliness

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(i.e., human nature bearing imago dei). These tensions, as the last chapter discussed, are exposed via a functional reading of humans and technology, where our activities cause us to vacillate between the two natures. Creatureliness can be traced back to a theological doctrine of creation, where the technological posthuman, as neither created by God nor present in the Garden, becomes the decisively alien and external threat. Yet because the posthuman has been created by human tools or imagination, we become the biggest threat unto ourselves because of sin and hubris. For Brent Waters, this underscores a Christian-based rejection of the posthuman: ‘The issue at stake is not that in pursuing the postmodern or posthuman projects humans may cease to be human, but that they will cease to be creatures bearing the imago dei in effectively rejecting their election.’36 Creatureliness thus becomes shorthand for adhering to boundaries set by God’s will and command, and provides a different expression of (human) nature alongside accounts of imago dei that emphasise human uniqueness. Technologies are forcing us to rethink the difference between human, animal and machine, which underscores Waters’ concerns about creatureliness. Is OncoMousee, a murine subject genetically designed by DuPont to have a predisposition to cancer, an animal or a patent?37 Is selective breeding any different from eugenics or genetic engineering?38 Would a vegetarian want to eat lab-grown meat?39 While we seek refuge in notions of creatureliness against antagonistic evolutionary posthumans, the same technological practices as are involved in bringing about the posthuman are reconfiguring what it is to be ‘created’ and by whom. We think that we fear technologically exceeding our abilities but, theologically speaking, we have little to no indication of where we are concretely supposed to draw the lines between creatures, creator(s), animals and machines. Our underlying fear, then, might ultimately have more to do with uncertainty and ambiguity about where the lines encircling different natures are, rather than transgressions of them.40 Evolutionary posthumanism, in my assessment, can be read as a manifestation of these attitudes. Although narratives featuring technological posthumans present a threat to the future of the human, this end is always averted and in fact the ‘ends’ of the

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human in terms of the boundaries that constitute human nature are affirmed. Thus, the featuring of evolutionary posthumanism in Hollywood SF means that we are granted a point from which we can voyeuristically gaze at the near-ends of the human that are always averted.41 Audiences are then invited to join in with the celebration of being human and overcoming the menacing ‘other’ – that we create.42 This is my main issue with the evolutionary posthuman (as well as the transhuman that dreams of becoming posthuman): it is an uncritical and static position; a strange sort of mirror that reflects to us what we want to see. The evolutionary posthuman helps us to affirm a sense of human difference rather than threatening it, yet this is revealed through an apparent crisis of the future of the human. To highlight this, consider Elaine Graham’s description of this ‘posthuman Other’ as a figure that ‘both tests and commends the limits of what it means to be human’.43 In a similar vein, for Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, ‘dehumanisation and annihilation is precisely the “terror” humanism itself helps to construct or at least to maintain’,44 suggesting that the threat of the posthuman is also, interestingly, its humanistic purpose. In these cases, the posthuman is yet another nonhuman against which we can dialectically affirm the human. In my reading, this parallels a substantive account of theological anthropology insofar as a strong sense of human nature – even when defined by creaturely limits – is upheld. Deeper theological analysis of substantive approaches, in short, is needed to help us to problematise the conservative assumptions that undergird their common usage. For example, the argument of the completed goodness of creation inferred by God’s blessing of it can be questioned by the repeated blessing of the different stages of creation: each day was good, but that does not mean to say that any of the days after cannot be good by adding something more to the creation. Whether or not this can be taken to vindicate human creation via technology is a somewhat moot point, but we should at least be wary and critical of assumptions such as hubris or perfection that touch on theological ideas while short-circuiting any doctrinal richness. Creatureliness, in short, need not – and indeed should not – be

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equated with a strong conservatism, which is often the case in debates relating theology to technology. Rather than seeing these views of creatureliness and creation as indicative of a static nature, it is important to note, as Peters does, that ‘we do nature no service by hallowing its past or present state’.45 Instead, creatureliness needs to be nuanced and reconsidered in the light of a technocultural milieu, where boundaries – particularly between animals and machines – are dynamic and are by no means obvious or clear-cut.

QUERYING THE HUMAN: CRITICAL POST/HUMANS In summary, we find that the evolutionary posthuman has been produced by a humanocentric worldview, and this sort of observation is the starting point of critical post/humanism. Critical post/humanism notes that it is not only technologies that we create; we also create narratives that legitimise our central location. Regarding ‘nature’, for example, Bronislaw Szerszynski’s suggestion that all of our approaches to it ‘emerge through a long historical process of disentanglement of what we now call the human and the natural’46 demonstrates that our self-positioning is a construction. By exposing this, critical post/humanists work with the Foucauldian dissolution of the subject.47 Critical post/humanism, in other words, explores a re-placing of the human rather than the glib threat of a ‘replacing’ of the human associated with evolutionary posthumanism, and it undertakes a deep and probing look at that human figure. The cyborg operates in this critical field, but, according to Ferrando, it engages in a deconstruction rather than a dissolution of the human subject.48 This cyborgian critical post/ humanism dismantles the frameworks of humanism and notes that ‘the subject of humanism is an impostor’.49 That these frameworks are not entirely dissolved indicates that (hi)stories such as Edenic symbolism must be re-assessed rather than entirely removed by the cyborg figure, contrary to what Haraway’s statements might otherwise suggest. Taking this tension with the human (and humanism) into account, critical post/humanists have developed tools with which to express how the post/human is an expression of, yet concomitantly makes a

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potent critique of, the human. Graham is one such theorist, and she develops the analytical tool and concept of the ‘post/human’. By appeal to the post/human, Graham writes: I hope to suggest a question both of the inevitability of a successor species and of there being any consensus surrounding the effects of technologies on the future of humanity. The post/human is that which both confounds but also holds up to scrutiny the terms on which the quintessentially human will be conceived.50

The forward slash invites a useful sense of rupture within the post/ human figure. It dislodges the sense of fixity that we find with ideas of the posthuman in evolutionary terms. The post/human is a more discursive, malleable construction. Most significantly, this corresponds to how the human is equally discursive and malleable, and the linguistic splice draws on these resonances in exploring the connection between the human and posthuman in a useful manner. Denoted by the forward slash proposed by Graham, a linguistic reading of the posthuman is central to critical post/humanism because of the manner in which our humanity is a (historically embedded) story that we narrate to ourselves. Language is thereby an important part of the ongoing process that must be critically considered if we are to understand the conceptual (post/)human. Evolutionary posthumanism, although significant, tends to take for granted certain assumptions about the human that can be challenged. Cary Wolfe, for example, who is a prominent critical post/humanist, asserts that ‘we are not we; we are not that “auto-” of autobiography that humanism “gives to itself”’.51 Here, the human subject of humanism, and the starting point of trans- and posthuman evolution, is undermined from a specifically linguistic perspective. Indeed, the identification and challenging of the human subject’s self-labelling and self-authoring is specifically a Derridean move, and this is where much critical post/humanism is rooted. To this end, Wolfe notes how, for Derrida: ‘we’ are always radically other, already in- or ahuman in our very being – not just in the evolutionary, biological, and zoological fact of our physical vulnerability and mortality, our mammalian existence but also in our subjection to and constitution in the materiality and technicity of a

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language that is always on the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity.52

There is a sense here in which language is our means of narrating the human, and yet language is itself not ‘human’. What Derrida seeks to convey by this claim is an incompleteness of the human. The human requires prostheses such as language in order to ascertain any of its self-understandings. Effectively, this makes it difficult to posit a clear sense of difference between the human and nonhuman. The lines are blurred so that, as Wolfe suggests, The human is itself a prosthetic being, who from day one is constituted as human by its coevolution with and co-constitution by external archival technologies of various kinds – including language itself as the first archive and prosthesis.53

The human, in this critical post/humanist figuration, is deconstructed and rearticulated in terms of composite parts by appeal to the metaphorical language of technology and prosthesis. Language, for example, is not a literal prosthesis but is figured as such in this interpretation. To be sure, a critical and metaphorical understanding of prosthetics here prevents us from naturalising technologies or vindicating naturalised notions of the human or its form such as bipedalism,54 where, as Sharon Betcher notes, ‘the science of prosthetics, in particular, and consequently cyborg incarnations may actually veil a discourse on compulsory holism’.55 The critical post/humanist goal is not to complete the human with technological appendages. It is, rather, to observe how the human is a bricolage of technological and other conceptual parts.56 Critical post/humanism, in short, allows us to begin to radically deconstruct the substantive human(ist) subject, which, although perhaps posing a challenge to the legacy of Christian theology, can also provide fertile ground to rework notions of imago dei that give due emphasis and attention to relationality. Language, for critical post/humanists, is used to express certain stories about ourselves, although it is not inherently bound to the human and in fact it reveals certain tensions within that figure. This perspective broadly gestures ‘towards a conception of existence in which the human is

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totally integrated with the world in all its manifestations, including nature, technology and other beings.’57 In spite of that integration, however, there is also dissociation, in particular figured as a critical and conceptual distancing from the (hi)stories and legacies of humanism. Such distancing enables reflective space, and it is in the construction of that space where critical post/humanism differs most from evolutionary posthumanism. ALTERNATIVE ARTICULATIONS OF THE HUMAN: CYBORGS The field of posthumanism, in terms of the key figures that have been presented and briefly discussed here, interacts with notions of

HUMANS

Humans-asnatural Technologyas-other

1

No alterity Everything natural

NATURE

Humans-astechnological Nature-asother

2

Technology -as-natural Humansas-other

3

TECHNOLOGY

4 CYBORGS Crical distance to reflect on substanve categories

FIGURE 3.1 Venn diagram to show the interrelationship between humans, nature and technology in the broad field of posthumanism

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humans, natures and technologies, and as such it can be mapped out on a Venn diagram (Figure 3.1). Developing the annotations made in the previous chapter, then, where humans are seen as technological and as able to be technologically augmented, this parallels a transhumanist attitude. There are two versions of this: (1) to enhance the human is seen as natural and consonant with expressions of human nature, which is the undergirding principle of Bacon’s utopian anthropology, as well as Huxley’s views of technology epitomised in ‘Humanityþ ’; and (2) (trans)human enhancements have made us posthuman in a way consonant with our human nature but divorced somewhat from non-technological nature, which is suggested by More’s letter to Mother Nature and in Bostrom’s posthumanist goal of transhumanism. This latter point is posthuman in the sense that it refers to human evolution, but there is also the matter of the evolutionary posthuman-as-other to attend to, suggested by (3). Whether or not this posthuman is natural is open for discussion, as there are ecological variations (cf. Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, or Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy) as well as those that are radically separated from any vision of nature, for example in cyberspace. As a critical post/humanist reading of these figures and attitudes revealed, however, they continue to affirm the discrete identity of the human and the categorisation of humans, natures and technologies. The critical perspective suggested by such a reading can be represented as (4), and it is here where the cyborg has most resonance. To illustrate this point, for David Gunkel, ‘the cyborg exceeds the concept of the human [. . .] it comprises an ideological implosion of the concept of the human [. . .] Indeed, at stake is one’s very humanity’.58 The notion of simultaneous excess and implosion is a useful way of conceptualising the cyborg, for it is a figure that looks beyond the human and its fraught boundaries (hence excess), as well as a critical figure (hence implosion). Although the end result sounds threatening to the human, Gunkel notes – supporting my claims above – that this threat only exists through the lens of humanism,59 which the cyborg scrutinises. On this point, while the cyborg can be read within critical post/humanism, in an important sense it also goes beyond it. Critical

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post/humanism, at best, as Katherine Hayles notes, ‘does not really mean the end of humanity’ but instead ‘signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human’.60 Herbrechter and Callus expand on this, positing that, in critical post/humanism, ‘the aim is not in any way to ‘overcome’ the human but to challenge its fundamental humanism, including its theoretical and philosophical underpinnings and allies (e.g., anthropocentrism, speciesism, universalism).’61 This has led some to critique the resonances that posthumanism has with the human: ‘the posthuman is actually anything but’.62 While the critical post/human does not offer anything particularly alternative to the substantive view of the human, the cyborg, which features nothing of the human in its name, marks an attempt to radically reformulate, or at least articulate in different terms, the problematic legacy of the human. The human becomes the crossedout figure that, to be sure, is not excluded from how we understand the cyborg, but is part of that ontology and critique. Drawing on critical post/humanist tools of reflection and critique, then, the cyborg moves beyond a critique and makes alternative, affirmative statements about our ontology as other than what we have thus far understood as ‘human’. Through the cyborg, we have (potentially, as the next set of chapters will highlight) come a long way from the substantivist tradition that has been long influential in Christianity and in broader philosophy and anthropology, where the perception is that ‘the relations of a thing to other things are not essential to defining or knowing what that thing is’.63 With the cyborg, such neo-Platonian diminution of relationality, which came to influence Christian theology via Augustine’s writings, is rejected, and relationships are emphatically foregrounded. Indeed, the whole enterprise of essentiality is abandoned in favour of a critical stance to the human, which is then used to inform a new articulation of our cyborg ontology. There is, in short, no human/nonhuman divide that we can rely upon to assure us of our unique and integral humanness. Cyborgs undermine claims to discreteness and substantive (id)entities. As such, cyborgs break with the tradition that spans from Christian anthropology (with earlier roots in Hellenistic philosophies) to evolutionary posthumanism, including transhumanism, in which we

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regard many of our technologies in ways that emphasise a dichotomy of otherness or sameness. Instead of the dialectic here that legitimises substantive identities, where ‘it is precisely against the marginalised and AI that the fearful dominion-seeking Christian Self is constructed’,64 such identities are deconstructed and then crucially are rearticulated through the cyborg. Although the cyborg has resonances with this critical post/ humanism, it looks beyond the human etymologically and constructively, and in this sense it makes a profound plea for (rather than a guarantee of) a revised and radical sense of relationality. It is not, then, about locating one’s ‘human essence and subsistence as a self, only through relation to other human beings’65 as Pannenberg suggests, but about discovering how we have more in common with the broader spectrum of beings and (id)entities than merely humans (as defined against nonhumans). On one level, we seem thus to have come far from the human, and from Christian workings of imago dei that are all rooted in a deepseated substantivism. There is a ‘proliferation of definitions [that] reveals the absence of definition: our ontology is adrift’.66 The only way we can perhaps trace our ontology is through relations and networks, where that vague sense of identity is dispersed and is held in continual flux. What is being called for, in theological anthropological terms, is a hybrid approach to imago dei that can account for connections and implosions between beings without discriminating based on categorical assumptions. This will involve expanding and diversifying how we conceive of the image of God: relationships actively image God, and that is where we begin. We are nexuses of interweaving relationships, and this is a powerful acknowledgement of our creatureliness; of our inescapable connectedness with everything in a technocultural milieu.

Part II

CHAPTER 4

Cybernetics and Organisms: Fusions

SYSTEMS AND CYBORGS The cyborg, it must be noted, is not a singular or simple figure. To assume either of these positions is to misunderstand that figure and to neglect the nuances of its critiques and alternative articulations, or to misconstrue them. Like the notions of the human that it interacts with, the cyborg has a complex genealogy. Indeed, the label ‘cyborg’ has been used to mean various things by different commentators and at different times, in response to the numerous ways of conceiving of human-machine fusions. Problematically, however, certain understandings of the cyborg have become more commonplace than others, and consequently, we are both overfamiliar and unfamiliar with the figure overall. This is attributable largely to SF and the popularity of characters such as the Terminator and Robocop. Such characters, though, interact with pre-existing notions of cyborgs, in turn continually changing our understandings of those figures. At a rudimentary level, a cyborg can be defined as: A self-regulating organism that combines the natural and artificial together in one system. Cyborgs do not have to be part human, for any organism/system that mixes the evolved and the made, the living and the intimate, is technically a cyborg.1

Although this is a basic definition, and it has been problematised in various ways by various theorists, it is important to see the (hi)stories

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of the term ‘cyborg’. The cyborg is a portmanteau of ‘cybernetic organism’, and it thereby suggests a meeting between the biological – that is, the organic – and the mechanical. What remains open to interpretation here is how much the two components are fused in this meeting, and to what extent they may retain their distinctness even in spite of their amalgamation. The cyborg emerged out of the cybernetics movement associated with the work of Norbert Wiener, who in the mid-twentieth century appropriated early Hellenistic ideas about governance (deriving from ‘kyb1rnhtikh’), and combined them with new ideas emerging in the field of computer science to form a new, transdisciplinary approach to systems.2 As Davis writes, ‘cybernetics is thus a science of control, which explains the etymological root of the term: kubernetes, the Greek word for steersman, and the source as well for our word “governor”’.3 Cybernetic systems impose order and structure on phenomena by making self-regulating feedback loops. If criteria within a system reach certain levels, then other parts of the system are designed to be responsive in order to maintain pre-set thresholds. In these systems, more routinisation and efficiency is enabled. Typically, it is humans who are the users of such systems, and so they are figured as the eponymous steersmen that the technologies are ordered-to. What this means, though, if humans are exempt from cybernetic systems as steersmen, is that any coming together of organic and cybernetic parts is not totalised. Human discreteness and specialness therefore remain in ways that connote functionalsubstantive readings of imago dei, where attitudes such as dominion are emphasised. Yet equally, the focus in cybernetics is on flows of information across systems at various levels, rather than on discrete categories. Emphasis on these information flows means that fundamental differences between categories and beings are able to be undermined; ‘cybernetics proceeds on the assumption that however man and machine may differ in construction, the process of communication and control is identical’.4 The significance of this levelling through information flows is profound, as posthumanist theorist Katherine Hayles notes:

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Of all the implications that first-wave cybernetics conveyed, perhaps none was more disturbing and potentially revolutionary than the idea that the boundaries of the human subject are constructed rather than given. Conceptualising control, communication, and information as an integrated system, cybernetics radically changed how boundaries were conceived.5

Cyborgs, then, have their roots in a movement that rendered previously embedded and fixed boundaries as altogether more plastic and malleable, if not entirely mutable. This opens up the possibility of a critique of the substantive mapping of the human that has been depicted as a Venn diagram throughout this investigation. Yet I would question to what extent cybernetics truly radically changed how boundaries were conceived, especially given that the human remains as an elevated figure in/above these systems. For Wiener, ‘the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence’.6 This corresponds not to a struggle of distinction between humans and machines, but one of their co-existence.7 Here, it is humans who are creatively responsible in such a way that, for scholars such as Hatt, the ‘enlargement of man in the cybernetic revolution’ can help to realise imago dei.8 This has led critics such as Hayles to note that, ‘for Wiener, cybernetics was a means to extend liberal humanism, not subvert it. The point was less to show that man was a machine than to demonstrate that a machine could function like a man’.9 In other words, Wiener takes the image of man, which highlights independence, freedom, and control,10 as his starting point. For Davis, this principle in cybernetics conveys a Gnostic attitude,11 where humans are regarded as ‘strangers in a strange land’.12 This might on the one hand refer to how information liberates us from given structures and norms insofar as technologies, concordant with human nature, are allowing us to express that human nature in expansive ways unconstrained by corporeality or genetics. On the other hand, given that humans are not fully incorporated within cybernetic systems but remain the steersmen, there are grounds to argue that humans are strangers in a strange land of their own making. To expand on this, in systems of increasing complexity, where different parts such as organisms and cybernetics (technologies) are

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brought together in hybrid assemblages, control over categorical distinctions becomes ever more difficult to maintain. Bruno Latour writes at length on this: When we find ourselves invaded by frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales outfitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesisers, audience analysers, and so on, when our daily newspapers display all these monsters on page after page, and when none of these chimera can be properly on the object side or on the subject side, or even in between, something has to be done [. . .] It is as if there were no longer enough judges and critics to partition the hybrids. The purification system has become as clogged as our judicial system.13

While Latour notes the numerous hybrid beings that now proliferate in our world as a result of the widespread application of cybernetics,14 he also astutely notes that we continue to seek to impose order on them, by reabsorbing them into binarised categories such as subject and object.15 This suggests tensions within cybernetic systems between fusions and categorical separations that place strain on our models, or what Latour terms our clogged purification and judicial systems. In my reading, these systems are clogged because of the (hi)stories that reveal them to us and that shape our attitudes to them. These stories encourage a dichotomised outlook where we seek freedom and control; we seek fusions and yet also discreteness. Although cybernetics opens new possibilities for circumventing substantive categories by introducing the fluid flow of information as a key concept, those categories ultimately remain intact because cybernetics emerges from the same humanocentric attitudes that preceded it.16 Indeed, the only boundaries that Wiener seems most comfortable to redraw are the ones that concern human knowledge, where it is our curiosity that impels us to push back these frontiers.17 This predicament connotes that of the evolutionary posthuman and transhuman, where the generation of the ‘other’ was used to vindicate the identity of the self.18 In both cases, the human seeks to control the threat of the mixed and to mark its own sense of discreteness and difference, yet as Latour notes, the classification system (which I have identified as being part of a substantive

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approach) is strained and unsustainable. An alternative way of figuring it is needed. ASTRONAUTIC CYBORGS Unsurprisingly, the substantive view remains prevalent even when cybernetic technologies that represent fusions are applied to human bodies and selves, as later developments in cyborg (hi)stories reveals. The first use of the term ‘cyborg’ to describe a human located within the technologically augmented, cybernetic systems was in astronautics. The cyborg was originally proposed by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline as a means of sending man (the gendered subject)19 into space by technologically augmenting his body. In Clynes and Kline’s own words, The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organisational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.20

What is important to note here is that, although there is a physical fusion of man and machine in this notion of the cyborg, there remains a sense of distinction in that the machinic elements supplant workings of the body that are already regarded as robot-like. Cognitive elements become the seat of humanness and are involved in the drive to expansion, while the more blatantly machinic ‘organisational system’ takes care of the mundane things that are already automated in the body insofar as we do not need to exercise regular conscious thought over them. Effectively, Clynes and Kline engage with a divided and Cartesian view of the human, where technologies are incorporated into the body and not the abstract sense of self which is cognitive.21 The incomplete sense of fusion that this signifies closely adheres to what I identify as an evolutionary posthumanist logic of cybernetics, where the human remains distinct from the system of fusions as a kind of steersman. Hayles writes of this tension of cyborgs: ‘the linguistic splice that created it (cyb/org) metonymically points toward the simultaneous collaboration and displacement of new/old, even as it instantiates this same dynamic’.22 This dynamic is one of continuity

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and discontinuity, of sameness and difference, where the binary parts dialectically encircle one another in an endless loop. Although the cyborg here, like the evolutionary posthuman of the previous chapter, presents a way of mediating and resolving these tensions, in its cybernetic and astronautic forms, it is absorbed into such dichotomisations. To elucidate, the cyborgian technologies are either taken as ‘specifically an amplifier of human beings’,23 indicating sameness; or, on ‘the insidious side of the cybernetic equation, [. . .] the human individual [risks being] merely a momentary whirlpool within larger systems of information flow; thus the steersman himself is subject to control’,24 which suggests a difference between humans and technologies. These attitudes strongly lend themselves to an uncritical embracing of or caution about technology as a general category. Common to both, then, is a substantive understanding of humans and technologies that either homogenises fusions under a human label, or rejects them in favour of an a-technological human nature. Neither of these positions enable us to fully address the hybrid beings that Latour discusses because our concern remains caught up with the welfare, discreteness and specialness of the human rather than its relationships with and responsibilities to others. The astronautic cyborgs that Clynes and Kline present suggest sameness even where enhancements are made to human abilities: nothing is lost, and humanness is thereby sustained.25 The issue here is that such a vision of humanness is predicated on the idealised human subject, which has been typically defined by excluding others on the basis of sexism, racism, classism, heteronormativity and, more broadly, anthropocentrism.26 The cyborg theoretically offers a way of circumventing these issues by rethinking the separation of human and machine. This would call into question the ontological priority of ‘the (ideal) human’ as I am advocating, but such questioning is muted in Clynes and Kline’s work in favour of an expansionist reading of technologies.27 On this point, the astronautic cyborg resonates with the transhuman and human, and this resonance can be extended to include how both figures are interpreted theologically. As Daniel Dinello writes:

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Originally imagined to adapt the body for space travel and fulfil divine aspirations of reaching the heavens, the cyborg also reflects the religious desire for godlike perfection, immortality, and – as a weapons system – omnipotence.28

The context of space is significant here, because it represents a transcending of the earth and a literal and conceptual elevation of the human spirit.29 For Haraway, who is deeply critical of this position, this means that ‘the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the “West’s” escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space’.30 The Gnostic vision of ‘strangers in a strange land’ is realised and fulfilled in this view, which Haraway parallels with Eden in terms of the escapism that they promote. Such escapism emerges from an ontological prioritisation of the human reflected in (first-wave) cybernetics and in astronautic cyborgs, where ‘space is not about “man’s” origins on earth but about “his” future, the two key allochronic times of salvation history’.31 These places (that Haraway deems ‘allotopic’)32 fuel our humanocentric attitudes to technology, while overlooking our obligations to others closer to home, on earth.33 This underwrites the need to reinvestigate our (hi)stories in order to articulate a more responsible ethic that does not make prior assumptions about humans, natures and technologies. To briefly reflect, the human seen primarily as central, but also as outwards-looking, knowledge-thirsty and ever-expansive, is firmly embedded in Clynes and Kline’s astronautic cyborg. The way that the cyborgian technologies are figured in the astronaut’s body without impinging on one’s humanness suggests that our humanness is locatable in our minds, or at least in our passion and drive to further ourselves. As such, the cyborg is here assimilated to the human;34 cyborgian prosthetics and technologies are no more or less a part of our essential and cognitive selves than our clothes are.35 Parts can be changed,36 replaced, even upgraded, and yet the human remains human by virtue of an idealised, largely pristine and discernibly human consciousness. This reveals a set of narratives that reflect and guide our attitudes to technologies and self-conceptions. On this point, the physical form of cyborgian technologies is not enough to consider by itself, but the guiding principles and designs behind the

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technologies, indicative of larger attitudes to humans and technology, are crucial. Clynes and Kline’s early conceptualisation of the cyborg evinces the evolutionary posthumanist and transhumanist tendency to leave certain tenets about the human largely intact. As with cybernetic systems, this allows for difference in spite of physical fusions, which might be surprising given that Clynes and Kline’s cyborgs directly apply to the human body. Conceptually, however, these fusions are downplayed in favour of an affirmation of the substantive human. ‘HEALTHY’ CYBORGS Moving from Clynes and Kline’s emphasis on space travel and exploration in their transhuman cyborgs, the question next shifts to one about cyborgs closer to home and rooted firmly in the quotidian. The significance of the space setting, for Clynes and Kline, manifested in how the cyborg systems were designed and integrated into the body so that ‘man’ could explore a world beyond himself, in the pursuit of some form of transcendence. How does this translate on earth, though? What is there for the cyborg systems to enhance, improve, or transcend? Finn Bowring muses on this: What is desired by the cyborg enthusiasts is, in effect, the elimination or revision of those features of human existence which, being censored, repressed, harmed and alienated by modern social conditions, lead to disempowerment, frustration and suffering. The elimination of our capacity to suffer is not, however, a satisfactory answer to suffering – or at least not a human one.37

The cyborgian, transhumanist desire to transcend the human (although not in as complete a way as some claim,38 particularly in terms of the organic/machinic distinction that largely remains) is here, according to Bowring, mapped onto the deficiencies that we find within ourselves under social conditions.39 Although the context is notably different to astronautic cyborgs, it seems that the undergirding attitudes remain somewhat similar in terms of an attempt to improve, or rework a part of what it is to be human via a rigorous application of technologies.

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The most common cyborgs that we experience on an everyday basis, though, are not technologically enhanced superheroes (or villains for that matter), as various comic series and SF works would have us believe,40 but rather they emerge from surgical theatres, hospital wards and even various clinics globally.41 These ‘cyborgs’ have any number of prostheses, ranging from contact lenses, to surgical scars, to pacemakers and transplanted organs.42 To what extent have these technologies changed the human?43 For Elaine Graham, ‘technology has moved from being an instrument or tool in the hands of human agents, or even a means to transform the natural environment, and has become a series of processes or interventions capable of reshaping human ontology’.44 This connotes Bowring’s concern cited above that the ends, the teloi, of such cyborg amendments and augmentations are not in themselves human and perhaps thereby embody an element of fear and technophobia. For Bowring: Because the elimination of the human’s capacity to suffer would mean the creation of a post-human being, the goal and beneficiary of this solution cannot be humanity itself. The need for the cyborg, in other words, is not a human need, a need whose satisfaction would reaffirm the essence of humanity. It is, rather a technological imperative, for the true purpose of the re-engineering of the human being is the abolition of the obstacles presented by people to the reproduction of machines.45

Bowring here perpetuates the organic/machinic distinction that was tacit in Clynes and Kline’s transhuman cyborgs. As part of this, qualities of humanness are exclusively projected on to the organic side of the distinction, rendering machines as enemies of humans, and as a threat to the whole human enterprise. It seems that cyborgs far less remote than in space are too close to home for many, and the promise of fantastic cyborgian technologies becomes overshadowed by concerns over the status and the sovereignty of the human. Putting this in cybernetic terms, we find ourselves asking: are humans still the steersmen of these technologies; are humans still in control?46 Against this fear, though, there are strong ethical reasons for the employment of cyborg technologies on medical grounds, and

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theology can be, indeed it has been, an important contributor to these discussions. Where technology is accepted under medical grounds, in particular by theology, it is largely with a strict emphasis on therapy. For Lutheran theologian Ted Peters: God has promised an eschatological transformation, the advent of the new creation. Our task this side of the new creation is to engage in the much more modest work of transformation in order to improve human health and flourishing.47

Peters advocates a future-oriented ethic, which he terms a ‘proleptic ethic’, that advocates a modest human participation, including technologies, in a larger eschatological schema. We are not trying to do God’s work or efface him with our technologies, then, which is traceable in visions such as Bacon’s to realise a New Jerusalem or utopia on earth.48 Rather, health and flourishing are the goals that Peters espouses. In this regard, ‘instead of thinking of cyborg brains as transhuman, we could think of them simply as fabulously human’.49 Health and humanness parallel one another in Peters’ work, suggesting a normative view of both, into which cyborgs seem to be absorbed. What is fraught in notions of medical cyborgs is the idea and ideal of ‘health’: it is a desirable state that we are in seemingly perpetual pursuit of. The trouble with the concept, particularly relevant to a discussion of cyborgs, though, is that technologies are constantly shifting the baseline of what we recognise as ‘healthiness’. Is health about having a fully functional body and mind in accordance with the model of how humans were originally made in God’s image, in an originary Garden? Or is health about finding ways to improve that original design by using, for example, neural implants to enhance cognitive functioning? These questions expose, in a theological framework, ambiguous attitudes to technologies in a medical sense where ‘health’ can be taken to mean either ‘therapy’, associated with a reparative objective; or ‘enhancement’, associated with an evolutionary and developmental (even transhumanist) objective. Briefly, ‘therapy’ is about returning to a state of healthiness; ‘enhancement’ is about going beyond that state to improve upon it. Common to both principles is an assumption about health as a normative state that is sought or that is improved upon:

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Peters’ proleptic ethic, for example, ‘begins with a vision, a vision of the perfected human being residing in a new creation’.50 Although the setting is new, the vision cannot help but draw on previous narratives and (hi)stories, and so even a forward-looking ethic such as a proleptic one must involve a degree of looking back to Edenic models of human creation, perfection and perfectibility. Here, the human as able-bodied is upheld, and cyborgian medical technologies can reinforce such norms by restoring ‘lacking’ conditions in the form of laser eye surgery, cochlear implants, prosthetic limbs and so on.51 The issue here is that, like all normativebased attitudes, certain users will be excluded; here on the basis of disability insofar as it is perceived as a lack in dominant ‘ableist’ attitudes, and something to be technologically corrected. Dan Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole note this: ‘many disabled people have been denied the opportunity to occupy the position of the modernist humanist subject: bounded, rational, capable, responsible and competent’.52 Alternatively, through a critical investigation of norms offered by the notion of the ‘dis/human’, which has much in common with the critical post/human, the stability, homogeneity and totalisation of such norms is undercut. Disability is thereby not figured as a lack against an able human self – in origin or telos – but is instead an opportunity to reflect on ways of rethinking normativity, in particular beyond ableist notions of health.53 Cyborgian prosthetics, such as those worn by Aimee Mullins in her creative collaborations with Alexander McQueen, as well as bioart from performers such as Stelarc and Orlan, can critique and subvert human norms by challenging the schism of replacement/ enhancement, and instead use technologies to gesture towards alternative aesthetics expressions of the body.54 To be sure, Goodley and Runswick-Cole are more pragmatic and recognise that some norms are valued and to be left in place,55 but they nonetheless recognise that ‘becoming dis/human does not offer a prescriptive opposite to the conception of the norm, rather it works away at a norm that is always, and only can be, in flux’.56 This flux, in my estimation, relates to tensions between health as therapy and as enhancement that underline concerns about iatric technologies. These technologies are open to both interpretations,

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and they thus complicate our understandings of what it is to be both ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’. For Andy Miah, however, who theorises much on transhumanism, the question of therapy and enhancement in medicine is a trivial matter: Medical technology is not able to support transhumanist ideals precisely because it normalises technology, bringing it under the humanist guise of therapy. In contrast, the requirement of the transhumanist is to make sense of these technologies as transcending humanism, as becoming something beyond humanness (not nonhuman, but posthuman).57

While I agree with Miah in part, noting the normalising tendency applied to medical cyborgs, I would dispute his identification of transhumanism as fully transcending humanism. I have demonstrated in the previous section that the transhuman draws out certain humanistic notions and attitudes, rather than transcending and surpassing the human entirely. Contrary to Miah’s comments, I contend that transhumanism essentially normalises technology in the same way that humanism does, albeit by using technology to go beyond foundational norms of health in pursuit of new norms and ideals (such as Clynes and Kline’s model of the astronautic cyborg to venture into space). From this, we can see how the cyborgs explored thus far assimilate into, and thereby affirm, our structured notions of health, therapy and enhancement. Common to these cyborg iterations is a reluctance to lose sight of the human steersman at the helm of technological developments and fusions. Eugene Thacker characterises this particularly well in discussing transhumanism. For Thacker, the transhuman: [. . .] necessitates an ontological separation between human and machine. It needs this segregation in order to guarantee the agency of human subjects in determining their own future and in using new technologies to attain that future.58

Pithily, Thacker underscores how the steersman is preserved, which is a trend reflected in all kinds of medical cyborgian fusions, contrary to Miah’s argument of a difference between the two. There is a conceptual difference maintained between the human and the machine, even in spite of physical fusions.

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With medical cyborgs, the fusions may be more commonplace and more intensive than those envisaged of early astronautic cyborgs, and they may be more permanent. They may extend even to that sacred and neurological seat of the self, but concerns about the human are commonly allayed by the sustenance of an ontological difference, out of which the human is preserved and is able to maintain at least a degree of ‘control’. Physically, then, the human body may undergo alterations, amendments and augmentations, yet conceptually, for Clynes and Kline’s designs and for medical cyborgs, the human remains intact. SF CYBORGS In a world replete with images and representations, whom can we not see or grasp, and what are the consequences of such selective blindness?59

There seems to be something of a reluctance to fully accept mixity in all of these discussions of the cyborg that have been considered thus far. In part, this can be accounted for by popular culture, where, to reiterate, (generally limited) portrayals of cyborgs alongside those in the ‘real world’ inevitably impact our broader understandings of that figure. The images that we commonly have through SF tend to sensationalise and ‘other’ the cyborg in a manner akin to the evolutionary posthuman discussed in the previous chapter. Typically, this leads to an ‘anxiety in popular culture that robotic and technological implants or enhancements not only turn us into something other than ourselves but also put us under the control of outside agents’.60 Of course, there are examples of less hostile depictions of cyborgs in SF,61 but they are nonetheless portrayed as distinct from the human in one way or another. To be sure, cyborgs are associated with fusions of organic and cybernetic parts, and this is reflected in SF, but through the narratives, a sense of separation is overall maintained. In Star Trek, for example, the ‘Borg’ amalgamate (and thereby fuse) genetic data from different species and incorporate it within their own species identity. On that point, however, they are portrayed as a sinister alien race that threatens to subsume humans on board the Enterprise, thus revealing their essential and antagonistic otherness. Similarly, in the

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Terminator films, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hyper-masculine character, although eventually coming to demonstrate more humanistic traits over the series, is consistently referred to as ‘other’ to the human, often leading to mildly comic scenes of misunderstandings and miscommunications. Even films that are adaptations of early modern fictions, or that draw more prominently on historical tropes and ideas, have a tendency to other the cyborgian as the menacingly not-quite-human.62 Some films raise deeper questions about human-machine identities and differences. In Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), for example, arguably a derivative of Shelley’s infamous Frankenstein story, the main character, David, becomes the lens through which we are brought to critically consider the exclusivist and destructive tendencies of humans. David, who is also a contemporary techno-Pinocchio, is the robot who dreams of becoming a real boy, but humans reject him and his kind, seeking to destroy them in carnival-esque ‘flesh fairs’. Ironically, humans concomitantly live out hyper-technologised lives in dystopian cybercities. Similarly, Ex Machina (2015) subverts the Turing test that is used to determine whether a robot manifests human-like intelligence. In the standard test, if a machine, unseen by a human conversing with it, can convince the conversant that it is human, then it has ‘passed’ the test. In the film, though, even when visual cues are reintroduced, the differences cannot be fully ascertained, leading the human protagonist to doubt his own humanness and the criteria that he uses to measure the humanness of others. In these ‘techno-mirrors’, we are encouraged to ask: who is more human(e)? Who is (more) cyborg?63 Although SF may seem to raise such important questions as these, there is also a sense in which those questions are distilled and allayed by the technologies that convey them. Expressing this notion, renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote 50 years ago that ‘the medium is the message’.64 Here, McLuhan emphasises, in what was at the time a novel theory, that attention needs to be given not only to the content of media transmissions, but also to the form of the media technologies themselves. We are arguably distanced from any of the cyborgs on the screen, even the most humanoid and

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humane ones, because ‘nothing impedes the subtle integration of human, natural, and artificial systems more than the present crudity of our technological interfaces – whether keyboard, screen, data suit, or visor’.65 The implication here is that technological devices that we associate with cyborgisation are ironically too clunky to lead us to accept that we are cyborgs. In other words, as with cyborgs in space or in hospital beds, we do not find a convincing account of fusion between organism and machine as the label ‘cyborg’ implies. In this sense, media technologies may depict certain fabulated images and mediate the imaginary to us, but they also maintain a strong sense of distance by sustaining the conceptual space between virtual and actual. Indeed, as esteemed SF writer and theorist Margaret Atwood notes, this distancing may even be a crucial ploy in maintaining the appeal of SF: ‘Perhaps, by imagining scientists and then letting them do their worst within the boundaries of our fictions, we hope to keep the real ones sane.’66 The element of distance surrounding us from SF functions here as a sort of safety valve, as a sort of magic mirror where we can act out our deepest nightmares so that we do not allow ourselves to let them become reality. (Can the same be said of our fantasies? How do we distinguish them, in some cases, from our nightmares?) It is this distinction, between virtual and actual that operates across the screen, that allows us the perspective of the allegedly detached. We are the spectators of these SF scenarios and, as spectators, we are chiefly observing, rather than being drawn into the drama. McLuhan’s views are now arguably dated, though, and may not correspond fully to the complexities of the technologies that we engage with. Maintaining McLuhan’s emphasis on the media technologies themselves, given the pervasiveness of these technologies in everyday life (such as smartphones, ‘intelligent software’, or the internet more generally),67 the screen may no longer be sufficient as a clear divider. Jean Baudrillard develops McLuhan’s theories here with a more contemporary, postmodern focus by emphasising the ‘ecstasy of communication’. According to this theory, our engagements with technologies are so immersive that ‘there is no more discrete subject as the distinctions between the real and the medium dissolve’.68 Through Baudrillard’s work that reinterprets many of

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McLuhan’s key principles, we realise that when we are watching cyborg images in SF, we are engaging both with the images or content, and also with the technology that presents them. This is cyborgian; yet, as with other iterations of the cyborg explored thus far, common parlance does not concede such fusions, and we remain decisively ‘human’. There is, however, a key difference between McLuhan and Baudrillard’s work on media technologies and the human that needs to be noted. For McLuhan, media technologies are prosthetic ‘extensions of [the hu]man’,69 which emphasises how the human is central to technological augmentation, in a similar way to how other cyborgs in this chapter have established a technological layer upon the foundational human subject. For Baudrillard, though, media technologies are ‘expulsions of man’70 in a process of transference of our identities to the machine. McLuhan’s cyborg-like beings, annexed through prostheses, are based on a principle of augmentation; Baudrillard’s on one of self-loss that may parallel SF narratives of humans succumbing to machines (consider here The Matrix, or RoboCop). What do we gain from either perspective, though? Is it better to see technologies as able to perfect the human, or is it better to fear them? What is the human at the centre of these questions? I contend that the last question is the most overlooked, and yet is also the most important one in our relationships and engagements with technologies. Pushing beyond a celebrating or fearing of technologies allows us to reflect on questions about our selfunderstandings, our place in the world, as well as our ethical models that enmesh other species and beings. SF is equipped to deal with such questions, but only if audiences ensure that they are open to the reflection and interrogation of themselves that these stories demand. As media theorist Scott Bukatman notes, ‘SF frequently posits a reconception of the human and the ability to interface with the new terminal experience.’71 The ‘terminal identity’ experienced here is ‘an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen’.72 It suggests a more complex interaction of human and technological than either McLuhan or Baudrillard develop. The human, we find, is deconstructed rather than

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affirmed and/or transcended,73 and this marks a new, interrogative way – beyond that of humanocentric cybernetics – in which we can be considered cyborgs. Bukatman figures cyborgs in this way by placing emphasis on both media technologies and the narratives that they convey, whereas McLuhan and Baudrillard give arguably greater weight to the technologies, and other SF commentators have focused more exclusively on the content. For Bukatman, there is a crucial narrative dimension not only to the content of SF but also to the media technologies.74 To illustrate this, Bukatman notes how ‘the illusion of subject empowerment depends upon the invisibility of the apparatus’.75 By highlighting this, Bukatman is able to deconstruct and critically investigate the complex relations at play between humans and technology, and between content and form. SF presents a powerful way through which to develop this deconstructive methodology because it recognises and reflects parts of our own culture while engaging in practices of fabulation by using alternative worlds and technologies to scrutinise our own. To be sure, Bukatman does not downplay the power struggles of subjects (i.e., tensions between self and ‘other’) as part of this bricolage of narratives, but he seeks to displace and refigure those subjects and their struggles by decentralising them.76 This is the groundwork for an alternative figuration of the cyborg that is particularly significant for the work of Donna Haraway and for theology, which I begin to elaborate in the next chapter. We then have, from Bukatman’s work on SF, a new conceptualisation of the cyborg, and with it, potentially a new way of conceptualising – or at least interrogating – the human. Cyborgs from their inception, as Figure 4.1 depicts, have explored fusions of technological and non-technological phenomena (1), yet such fusions are never totalised or complete insofar as the discrete human remains (2). This means that overlaps across categories are shifting and contestable zones that generate anxieties. Evidencing these, Major Motoko Kusanagi of Mamoru Oshii’s anime sci-fi Ghost in the Shell (1995) declares, ‘I guess cyborgs like myself have a tendency to be paranoid about our origins.’ Cyborgs have multiple origins weaved in complex (hi)stories, including cybernetics

Technology-asnatural Humans-asother

TECHNOLOGY

Humans-astechnological Nature-as-other

3

CYBORGS

Crical distance to reflect on substanve categories

2

Technology (as substanve category)

3

1

Fusions between humans and technology

Discrete human

FIGURE 4.1 Venn diagram to show human – technology dynamics in different expressions and understandings of cyborg figures

NATURE

No alterity Everything natural

Humans-as-natural Technology-as-other

HUMANS

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and sci-fi. Notions of the human are embedded here, and these resonate with ideas discernible in Edenic anthropologies. While reflection on these (hi)stories is useful, when we seek to ‘fix’ or remedy our ontological anxieties by reabsorbing the contestable zones into pure categories that are easier to understand, manipulate and control, we continue to espouse a humanocentric ordering of the world. SF narratives can challenge this by allowing us to establish a critical reflective positioning alongside our technologies at the same time that we closely engage with them as audiences (and participants) in those narratives (3). This demands a new way of considering closeness and distance that takes us beyond the more simplistic models of early cyborgs that are predicated on a central, foundational human subject. I take this complex connectivity with technologies expressed in SF as the starting point for a way to usefully begin to rethink how we see ourselves in relation to technologies in ways that do not prefigure the (ideal) human through practices of exclusion.

CHAPTER 5

Figurative Cyborgs: Confusions

NON-TELEOLOGICAL CYBORGS Common to many early conceptions of cyborgs in astronautic, medical and SF terms is a preconception of the human. Especially with Clynes and Kline’s cyborgs in space, the human was taken as the springboard for technological augmentations that allow specifically human exploration. Increasingly over time, though, and this is discernible in both medical and SF renditions of cyborgs to various degrees, cyborgs have scrutinised our understandings of humans and nature as discrete. Medical cyborgs, for example, invite questions about ‘natural’ death via the technological creation and sustenance of new, comatose states;1 or they invite other questions about ‘natural’ birth with new technologies such as IVF (in vitro fertilisation) allowing for the possibility of ‘test tube’ or ‘designer’ babies, or even three-parent families.2 Similarly, SF cyborgs can in some cases ask us how our relations with technology might have already changed us. Can we still speak of ‘human nature’, in terms of either origin or telos, in this technologised and cyborgian context? In other words, have we or will we always be human as a result of our engagements and entanglements with technologies? Anne Kull makes a strong case criticising discussions of naturalness. She argues that, instead of the cyborg reaffirming naturalness in terms of being incorporated into human nature, the figure should be interpreted as challenging those ideas from the offset:

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The cyborg is an attempt to understand nature in a way that challenges the features of the culturally authorised concepts of nature; it is an attempt to free ourselves from conventional ideas of nature. The problem with conventional ideas is that they tend to become oppressive and normative – especially when a situation is perceived to be one of crisis. Then the nature of nature is denied change.3

In this understanding, close to Haraway’s views on nature, the cyborg becomes a way to actively challenge what it is to be ‘natural’ in the first place. This is useful – and yet difficult – because notions of the ‘natural’ guide so many of our attitudes and practices. At present, our technological engagements are informed by notions of human nature as capable of changing the world for the better, or in need of augmentation, or in need of protection and conservation against technological amendments. But, as I argue, with Haraway’s notion of the cyborg as a non-teleological figure, these are not necessarily accurate images of humans or technologies because they generally fail to address the complexities and richness of our technoculture (such as fusions explored in the previous chapter), placing instead greater emphasis on abstract ideals of the human and nature. Haraway’s cyborg rejects notions of an independent or preexistent nature that is defined against the technologised human who distances his/herself from the state of non-technological ‘naturalness’. Instead, ‘the certainty of what counts as nature – a source of insight and promise of innocence – is undermined, probably fatally’.4 Relating to this, via a breakdown of the dichotomy between nature and culture, or nature and technology, is a closely related challenge that the cyborg figure makes of ‘human nature’.5 We cannot, in short, idealise or envision any normative or ‘innocent’ aspects of humanness. The non-teleological cyborg is without origin or salvific ends that reflect that origin, as both conceptual points are rooted in appeals to nature in substantive and discrete ways that suggest innocence. The underlying principle with the cyborg instead is an ethics of inclusion, which questions how normative notions of humanness have been used to exclude different groups, both ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’.6 Cyborg figures draw on the dynamism brought about by technologies to challenge assumptions we have of ourselves, and encourage openness to the implications of living in an

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equally dynamic world. Because of the significance of this challenge, it can be argued that Haraway’s cyborg figure is not merely auxiliary to the human as the cyborg previously has been for other theorists. It is, rather, a powerful hermeneutic figure and a trope through which we critically interrogate our relationship to the world and to other technologies.7 The division between humans and cyborgs characteristic of early cybernetic and cyborgian designs, by this stage, becomes increasingly difficult to uphold. Non-teleological cyborg figures undercut discrete notions of human nature, but this presents a particular theoretical quandary given that cyborgs are conceived of by humans, and they emerge from a human world.8 One of the main arguments that Haraway wants to emphasise with her vision of the cyborg is that there is a way out of the so-called ‘border war’ primarily between organism and machine. This border war, I have demonstrated, has been a strong undercurrent in early notions of the cyborg. For Haraway, it represents a number of other disparities and binarised oppositions that she sees as problematic: In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics – the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of self from the reflections of the other – the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.9

Haraway’s cyborg, in short, is locatable as the critique of these interlinking philosophies. What is interesting, though, is that these attitudes are all embedded in earlier narratives and forms of the cyborg, and yet Haraway radically reinterprets that figure to challenge such attitudes. Arguably, what Haraway is doing, to return to the notion and quandary of ‘beginnings’, is not starting with the human as previous work on the cyborg has done. The human, to be sure, is being taken into account by virtue of the (hi)stories embedded in earlier cyborgs, but Haraway is not taking the cyborg as an expansion of the human. As such, she is not perpetuating assumptions about the human as central or as a free and rational agent in the substantive image of God, which is contrarily the position espoused by other posthumanist

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figures. Haraway seeks to tell different stories in different ways. Elaborating on this, she writes: It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.10

The cyborg invites and narrates reflection on the non-discreteness of beings, including the human. Technologies are not ancillary to the human, as was the case with earlier cyborgs and removable (or at least identifiable) prostheses, but are inseparable from how we understand ourselves. In order to tell different stories differently, so that they do not succumb to the substantive model of the discrete human upon which technologies have typically been embraced or rejected, Haraway uses her cyborg figure to call for a new articulation, rather than representation, of the mixity of beings. This is a significant (albeit perhaps subtle) distinction. In Haraway’s own words, ‘I have framed the issue in terms of articulation rather than representation. Human beings use names to point to themselves and other actors and easily mistake the names for the things.’11 The underlying attitude here is that representation has a tendency towards nominalism, which has traditionally and theologically manifested in Adamic and humanocentric terms, where the author of the name exerts a power over the named being. In Genesis, this was expressed as a form of domin(at)ion over animals (2:19). Articulation does not let the human tell the story of the cyborg through representation as an act of ventriloquising.12 As we have seen with the (hi)stories of the cyborg in the previous chapter, this has typically resulted in the cyborg being eschewed as an outworking of the human. Articulation instead provides a way of rethinking and reflecting on the (hi)stories we inherit, by responding more fully and openly to the figure of the cyborg. The cyborg, then, ‘wasn’t born in a garden, but it definitely has a history’.13 For Haraway, this means that articulation is necessarily ‘non-innocent’; it ‘is work, and it may fail. All the people who care, cognitively emotionally, and politically, must articulate their position in a field [. . .] made up of indigenous

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people and other human and unhuman actors’.14 Articulation shifts our focus to the broader field and involves acknowledgement of the multiple and complex narratives, and realising how they work together in telling new stories rather than retelling old stories in different ways. This is fundamentally a critical as well as a constructive undertaking. The cyborg, then, as Haraway articulates it, can be read on one level as a mode of critique of humanocentric thought. For posthumanist theologian Stephen Garner, ‘the [cyborg] metaphor stands against perspectives that divide the world into overly simplistic dualisms and hierarchies that are used by those in power to maintain control’.15 But this is only one dimension of Haraway’s cyborg, and to take this alone would be misleading and incomplete because something that is merely a critical device is abstract and freefloating. In the light of the genealogy of the cyborg, this solely metaphorical use would perhaps ironically risk a conceptual return to the original free-floating and deeply humanocentric cyborg deployed by Clynes and Kline, which is something that Haraway is critical of. This cyborg would revert to being a conceptual ‘man in space’,16 where the figure is detached from the world. To counter this, the cyborg needs to be taken as metaphor, but also enacted and embodied. Here, the cyborg must thread itself into, and reflect upon, the multiple narratives that prefigure and frame it. Taking heed of this involves recognition of our fusions rather than discreteness: ‘the cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular, historical, cultural practices. Cyborgs are not about The Machine and The Human, as if such things and subjects universally existed’.17 Haraway uses an emphasis on the complex (hi)stories of cyborgs to highlight the fusions of different practices, which call into question the universal categories of ‘The Machine’ and ‘The Human’. Previous cyborg figures have inadequately relied on these broad notions in maintaining the discrete human at the centre of mechanical and technological augmentations. Thus, we need to recognise that the cyborg, for Haraway, is more nuanced than merely being a metaphor. Instead, ‘the cyborg is not only an image or figure, an entity in fact or imagination, but it is also a positioning, a way of thinking and seeing’.18

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Haraway’s positioning of the cyborg places us firmly in the midst of connections and entanglements.19 Humanocentric representations do not reveal the realities of this situation because connections are filtered through categories that we seek to impose yet that are strained. Articulation allows recognition of the complex interweavings that undermine distinctions to such an extent that all differences, and not just cybernetic fusions, are called into question. In this sense, ‘cyborgs were never just about the interdigitations of humans and information machines; cyborgs were from the get-go the materialisation of imploded (not hybridised) human beings-information machinesmultispecies organisms’.20 Cyborgs in this sense go beyond fusions because fusions presuppose a difference between phenomena that ends up reaffirming a substantive understanding. Instead, I propose that non-teleological cyborgs that lack origin and telos can be figured as such because of the confusions that they articulate. This illustrates the sense of implosion that Haraway refers to,21 which suggests a combustive, unstable zone of concentrated activity where ‘different’ things are closely interlinked (hence fused), thereby undermining claims to their absolute difference (or sameness) (hence confused). I use the construction ‘(con)fusions’ to draw attention to both parts of cyborg figures. Beings, entities, identities, things, stories, myths and notions – including humans, natures and technologies – are all part of this imploded zone, and it is this that the cyborg articulates and is positioned in. Although Haraway’s work advocates a move towards articulation and away from representations that retell the same stories in uncritical and unconstructive fashion, though, the aim with articulation is not to deny or abandon the (hi)stories that we inherit. Whilst Haraway’s cyborg critiques the validity of certain assumptions within narratives, it cannot pretend that those narratives never existed. Graham is attentive to this point: Haraway cannot claim a monopoly on cyborgs, or assume that they are innocent of contrary readings. They can only be used as a heuristic device to think beyond the polarities of technophilia and technophobia in the service of genealogical critique and fabulation.22

Haraway herself is aware of this, as she develops the cyborg figure in the light of the ways that it had previously been figured, in order to

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make a feminist subversion of the masculine figure that dreamed of technological production and challenged ‘natural’ female reproduction.23 While Haraway cannot ignore these posthuman myths of origins and creation, she critiques and rearticulates them, as part of an emphasis on implosions and confusions. The cyborg’s origins, as we saw from Clynes and Kline’s account, concerned the human (and specifically masculine) drive to expand one’s own horizons and to venture into space. Although Haraway may not have been specifically aware of Clynes and Kline’s work at the time of writing her Manifesto,24 she is certainly aware of how these origin stories have influenced the cyborg’s genealogy. For Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, Haraway ‘never forgets this dubious original conception of the cyborg as the ultimate Man, even while she argues that the cyborg, as the “illegitimate offspring” of the Enlightenment, may very well be unfaithful to its origins.’25 The cyborg seems to both inherit and challenge its sense of past and origins. The tension between the cyborg and the human figures that has been discussed at length in the previous chapter, in short, manifests in Haraway’s work as a tension between different (hi)stories and narratives: on the one hand, those that belong to the human, or a humanocentric frame of thought, and that represent the cyborg; and on the other hand, those that attempt to circumvent such conservative patterns of thinking, and that are more keen to articulate a new and more radical understanding of the cyborg. What we can perhaps deduce from Haraway’s paradoxical and figurative articulation of the cyborg is that she is specifically not trying to oppose it to the human. Rather, Haraway is trying to problematise the separation of (hi)stories narrating ‘The Human’ and ‘The Machine’. This separation, as the last chapter demonstrated, has typified the cyborg’s own genealogy. To oppose the cyborg to the human is to perpetuate the humanocentric patterns of thought that ‘othered’ the cyborg in the first place, even marking it as a threat to be controlled.26 Nonteleological cyborgs are not interested in same/other binaries that are part of a human and evolutionary posthuman logic, but rather they dwell in implosions and confusions, and refuse to separate or categorically divide phenomena. As such, the human is a question to

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be perpetually raised, and it is this need for ongoing reflection and critique that sustains the cyborg as a chaotic, complex, but ultimately innovative figure. WE, CYBORGS Cyborgs, though, remain open to many interpretations. Not all theorists necessarily agree with or follow Haraway’s articulation of the cyborg. Another notable technologist working in this field is Kevin Warwick, who gained media attention after he implanted a technological device into his arm that allowed him to control various external devices, to automatically open doors in his office when approaching them and some other experiments.27 Interestingly, some have regarded Warwick’s experiments as the first examples of ‘oneness between living, breathing human beings and the machines we have built’,28 meaning that Warwick himself has been accredited as ‘the world’s first cyborg’.29 On closer inspection, however, particularly in the light of the multifaceted motley crew of cyborg figures, it is possible to question the assumptions behind the heralding of Warwick as ‘Captain Cyborg’.30 To begin with, Warwick works with a certain definition of the cyborg, where he sees that figure as ‘something that is partanimal, part-machine, and whose capabilities are extended beyond normal limits. This is much more general than other definitions and includes creatures other than humans’.31 At first glance, Warwick’s definition seems broad and inclusive, going beyond the human to consider animals as well as machines, which is also something that Haraway takes seriously in her work on cyborgs.32 Yet equally, Warwick makes significant use of the notion of normalness, and this limits his understanding of the cyborg within the parameters of what he understands as ‘normal’. This may seem counterintuitive; Warwick claims that his cyborgs are about going beyond normal limits, but his definition assumes a pre-established notion of what is normal as the baseline for enhancements. In short, Warwick starts, in a similar way as do transhuman theories of the cyborg (such as Clynes and Kline’s), with the organism as the ‘norm’ that technologies are built upon.

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Transhumanism and cyborgs are very often conflated in literature on the subject. In these cases, cyborgs are vaguely taken as the figures that have somehow advanced beyond the ‘normal’ human and lead towards a posthuman future.33 In other words, cyborgs are a kind of stepping stone from human to transhuman to posthuman, where etymologically the ‘human’ figure is emphasised. Whether prominence is given to sameness or difference in these broadly posthumanist figurations, the point is that the humanist logic that dichotomises and vacillates between the two remains prevalent. To elaborate on some of these connections between Warwick’s work and transhuman cyborgs, one needs only to heed Warwick’s warning at the start of his autobiographical recount of his cyborgian experiences. He writes that, ‘just as we humans split from our chimpanzee cousins years ago, so cyborgs will split from humans. Those who remain as mere humans are likely to become a subspecies’.34 There is an evolutionary trajectory mapped out here, where cyborgs are seen as taxonomically different from humans, as a sort of posthuman species akin to how humans differ from apes. Articulation of confusions, however, requires that evolutionary distinctions must also be called into question, as otherwise prior differences are reified and are taken as a starting point. To be sure, this is not to call evolutionary theory entirely into question, but it is to problematise and nuance the linearity of it, particularly as it lends itself to a posthumanist framework that allows the projection of future and ever perfected humans that hearken back to (hi)storical points of origin. Thus, in Haraway’s work on primates, she writes: Primates existing at the boundaries of so many hopes and interests are wonderful subjects with whom to explore the permeability of walls, the reconstitution of boundaries, the distaste for endless socially enforced dualisms.35

This description connotes the ways that cyborgs interrogate boundaries and invite a scrutiny of the human figure. Linking primates and cyborgs in this way suggests confusions that challenge a straightforward evolutionary linearity; the (hi)stories of the interrelations of species and technologies are told differently.

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A useful way of conceiving of this form of implosion and confusion is offered by Peter Scott, for whom ‘we are mixed entities, participating in a wider environment of attachments (including nonhuman animals) by way of our machines’.36 While this may still gesture towards the substantive human that is annexed by peripheral non-humans in a humanocentric way, it is useful in illuminating the simultaneous and shifting fusions and confusions of humans, animals and technologies. These are not static, which is another trait embedded into Warwick’s interpretation of the cyborg. Against Clynes and Kline, for whom cyborgian apparatus such as astronautic spacesuits are removable and transient (albeit in a way that affirms the discreteness and endurance of the human), for Warwick it is the permanence of fusions that will constitute evolutionary technological development. Speaking of his own experience as a temporary cyborg, for example, Warwick notes how ‘certainly, from the very start, I regarded the array and wires as being a part of me. Having it extracted, I knew, would be like losing a part of my body, almost an amputation’.37 Warwick extends his perception of himself so that it includes technologies, and they become a literal and conceptual part of his body and identity.38 On the one hand, this more inclusive and embracing approach to technology is yet another understanding of the cyborg that seems to take seriously Haraway’s refutation of human and machine divisions. The cyborg body incorporates technological components such that they are as embedded and constitutive of the self as any organic parts. On the other hand, though, Warwick’s evolutionary-based analysis necessitates a taxonomical division between humans and cyborgs that is difficult to reconcile with a Harawayan recognition of fusion and confusion. By the end of his book, for example, Warwick envisions: Those who predicted that humans would stay in control [will] have certainly been proved wrong. The earth [will be] dominated by cyborgs – upgraded human/machine combines that have managed to harness the new-found super intelligence of machines and use it for their own ends.39

The power here has been shifted away from humans to an ‘othered’ form of the cyborg that we typically associate with SF. Again, humans and cyborgs are distinct and not confused, in spite of how

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technologies already abound us and impel us to rethink what the boundaries of the human are in the first place. But even this would be a misleading conclusion to make of Warwick’s work. Warwick actively seeks to apply technology to therapeutic projects such as tackling Parkinson’s disease,40 where therapy is about achieving a ‘normal’ state of ‘health’. The problem here is that cyborgs, as discussed in the previous chapter, are vague enough to refer to both therapeutic applications of technology and enhancements. In both cases, as with medical cyborgs, the human ‘norm’ is affirmed and challenged. Warwick mutes this challenging: ‘the cyborg provided our main hope of staying in control’.41 By looking forwards rather than inwards, though, Warwick does not address the challenges that the cyborg raises of the human. Without seeking to dispel these challenges, it is necessary to be attentive to them by asking, for example, more critical questions about what it means to be in control. Given this emphasis on and striving for control, Warwick advocates the cyborg as more optimal for us than remaining, by proxy, ‘naturally’ human in terms of being non-augmented by technologies. In emphasising the choice that we can become cyborgs, Warwick shifts focus away from our origin and nature as humans. He declares, ‘I was born human. This was merely due to the hand of fate acting at a particular place and time.’42 While downplaying this part of our origin though, Warwick nonetheless grounds the choice to become cyborg in our natures. He continues, ‘But while fate made me human, it also gave me the power to do something about it.’43 In this context, staying human is a choice that Warwick sees as contrary to our developmental nature that is also discernible in Clynes and Kline’s earlier astronautic cyborgs. Becoming cyborg is thus more in-keeping with our expansive human nature, and could itself be considered as ‘natural’.44 Here, Warwick’s discussion of the cyborg reminds us that cyborg projects that start with the human (i.e., transhuman cyborgs) do not stray too far in one way or another from that figure. Although Warwick accepts a deeper sense of fusion than other cyborg writers, he still maintains a sense of human nature as a foundation for his technological augmentations. This contrasts Haraway’s articulation

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of the cyborg, which ‘develops directly out of the postmodern sensibilities of a critique of essentialism in second-wave feminist discourse’.45 Transhumanism, however, ‘relies directly on rationalist and Enlightenment articulations of human personhood’,46 and so it expands certain principles rather than interrogating them. This is a key part of my argument pertaining to the cyborg: wherever the human is assumed or normative as a foundational concept, we need to focus more attention, that is, theologically and culturally, on ways to reflect, critique, and rearticulate that figure. The cyborg and the confusions that it highlights are a useful way of doing that. NATURAL-BORN CYBORGS On the one hand, then, we have the evolutionary posthumanist set of cyborgs that start with the human and typically carry some normative part of the human, either as an explorative drive or as a baseline for enhancement, along its course of modifications. Here, the human figure is able to incorporate the cyborg technologies and prostheses within itself as transhuman, or such technologies are defined against the human as posthuman, as part of a binary logic of sameness and difference. On the other hand, cyborg technologies can prompt us to question the plasticity and boundaries of the human, as Haraway’s account and some readings of SF show. They allow us to deconstruct that human figure in scrutinising where, if at all, we can locate our understanding of what it is to be human (in terms of human nature, for example). Both of these tendencies – of dialectic (accommodation or othering) and critique – are arguably continued in a further iteration of the cyborg figure, which is Andy Clark’s conceptualisation of the ‘natural-born’ cyborg. Outlining his position, Clark writes: We shall not be cyborgs in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being humantechnology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry.47

Clark attempts to develop a seemingly radical new conceptualisation of the human that emphasises our connectivity with tools.

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Its strikingness emerges out of its emphasis on fusion, and rather than continuing to mark technologies as ‘other’, Clark depicts them as a fundamental part of being human. Although this seems to be similar to Warwick’s work, and indeed there are notable resonances such as a deep sense of fusion, Clark goes beyond this and begins to deconstruct the notion of the human. Whereas, for Warwick, cyborgs are our future, for Clark, arguably as for Haraway, cyborgs are also part of our present and our past. In this way, Clark connotes Erik Davis, for whom, ‘human beings have been cyborgs from year zero. It is our lot to live in societies that invent tools that shape society and the individuals in it’.48 If this is the case, though – if humans have indeed always been cyborgs, as Clark (and Davis) would have us believe – then in what sense can we affirm the radicalness of their critique? What has changed about humans, or about our understanding of them, if anything? Clark posits, ‘we have been designed, by Mother Nature, to exploit deep neural plasticity in order to become one with our best and most reliable tools. Minds like ours were made for mergers’.49 What is interesting about Clark’s vision of the cyborg is not only that it means that we are, and always have been cyborgs, but that it naturalises notions of technology so that technologies are not read in antithetical ways to the human, as previous iterations of cyborgs (such as cyborgs in space and medical cyborgs) have supposed. What this would suggest is an understanding of the cyborg that is more attentive to the fusion between cybernetics and organism rather than maintaining a degree of conceptual separation, particularly of the human, as with previous understandings of that figure. The separation of organic and mechanic parts leaves us with a lingering sense of the human, but this would be undercut by a vision of the cyborg, as Clark suggests, that is more embracing of deep-seated fusions that are already a part of who we are rather than being stalled to a point in our cyborgian, posthuman future. That said, we cannot celebrate the conceptual overcoming of the human with regards to Clark’s interpretation of the cyborg too hastily because the naturalisation of prosthetics and technologies may be misguided. To elucidate, on the one hand, Clark offers an account that claims to blend cybernetics with the organism, noting that ‘it is

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just tools all the way down’50 in a manner that refutes the notion of ‘the mind and the self as a wafer-thin inner essence’.51 This interpretation of humans and technology necessitates an emphasis on fusions that coincides well with Haraway’s own conviction that ‘humans are congeries of things that are not us. We are not selfidentical.’52 On the other hand, Clark arguably restricts himself by naturalising technology, such that it is constrained to a specifically human nature.53 Effectively, this undermines much of the critical investigative work that Haraway does with her account of cyborgs. Crucially, Haraway takes heed of not only technological crossovers, but also crossovers with other organisms, which is why, for Haraway, ‘there could be no more iconic cyborg than a telemetrically implanted chimpanzee’.54 Because Clark restricts his understanding of cyborgs specifically to humans, such a ‘nonhuman cyborg’ would be harder to identify in his work.55 Haraway’s cyborg, unlike Clark’s, is a figure, and figures ‘must involve at least some kind of displacement that can trouble identifications and certainties’.56 Clark’s cyborg, by contrast, continues to offer certainties by telling the same stories that we are accustomed to about human nature but with a different label. Nothing particularly changes in Clark’s account. Clark naturalises technological and transhumanist visionary drives, such as to venture into space or to prosthetically extend ourselves, by rendering them as central to human nature. Clark, in my reading, re-presents the figure of the human under the diffracted form and guise of the cyborg, rather than offering us any critical exploration of our relationship with technologies. Contrariwise, Haraway’s methodology of articulation draws upon tropes, metaphors and figures such as primates, OncoMousee or computer-using-cyborgs to offer us critical perspectives on our own relationship with technology that undermine the stability of our narratives.57 It is articulation, rather than representation, that enables critical and reflexive reflection on the (hi)stories that shape us, as well as being (co-)shaped by us. Clark’s natural-born cyborgs are perhaps, then, only a slight variation of their transhuman and medical forerunners, and his book can be subsequently read as an attempt – albeit a convincing one – to allay technophobia and cyborg fears. In naturalising technologies,

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though, Clark establishes a technophilia that remains part of the binary thought that links to substantive anthropologies, including those in Christian theological traditions. The fact that Clark is able to make assertions such as that ‘it is our basic human nature to annex, exploit, and incorporate nonbiological stuff deep into our mental profiles’,58 demonstrates that his work maintains a strong allegiance to the human subject. The human is preserved as central in a technologised world, and though humans are deeply connected to those technologies, in Clark’s depiction, they remain in the driving seat. This identification, as with earlier cybernetics theory, ultimately betrays the deep sense of fusion that Clark insists upon. If humans are regarded as central and controlling, then they have been distinguished above and against their surroundings, in particular against nonhuman animals and nature. There is less scope for critical reflection in Clark’s account compared to Haraway’s because Clark works with the same anthropocentric framework that uses technologies to legitimise human discreteness and dominance rather than challenge it.

POST-CYBORGS? We have thus far considered the tensions that have riddled the fraught and tenuous relationship between humans and cyborgs throughout the cyborg’s genealogy. Where the two are able to be distinguished, as I have argued that they have predominantly been thus far, troubling questions are opened up that are ultimately sealed by a persistency of the human subject and figure. Clynes and Kline’s original cyborg left ‘man’ largely intact by distinguishing that subject from his technological augmentations. Medical cyborgs then brought the human under further scrutiny, particularly in terms of what is normalised and ‘healthy’, and what falls under the titles of ‘therapy’ and ‘enhancement’. SF cyborgs sometimes reaffirm these human values by offering narratives that sustain the human-cyborg distinction, whilst also opening the possibility for deeper critical reflection, as Bukatman demonstrated. In each of these cases, technophobia is allayed by subjugating the technological components and prostheses to human control.

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Augmentaon Annihilaon

HUMANS

TECHNOLOGY

1 Fusions between humans and technology (Yet prior separaon of categories)

2 HUMANS TECHNOLOGIES Confusions of different parts that are imploded and reconfigured, challenging sameness/difference

FIGURE 5.1 Diagram to show the cyborgian interrelationship between humans and technologies as fusions and confusions Of course, there are fears about prostheses-gone-awry,59 but these fears nonetheless espouse the human – technology control dynamic by inverting it. Put differently, they reveal that physical cyborgs are not conceptually fused systems, which is depicted by Figure 5.1. There is integration of organism and mechanism, yes, but there is also a power imbalance where tools remain subservient to the essentially human self (1). This exposes a fine line between augmentation and annihilation that I earlier touched on with reference to McLuhan and Baudrillard. Cusack aptly describes this: While we view the cyborg as a violation of humanity’s special status, we will hate and fear it, and perhaps be more vulnerable to being taken over by it. However, closer contact with the cyborg reveals that, although modified, it is still human, ‘one of us.’60

Again, attitudes to the cyborg are dependent on how the human is initially regarded, and as with prostheses, even when humans and technologies appear fused, the technologies are actually incorporated into a specifically human system. Although technically anybody with an artificial limb, pacemaker or even contact lenses is a cyborg,

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common parlance does not regard them as such, and this demonstrates the absorbing (as well as othering) power of the ‘human’ label. With these important definition issues in mind, it is perhaps not difficult to see why Haraway, who began with the question of boundaries between humans and animals as well as humans and machines, has moved away from the question of the cyborg in her later works. Joseph Schneider notes that, for Haraway, the cyborg has become a ‘somewhat less useful resource for provocative criticism in the multiple and ever-shifting worlds of global technosciences and cultures’.61 In Haraway’s own words, ‘cyborg’s enhanced litter is outsized’,62 which refers to the wider network of dislocated and boundary-troubling beings that cyborgs are to be counted among. Haraway’s turn away from the cyborg is a move attributed to the narrow inclusivity of the figure: ‘by the end of the millennium, [. . .] cyborgs could no longer do the work of a proper herding dog to gather up the threads needed for serious critical inquiry’.63 The implication is that the cyborg foregrounds certain relationships over others. In focusing on overcoming what Bruce Mazlish terms the ‘fourth discontinuity’, namely that between humans and machines,64 Haraway’s cyborg may arguably detract attention away from other fundamental and problematic discontinuities, such as between humans and animals, which takes the forefront of Haraway’s post-cyborgian work. In brief, the cyborg is refigured, in Haraway’s more recent work, as one member of a ‘bigger, queer family of companion species’,65 which concerns itself more with the wider network of figures and entities that we relate to. This is an important step in recognising the larger context in which cyborgs are located without having to regard everything as cyborgian,66 which was a risk of homogenisation and naturalisation located in Clark’s work in particular. ‘Companion species’ to this end continues in the cyborg’s trend of working across borders with information flows, ‘where boundaries are less about skin than about statistically defined densities of signal and noise’.67 These flows that facilitate fusions and confusions gained prevalence in early cybernetics, albeit in an unrealised way given the emphasis that remained on categorical distinctions. It is with Haraway’s

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non-teleological and figurative iteration of the cyborg that such confusions are brought to the fore, which Kim Toffoletti aptly discusses: The posthuman, like the cyborg, exhibits a confusion of fact and fiction, science and technology, the virtual and the actual [. . .] In a posthuman landscape, technology is neither friend nor foe, but emerges as a possibility or potentiality to refigure bodies and identities outside of self/Other relations.68

In agreement with Toffoletti’s reading, I use the cyborg to call attention to fusions and primarily confusions (Figure 5.1 [2]), over distinctions and binaries such as those that can be read out of an Eden-and-Fall narrative, tending towards technophilia and technophobia. The tendency towards dichotomised attitudes to technology emerges, as I have argued, from an uncritical and substantive approach that makes assumptions about categorical distinctions based on the prioritisation and givenness of ideas such as nature. While Haraway is sharply critical of such assumptions about ‘nature’ and its antitheses and corollaries across her work, ‘companion species’ in my estimation does risk lapsing back into notions of nature through an emphasis on organisms and living beings.69 This is indicated by Haraway’s appeal to companion species, which ‘helps [her] refuse human exceptionalism without invoking posthumanism’.70 Haraway’s uncomfortableness with posthumanism as a term seems to derive from her wariness of its attachments to the human and to humanism,71 whereas in her work she seeks to deconstruct rather than continue to extend the human. On this point, Haraway quips, ‘We are humus, not Homo, not Anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman.’72 In one of Haraway’s strongest critiques of anthropocentrism, living beings are here seen as ‘compost’, or in other words as composite and partial entities. Fusions and confusions can helpfully be maintained here, but the technological dimension to these mixings is comparatively – and problematically – underemphasised against how it is presented with the cyborg. In theological terms, what companion species immediately seem to gesture towards is an espousal of creatureliness that is increasingly seen among a growing number of ecotheologians as

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non-anthropocentric. Gordon Kaufman, who can be considered among these, writes: We humans are indissolubly a part of the created order, and not in any way to be confused with the serendipitous creativity which has produced not only us but the entire cosmos, in all its complexity, order, and beauty. So in the picture I am sketching here the too-easy anthropocentrism of traditional Christian thinking is thoroughly undercut. But it is undercut in a nonreductive way.73

Both Haraway and Kaufman consider other beings as a way of decentring the human, and of recognising our deep interconnectivities with the world. Theologically, emphasis is given here to the common dust of the ground that we were created from, along with fellow creatures. For Haraway, technologies are confused among our knots and interconnectivities in such a way that organic and technical components are largely indistinct: ‘post-cyborg, what counts as biological kind troubles previous categories of organism. The machinic and the textual are internal to the organic and vice versa in irreversible ways.’74 When reflecting on creatureliness, then, a Harawayan model that incorporates technologies as part of the confusions of this world is to be noted. Otherwise, it would be too easy with a companion species approach to overlook the technological aspect of our confusions and to continue to seek a substantive sense of unity predicated on our original natures. Kaufman and other ecotheologians suggest this in ways that render technologies either as salvific in helping us to attain holism and unification, or as detrimental in alienating us further from our unified teleological selves.75 For Haraway, we can only dwell in the midst of things rather than anticipate any metaphysical futures yet to come. Haraway’s most recent work, to this end, locates companion species (and, by proxy, cyborgs too) in the ‘chthulucene’. With the chthulucene, which is a portmanteau of the Greek terms xuvn (chthon; ‘of the earth’) and kaino6 (kainos; ‘now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness’),76 Haraway makes another critique of Eden in favour of the connections that we share among others in other present context. Rejecting ‘sky gods’ and ‘upward gazes’, Haraway’s companion species and ‘chthulucene’ are attentive to the dynamic, partial and ongoing fusions and confusions within our world. These are themes across

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Haraway’s work, but they are also in a sense limited and constrained by the articulation of the chthulucene as a solely immanent world. To be sure, ‘this chthulucene is neither sacred nor secular; this earthly worlding is thoroughly terran, muddled, and mortal – and at stake now’.77 Theological insights thus need not be occluded here, as the next set of chapters discuss with regards to theological anthropology,78 however it is certainly striking that a perspective that makes such extended use of confusions can leave certain ideas – namely, those that Haraway identifies with Eden symbolism – extraneous and excluded. Closer work with that myth is needed in order to more fully understand what it is to be in this world: to be created, to be creative and to be creaturely. These (hi)stories have shaped our existence, and so we cannot simply abandon them. Thus, the chthulucene, while a useful notion in certain regards such as its ability to locate the cyborg in a wider nexus of companion species and to call attention to our own immanent context, paradoxically limits itself from certain confusions on the theological and metaphysical point of transcendence and immanence, and the binary construction of the two. Cyborgs, in my estimation, more so than animals or companion species, are tropological and allow us to reflect on ‘fabulated’ narratives that undermine the certainty of phenomena and ideas.79 As Haraway reflects, ‘cyborgs were always simultaneously relentlessly real and inescapably fabulated’.80 Companion species, by contrast, are about ‘actual animals and people looking back at each other, sticky with all their muddled histories’.81 What this comparison reveals is that, although companion species draw on (hi)stories like the cyborg, they place a greater emphasis on the concrete and material embodiments of those narratives than cyborgs. Cyborgs, as figures, are more able to touch on how presence is telepresence; how ‘actual’ is ‘virtual’; and they can emphasise how all beings are always already interfused with the ‘technological’. Cyborgs thus continue to raise important questions about animality, divinity, virtuality and humanity by bringing to our attention our full interaction with the technological, and articulating it in a richer and potentially more ethical (or at least responsible and response-able) way. Cyborgs thereby remain significant figures to contend with, particularly in theological anthropology where assessments of technologies are polarised and largely inconsistent.

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With Haraway’s corpus of work, as well as with posthumanism in its most general sense, I want to continue to reflect on how ‘the differences matter – in ecologies, economies, species, lives’.82 With the non-teleological cyborg in particular, I want to note: [. . .] in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about knowing the difference.83

What is needed from this comparison is a way of being able to discern the differences among different types of difference. This is work that, as Haraway continues to recognise, the cyborg remains adept at doing. She returns to her cyborg, even in the chthulucene, [. . .] in order to relay the string figures – the speculative fabulations, the scientific facts, the science fictions, and the speculative feminisms – to whatever sorts of tentacular grippers will receive the pattern to keep living and dying well possible in ‘our times’.84

I want to understand what we mean by ‘our times’ in the broadest sense, and I appeal to the multiple (hi)stories encoded into and confused through the cyborg in order to gauge that. A theological perspective is indispensable to reflections on our stories, particularly to nuance our readings of Eden and escapism, which figure so prominently in our inherited anthropologies and attitudes to humans, natures and technologies. To be sure, by no means do I want to imply here that we should not look at our interspecies relations with animals. Companion species, as I have discussed here, raise some important issues concerning other discontinuities that the human erects to mark itself as unique and privileged. What I am instead arguing is that we are not anywhere near ready to close the chapter on the cyborg, which is multispecies but in an imploded and confusing sense. Echoing Haraway’s own sentiments (admittedly given in an interview that predates the work on companion species, but that I nonetheless feel remains pertinent): I think the cyborg still has so much potential [. . .] ‘Cyborg’ is a way to get at all the multiple layers of life and liveliness as well as deathliness

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within which we live each day. So instead on giving up because it has become too famous let’s keep pushing and filling it.85

The cyborg began as a figure within certain scientific and technological circles, and Haraway was able to appropriate the cyborg figure so that it could disengage somewhat from that (hi)story and ultimately critique it. Similarly now, there is no reason to discard the cyborg because of a polluted (hi)story that it has acquired, that has been seen through the lens of companion species.

Part III

CHAPTER 6

Creation, Creatures and Creativity

CREATIVE CYBORGS AND CREATED CO-CREATORS According to and animals, technologies, in the sense

Genesis, God created the world including humans and this is referred to as creation. With regards to humans are creating new tools and even new species of posthuman species, or hybrid animals that are

mixings of different components, incorporating the technological and organic. 1 Are both senses of creation compatible? Put differently, what does it mean to understand humans as both creaturely and creative? Typically, in theological anthropology, imago dei has been used to aid our reflections: humans are made in, or according to, the image of the creative God. But is this (accurate) enough information from which to derive ethical assumptions about our place in creation and our own creativity, as well as our obligations to our own creations?2 The non-teleological cyborg figure posited by Haraway, and explored and contextualised in the previous chapters, articulates a way of seeing ourselves as entirely relational. We are thus not constituted by any inherent traits or qualities such as creativity, which a substantive reading of imago dei would imply. Indeed, the cyborg can have no essential identity because of the way that it is a confusion and implosion of multiple parts that were previously and erroneously categorically split between ‘same’ and ‘other’.3 Haraway

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lists a set of similar and paralleling dualisms in her Cyborg Manifesto that are dismantled and rethought via the cyborg: self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilised/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/ passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man.4

The last binary implosion is of particular relevance for a theological anthropological investigation of the cyborg. Previous approaches to technology that have effaced this boundary have overemphasised similitude between God and humans, typically by virtue of imago dei, and have resulted in the deification of humans, which elsewhere has been linked to the notion of the ‘death of God’ and the human supplanting of at least part of God’s role in terms of technological power and creativity.5 These trends are continued in transhumanism. Given that the cyborg is about deconstructions and articulations rather than assumptions and extensions, however, is there an alternative way for that figure to rethink this boundary between God and man? Or, given that Eden remains external to and divided from the world in which we now dwell (the ‘chthulucene’), does Haraway’s critique of binaries fall short on the need to more appropriately handle theological boundaries and divisions? Of cyborgian ontologies, Linda Hogle reminds us: Cyborgs are human bodies fragmented and re-configured in another sense. If we are to study cyborgs, the technoscience that makes them possible and the phenomenon around them, we must examine our romanticism for the ‘Whole’, our desire for the transcendent, and our notions of the human.6

Cyborgs are hybrid beings that (con)fuse various components and parts, such that those parts cannot be regarded as discrete or distinguishable. Not only do cyborgs hybridise on an earthly level, but, as Hogle suggests, they also invite questioning of the transcendent and our understandings of the ‘whole’. The cyborg is critical of these notions, yet they feature prominently in theological language and reflection. Is there a way to reconcile the two positions, in a sense to realise the implosions and confusions between theology and cyborgs more fruitfully? Or, must we assume

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a polarisation of the two as Haraway’s articulation of the cyborg might initially suggest? Is the cyborg even a theologically desirable figure? A notable attempt at responding to these challenges presented by Haraway’s cyborg can be discerned from the work of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner. For Haraway, we must take heed of the confusions and implosions that arise from our deep sense of fusion with other phenomena. Taking up this point, Hefner writes that the question ‘Who are we?’ ‘is not a simple question to answer – the answer comes only through struggle’.7 Here, Hefner realises how Haraway’s cyborg figure denies us the possibility of clarity or certainty in terms of self-identity, not least because the conventional boundaries between self and other are among the main confusions that cyborgs embody. The notion of ‘struggle’ that Hefner refers to is important in problematising our self-understandings, and characterising the necessary difficulty of ascertaining a substantive, essentialised identity for ourselves (or, indeed, for others such as ‘nonhumans’ as well) that, in my reading of the cyborg, is illusory at best and destructive at worst. Significantly, though, Hefner does not seem to deny the possibility of an overall answer to the question of who we are and thereby leaves us able to strive towards an ultimate sense of identity. This is something that Haraway is more resistant to: the cyborg figure is just outside of our grasp, which underscores the way that it impels us to perennially question not just who we are, but how we are in relation to other beings and phenomena in the world. 8 Hefner gives the impression of being able to affirm at least a degree of certainty in terms of our self-understandings, which certainly has a more practical import but may not take us far enough in the direction of critical reflection on our attitudes and perspectives. In other words, seeking norms and attitudes about humans and nonhumans allows for a yardstick against which to measure the ethicalness of different activities. The issue, however, is when such norms and attitudes become oppressive and harmful to those who deviate from them in terms of their gender, sexuality, race, dis/ability or beliefs (among other strata),

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which is Haraway’s (and my) chief problematic that prompts the need for deep cyborgian critique and alternative articulation. Does this then undermine the extent to which we can ascertain that Hefner has developed a viable theological appropriation of the cyborg? Underscoring Hefner’s approach to the cyborg and to our technocultural world is his theological position. This seems to require a degree of certainty in metaphysical and mythical narratives that in turn impact our (theological) notions of human nature. Most pertinent to this investigation, Hefner identifies how: The essential Christian myth consists of the narrative that includes at least the following events: (1) God made the world, including humans in the image of the maker. (2) Human beings were created in the garden, in unity with their maker and with one another, but they came to be alienated from both, and the alienation manifests in their actions.9

Specifically, it is point (2) that is problematic for an engagement of theology with the cyborg because Haraway makes it clear that the cyborg was not created in a garden. Within Hefner’s theological framework, then, is the cyborg about alienation? Does this not denigrate the cyborg and perpetuate our attitudes to technology as destructive, alienating and sinful? These questions frame this chapter of the investigation. I analyse Hefner’s approach to the cyborg that has been instructive and influential for a range of theologians looking at the dynamic between theology and technology, often with reference to imago dei. To put it briefly, the concept of imago dei, it has been noted, implies a relation between God and humans. While this appears to be relatively straightforward, exactly how we figure this connection amidst a broader grid of other things,10 including animals and technologies, complicates the matter. On the one hand, the imago dei in humans has a tendency to bind us closer to God than to the animal and nonhuman kin with which we share the world. On the other hand, there are concerns that this is destructive and that excessive differentiation of humans in this manner gives us false assumptions of godliness and privilege.11 How are we to reconcile these understandings, particularly with the concept of the cyborg that

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seems to work difference differently by emphasising relationality, implosions and (con)fusions? Hefner’s theological anthropology, and his wider theological position, is explored through the figure of the ‘created co-creator’. This figure, coined by Hefner in 1993, features widely in subsequent discussions of theology and technology, especially where Haraway or the cyborg are mentioned because of how Hefner sketches the created co-creator as a sort of theological parallel of the cyborg figure. In a later essay by Hefner, where the created co-creator ‘meets’ the cyborg, it is plainly stated that both figures ‘are images of boundary transgression,’ or ‘images of xenogenesis’.12 This means that they both are inheritors of multiple and contested origins; they are figures comprised of borrowings and bricolages. Given that Genesis features so prominently as the prime origin in anthropology and anthropogeny, however, whether or not this is a valid point remains to be seen. How, for example, is an affirmation of xenogenesis compatible with point (2) Hefner discussed of traditional Christian theology (above), where humans were created in a garden? In one sense, they are not entirely compatible, which is precisely the point of the cyborg being what Haraway describes as ‘blasphemous’: Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of US politics, including the politics of socialistfeminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy.13

The cyborg takes seriously the traditions that it seems to critique, but it would be a mistake to see the cyborg as external to those traditions.14 As Haraway suggests elsewhere, she works with her own ‘polluted inheritance’15 which emphasises how she, like the cyborg, is firmly embedded in a culture that is muddy with (hi)stories, including theological traditions and ideas. Drawing on this notion, Hefner posits that ‘Cyborg does not fall outside theology so much as s/he requires a re-thinking of theology. Created co-creator may convey this inescapable theological dimension more forthrightly than Cyborg.’16 As part of this more

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explicit theologising, Hefner claims to parallel the blasphemy that Haraway builds into her articulation of the cyborg. Rather than clinging to the sureties that religion is often accredited as providing us with, including the sanctity and purity of Eden, Hefner writes, ‘both Cyborg and Created Co-Creator place us in this situation of facing the tremendum, they are not benign images that provide comfort’.17 There is something fundamentally destabilising about both of these techno-savvy figures, and much of that seems to be a firm acknowledgement of the ways that technologies change (our understandings of) both us and the world, in deep and complex ways. Technology, for both figures, is an important part of how we live our lives. For Hefner, ‘our journey is unavoidably technological’.18 There is, then, an inescapability of technology, which is significant given the long history of how we have ‘othered’ it against the human or the natural.19 Not only do we need to recognise how we are deeply fused with technologies, but we also need to take heed of the confusions that we dwell in alongside technologies and everything else. And yet, Hefner does not avoid the language of ‘nature’, which is somewhat problematic, particularly within an anthropological framework. To restate the issue, how are we able to discern a discrete nature like non/human nature in a context marked by (con)fusions all the way down? Perhaps, on this point about nature, Hefner misappropriates Haraway’s cyborg figure: in Hefner’s understanding, ‘Cyborg is a relatively recent term that expresses the dimension of techno-nature within human nature.’20 Hefner locates the specifically technological within the specifically human, which does a disservice to the more complex ways in which we intermesh at multiple levels, particularly in terms of technology crossing over and impacting other ‘nonhuman’ species (such as chimeras, or cloned or patented animals). There are, it seems, certain undertones that slant Hefner’s theological appropriation of the cyborg figure in the direction of (human) nature. This ‘nature’ is associated with substantive identities and anthropocentrism, which Haraway emphatically seeks to overcome with her non-teleological articulation of the cyborg figure.21 I explore these undertones to Hefner’s work with reference to

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imago dei as a way of theologically approaching questions of (human) nature and the cyborg. IMAGO DEI AND CREATIVITY Hefner’s theological parallel of the cyborg, embodied in the figure of the created co-creator, as its name implies, addresses specifically the question of creativity. The human act of creation, considered in the light of God’s original creation, is Hefner’s starting point, and this forms the basis of his controversial appraisal of technologies. Technologies, for Hefner, are the fruits of our creative labours. Such creativity is the focus of Hefner’s coinage: Human beings are God’s created co-creators whose purpose is to be the agency, acting in freedom, to birth the future that is most wholesome for the nature that has birthed us – the nature that is not only our own genetic heritage, but also the entire human community and the evolutionary and ecological reality in which and to which we belong. Exercising this will is said to be God’s will for humans.22

This passage demonstrates the key theological and metaphysical underpinnings of Hefner’s work, which many writers have raised concerns about. I consider some of these critiques alongside the threefold model of theological anthropology and imago dei in order to learn from some of the shortcomings (and strengths) of Hefner’s influential model, and to look at how an alternative theological appraisal of Haraway’s cyborg might be developed. Hefner, for example, claims to develop a relational theological anthropology that is able to adequately appropriate the relationality and implosions that the cyborg articulates, but insofar as he recourses to particularly substantive interpretations (as well as functional interpretations)23 and affirms a sense of human nature, I question the validity of Hefner’s figurations. Beginning with relational models, and ending with an argument that uncovers a substantive approach embedded in Hefner’s theories, I explore: (1) Relational models, where the connections between and among beings and phenomena are foregrounded. Hefner alludes to this

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above in terms of ‘co-creators’, as well as recognising a sense of ‘community’ (albeit an exclusively human one); (2) Functional models, where emphasis is given to action and engagement with technology. Hefner refers to this above in terms of ‘agency’ and ‘acting in freedom’; (3) Substantive models, where concepts of ‘nature’ are operative and influential. Hefner touches on this above in terms of ‘our own genetic heritage’.

I then reflect on Haraway’s own emphasis on relationality, implosions and (con)fusions in a theological sense with her elaboration of the cyborg/goddess division. These comments will inform the next, penultimate chapter that suggests how Edenic figurations of (human) nature might be figured in a theological framework that is sensitive and responsive to the ‘blasphemous’ position of the cyborg.

Relational modelling? Although, as has been suggested above, Hefner’s theory of created co-creators problematically draws on substantive notions of (human) nature, Hefner foregrounds relationality in his theological appropriation of Haraway’s cyborg. This is built into the ‘co’ component of Hefner’s coinage, where a collaborative partnership is sketched out that involves humans actively and dynamically in God’s broader plan for creation. One way that Hefner presents relationality refers to the partnerships among creatures. All creatures, including humans, are bound in a theological sense: ‘Because the human is made up of the basic stuff of the planet, the image of God in that human being indicates that the world itself is capable of that special relationship to which the image of God points.’24 In one sense, the connection between the human and the world means that all of creation is bound together. Relationality across all of creation is emphasised here: what is implied is a sense in which, as Terence Fretheim suggests, ‘interrelatedness is basic to this community of God’s creatures’.25 A relational interpretation of imago dei necessarily expands beyond the solely human by looking at commonalities across creation, including ‘the basic stuff’ creatures (and technologies) are all made of. For F. LeRon

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Shults, theological relationality in this sense is modelled on pluralistic Trinitarian accounts. Shults writes, ‘the glory of God is not about the self-glorification of an autonomous divine Individual but about the mutual glorification of the three persons of the Trinity’.26 In terms of theological anthropology, this suggests that humans are not to be regarded as superior to their fellow creatures but emphasises that they are ‘wholly embedded in creation’.27 This account parallels Haraway’s emphasis on immanence across her work, but that is perhaps most clearly expressed in ‘companion species’ and the ‘chthulucene’ (see previous chapter). While Hefner recognises something of this relationality with other creatures, noting that ‘humans fully implicate the rest of nature in the human adventure’,28 he nonetheless conveys a strong sense of anthropocentrism insofar as there is a specifically human adventure contrastable against ‘the rest of nature’. This adventure is expansive from the locus of the human and impacts rather than accounts for nonhuman nature, having notably destructive effects that render the ‘created co-creator’ coinage as dangerous. For Hefner, though: [T]his risk is unavoidable. History, from the Stone Age to the present, testifies to this fact. Homo sapiens, following the lead of its genetic programming and its neurobiological possibilities – that is, taking advantage of its distinctive qualities – has become the dominator of the planet and the destroyer of it.29

Strikingly, in an essay that emphasises how ‘a reorganisation of consciousness is called for’,30 Hefner clings to deeply rooted and naturalised notions of what it is to be human as dominant in a way that typically leads to ‘violence’.31 To be sure, Hefner seeks to readdress the relations that result in such violence, but by grounding his ideas in a substantive account of human nature as rooted in biological genetics and theological anthropogeny (via an account of imago dei that underscores ‘distinctive qualities’), he limits the extent to which we can truly reassess our relationality and relationships with others. It is one thing to acknowledge the (hi)stories that shape us; it is another to affirm them in such deeply anthropocentric ways that elevate the specifically human in contradistinction from other beings and technologies, in spite of the cyborgian articulation of implosions and confusions.

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That said, given the emphasis that Hefner places on human action and creativity (or destruction) in the world, there is a deeper interrogation not only of the modelling of anthropology based on relational theological structures such as the Trinity (as we find with Shults), but also of the ways that humans relate to God in terms of creativity and transcendence via technologies. According to Hefner, ‘technology is itself a medium of divine action, because technology is about the freedom of imagination that constitutes our self-transcendence’.32 Technology, in this reading, is what brings together the human and the divine because humans assert themselves and thereby enact their vocation in a manner concordant with how they are created. Hefner implies this by stating, Transcendence is a fundamental element of both human nature and technology – transcendence in the sense of imagining and believing and cocreating what is not actual, and creating the meaning of what is imagined, as well.33

This is, according to Hefner, a naturally creative transcendence, and it conveys a close sense of relationality between God and humans who share in this creative capacity. Arguably, putting aside how ‘natural’ Hefner figures this creative transcendence for humans, this is relational in a cyborgian sense. Boundaries are here interrogated not only at the creaturely level, which suggests (con)fusions in the chthulucene between technologies and organisms, but also, importantly, in terms of transcendence, fabulation (i.e., the ‘not actual’) and creativity. Haraway, making a theologically significant comment about cyborgs, writes that they are illegitimate offspring, and ‘illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential’.34 In this passage, Haraway indicates the way in which she might rethink relationality specifically between cyborgs and God. For Haraway, the notion of God-the-Father, that is, the deistic being that brought humans into the world but that, crucially, is radically demarcated from humans and the world, is archaic and dated. Although Haraway writes from a secular perspective, a radical and relational approach like Hefner’s demonstrates how a constructive theological response can be made.

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Haraway’s critical assessment of God-the-Father is not necessarily an uncommon view in theology. As well as Hefner, other theologians advocating a relational approach share in this assessment. One of these is Shults, for whom: We are called to a koinonia with God, a union that is so deeply perichoretic that our anxiety about losing our personhood through relation with the other is dissolved as we rest in the One whose personhood is constituted by self-giving love.35

Shults uses relationality to bind (human) personhood to God in an agapeic way. Haraway’s cyborg challenge, though, goes deeper than this and articulates a more interrogative relationality where identities are scrutinised and deconstructed, rather than linked as is the case for Shults.36 This hearkens back to the difference between fusions and confusions: fusions are relational, but confusions suggest a more critical deconstruction of and reflection on the parts that are involved in complex relationalities. Haraway’s concern with an approach like Shults’ is that ‘to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many.’37 Relationality, for Haraway, cannot be figured dialectically in a way that divides itself against the other or that resolves itself into a whole. The cyborg is, in a sense, the figure of alterity without a self to be neatly contrasted against. To reiterate, it is the figure that does difference differently.38 From this critique, Haraway detracts emphasis from Eden and origins in order to explore more dynamic ways that cyborgs (inter) relate in the world. Transcendence is here part of a deep ‘neediness’ for connection, but it is figured as a schism against the world.39 Haraway thus rejects notions of transcendence as part of this antiEdenic emphasis on immanence and (inter)connectivity. Yet cyborg relationality and hybridity demands that we rethink the schism between God and humans, so that creativity is not assigned to one side of the dualism. One way of developing this that has emerged from theologians and philosophers is to rethink transcendence and immanence as ‘not in competition: although contrastive notions,

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they do not occupy the same ontological space. How transcendence is “experienced” is therefore not by way of opposition to immanence.’40 This allows for the recognition of a key theological difference between God-as-creator and creation that is beyond our world, and therefore that need not be deconstructed or imploded in the same way that worldly divisions (in the chthulucene) do.41 Yet in another sense, this returns to the quandary that Haraway originally raised with her cyborg: that figure does not recognise Eden because of its association with longings for escapism and transcendence. In order to combat this, a deeper sense of confusions between transcendence and immanence needs to be explored, even if Haraway herself resists this point with how she articulates the chthulucene as rejecting transcendence.42 As part of this critical rethinking of Haraway’s cyborg, it is worth bearing in mind that the Father, for Haraway, is ‘inessential’, but not necessarily non-existent. Attentiveness to this point means that Haraway’s articulation of the cyborg is not as hostile to theology as might first appear or even as she might declare in her more autobiographical statements.43 As such, an interaction between the cyborg and theology, like Hefner proposes, is feasible. In Hefner’s account, this is a necessary endeavour.44 The relationality between humans and God that emerges from such work is by no means harmonious or even unilateral. Far from it; for Hefner, ‘since we are cyborgs, technology is also the place where, like Jacob, we wrestle with the God who comes to engage us’.45 Relationality here is tenuous and involves an interaction of creative beings, which undercuts the discreteness of the creator/created schism commonplace in traditional theology. For some theologians, however, this is not something to be celebrated. For Brent Waters, for example, ‘in its easy disposal of a creator and creation, postmodern theology effectively strips Christianity of any critical or constructive tools with which it may engage the emerging technoculture’.46 While I disagree with how ‘easy’ the disposal of these terms is, especially given their weightiness in theology, Waters identifies a key point about theology’s role if its central concepts are reconceptualised such that theology is no longer able to make ethical commentaries, or at least not in its traditioned ways.

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Certainly in Hefner’s account, though, against Waters’ concerns, ‘creator’ and ‘creation’ are not disposed of. They are instead reframed and refigured in more relational terms in the coinage ‘created cocreators’.

Functional modelling? Given that Hefner continues to use these terms, though, to what extent can we posit that he has developed a theological account of relationality that is truly respondent to the deeply critical and interrogative imploded relationality marked by Haraway’s cyborg, where identities are (con)fused because of their fractal and dynamic ontologies? To begin with, we might note that, on a grammatical level, the ‘co’ of ‘created co-creators’ that signifies relationality is a prefix of the noun; it is not confused in any particularly deep or meaningful way. This has the potential to undercut tenuous claims of relationality and collaboration, as is evidenced in instances where Hefner emphasises human responsibility to the point where it seems deterministic, and as though it is the only thing that is causally efficacious. For example, ‘if humans survive, they alone will bear the responsibility for the future and they alone will be able to seize the opportunities to actualise the possibilities for grace that are contained within it’.47 Here, relationality implied by the ‘co’ component of Hefner’s coinage is muted. It thereby seems that relations are not necessarily central to Hefner’s theological anthropology, but that they instead overlay other interpretations of imago dei. Hefner, as we have seen, emphasises specifically human agency in his conception of the created co-creator, and this may suggest, in place of a relational view of imago dei, a functional view. To reiterate, a functional approach to theological anthropology emphasises how actions perform the image of God when they are somehow accordant with God’s ongoing plan for creation, and so creativity is not limited to one side of the God/creature schism. This is strongly discernible in Hefner’s work: ‘human beings are God’s created co-creators whose purpose is to be the agency, acting in freedom, to birth the future that is most wholesome for the nature that has birthed us’.48 While it is possible to trace a sense of relationality in this understanding, as

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Hefner’s emphasis on the independence of human activity discussed earlier shows, relationality is not central to a functional assessment of how humans assert themselves against a backdrop of other creatures and God. In other words, with a functional view, humans take centrestage: their actions affect other creatures, but such actions are then measured by, and largely in the interests of, humans. Accentuating the differences between the relational and functional approaches, Noreen Herzfeld pithily discusses how, [A]s with the functional approach, a relational approach also allows for a God who is wholly other, in no way essentially like the human. However, this God is never absent from the human sphere; the relational approach differs from the functional in that it views dominion over the rest of creation as an activity humans engage in with God, rather than in God’s stead.49

Significantly, Herzfeld does not dismantle the creator/creation polarity in either the relational or functional schema. Common to both, she insists upon the radical otherness and difference of God. But concomitantly, there is an undeniable sense of connection with the relational approach that undercuts the degree to which we can claim that God is radically demarcated from created order. It is not that humans are doing God’s work, but that humans are doing human work alongside God. Hefner alluded to this position in his notion of the ‘created co-creator’, yet his strong anthropocentrism means that his attempts to construct a relational account of theological anthropology inclusive of other creatures are undercut. Indeed, with his emphasis on the human, Hefner pushes aside notions of God. Where God enters Hefner’s theological anthropology is where Hefner reads created co-creators as having creative agency, and ‘exercising this agency is said to be God’s will for humans’.50 The created co-creator coinage consistently emphasises dynamic and ongoing acts of creation, and as such may be concordant with a functional modelling of humans and technology with regards to God. The fact that humans were created by God, reflected in Hefner’s use of terms in ‘created co-creator’, demonstrates that humans are still somehow accountable to God, in spite of an overwhelming focus on human technological capabilities.

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On the other hand, as Herzfeld’s description of the functional interpretation of imago dei intimates, one of the more contentious points about Hefner’s coinage of the created co-creator is that it sounds like it challenges the sovereignty of God, by placing human creativity on at least a more elevated plane, if not on more of a par with God’s. In some of Hefner’s more troubling passages on this note, God seems notably absent altogether: ‘the co-creator and none other must take responsibility for the consequences of action; no divine hand or absolute natural law steps in to forestall those consequences’.51 Tellingly, here Hefner elides the ‘created’ part of his coinage, and so the only reference to God is tacitly implied by the ‘co’ qualifier of the nominal ‘creator’ part. The emphasis on human creativity expressed via technology is such that God is relegated to the background in Hefner’s analysis, or He is generally absent. This latter point is the concern voiced by Brent Waters, for whom ‘Hefner’s created co-creator is really the self-created creator; the being that is now transcending and directing the evolutionary processes from which it has emerged.’52 Does this accord with Haraway’s articulation of the cyborg? In some respects, the critique of conventional theological models of humans and God, referred to in Waters’ concerns about the more radical elements of Hefner’s work, approximates with the ways that Haraway challenges notions of discreteness in terms of identities and transcendence. On the other hand, as previously noted, unlike Haraway’s cyborg that begins with relationality as a means of interrogating discreteness in favour of (con)fusions, Hefner’s created co-creator builds a layer of relationality on top of functional understandings of humans and technology. What is key here to reading Hefner’s work is an emphasis on specifically human agency that performs or enacts imago dei. In Hefner’s account, technology is a reified and discrete category. It is seen as inert, and is rendered as an auxiliary prosthesis to the human will. Don Ihde critiques this sort of view because it erroneously frames the question of relating to technology as one of unidirectional control, which underwrites technophilia if humans have control, or technophobia if technologies have control.53 Either way, a substantive difference between humans and technologies is

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presupposed: humans are agential; technologies, for Hefner, ‘are not good or evil in and of themselves, but they are good or evil depending on the agency we exercise through them’.54 Human agency clearly remains central in Hefner’s account, which, although practical insofar as it provides a stable basis for ethical judgements of human conduct, undermines attempts at articulating implosions, where agency is dispersed among multiple (con)fused interactants. In increasingly complex webs of actors, laced with knotted (hi)stories, it is important to recognise that the human is not central and to reflect that in our cyborgian perspectives and attitudes. Even in Hefner’s coinage of created co-creators, the terms are brought together in a manner neither deeply fusing nor confusing. There is disparate weighting on the different grammatical parts which are sometimes even omitted. It is this that makes Hefner’s figure most problematic at best or misleading at worst for theology: rather than radically rethinking (id)entities in terms of relationality as Haraway’s cyborg compels us to do, the created co-creator awkwardly and provocatively attempts to challenge categories without deconstructing the ‘nature’ of those categories. Such a trait leads us to consider the created co-creator in altogether more fundamentally substantive terms, where, as I shall demonstrate, notions of nature lie at the heart of Hefner’s theological anthropology. These are problematic: with the cyborg, ‘nature and culture are reworked’55 in deep and imploded ways; yet with the created co-creator, ‘technological civilisation is nature for us today. The entire planetary ecosystem is fully implicated in this civilisation, both as resource and as victim’.56 Hefner’s account, evidenced here, clings to notions of nature and is deeply anthropocentric. Such anthropocentrism is buttressed by an undergirding assumption about what it is to be human and/or natural. This, I contend, is substantive.

Substantive modelling? Hefner, to put the matter bluntly, articulates a theological anthropology whereby ‘the imago dei, seen through the metaphor of the created co-creator, contains within it an explanation of human beings as inherently technological, and a trajectory that human technological agency should take’.57 The issue is, in a fairly

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straightforward way, that Hefner’s account sees humans as inherently technological (while also noting a difference between humans and technology), and that this, as we have seen in the previous section, is then used as a basis for prescriptive accounts of human activity. By making this his starting point, Hefner essentialises certain types of action. In other words, he relies on a specific presupposition of the human with regards to technology. This is substantive: Since technology is the work of our cultured brains we may say that the crisis has its origins in the gifts that are distinctive to us as humans. Technology is the work that comes naturally to us [. . .] it is a natural expression of our nature as creators.58

Hefner makes strong reference here to a sense of human nature, and he unambiguously links it to creativity in a way that images, or mimics, God’s own creative capacities. It is out of this nature that technology emerges: humans create technology; technology expresses and engages our creative impulses. Put differently, Hefner naturalises technology: technologies are seen as the outcome of naturally creative drives, and so they cannot be regarded as themselves anything but natural. For this reason, Hefner is able to claim, [W]e change the flow of rivers, employ artificial selection in growing plants and raising livestock, alter our physical bodies through medication, surgery, and the like – all in order to conform more fully to what we consider the ‘truer’ thrust of our evolutionary becoming.59

In this view, we define ourselves in accordance with how we actively change and technologise our surroundings. Here, we ‘conform’ to a ‘true’ evolutionary pathway (or do not), which suggests a presupposed teleology of human nature that relies heavily on technology. What this view leaves out, however, is anything beyond a rampant humanocentrism. Our ‘true’ evolutionary thrust, it seems, is speciesexclusivist, and can be used to legitimise any means of change to ourselves or to our surroundings (rivers, plants, livestock) that we deem necessary. Hefner does not shy away from this point: Is this an anthropocentric or human-centred reading? Of course it is. But there is a new element here. Now that we have broken down the

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walls that separate humans from both nature and technology, now that we are crossing the boundaries between these domains, we see that humans and their technology are a set of nature’s possibilities. Humans are not what they used to be, so anthropocentrism is not the same, either.60

Anthropocentrism has only ‘changed’, however, to the extent that it is increasingly technologically augmented. Hefner clings to notions of (human) nature and identifies technology within that realm: human autonomy and creativity are at the heart of humantechnological nature. Consequently, the relationality or hybridity that Hefner conveys is disparately weighted in favour of the human and anthropocentrism.61 The boundaries we use to divide ourselves from technology may be crossed, then, but they are being redrawn elsewhere. From this, we see that Hefner’s understanding of the ‘natural’ is all-encompassing. Hefner talks about human nature as inclusive of technologies, as well as of nature in another sense that is assimilated with culture. As such, Hefner’s understandings of nature run in the opposite direction to my critique of the ‘natural’ developed throughout this investigation and with reference to Haraway’s cyborg. In my estimation, the process of expanding what it is to be ‘natural’ results in the concept arguably becoming diluted, which is problematic particularly as it is still held to be meaningful and decisive in Hefner’s account. Scott pithily outlines some of the shortcomings of this approach in Hefner’s work, in which: To engage with the technological factor is to engage with humanity as natural. However, although technology is described as a competence that is rooted in the human species, the resulting theological anthropology of the ‘created co-creator’ does not attend carefully to the concept of nature which emerges in technology nor the relations between humanity and nature as technologically mediated.62

Hefner, in short, overworks and under-develops his concept of ‘nature’, which makes for an argument that, like the notion of the ‘created co-creator’, is broad and vague. An analysis of substantive theological anthropology can help us to make sense of this. The issue is that we always, in these readings, start with separations and/or absorptions of different categories (i.e., of humans and

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technologies) based on notions of naturalness. Rather than starting with (con)fusions, the categories themselves determine our attitudes. Origins, both in and of our assumptions and attitudes, are fundamental. Contrariwise, Haraway’s cyborgian rejection of origins can be understood as a desire to move away from these oversimplified and assumedly discrete categorisations. For Haraway, these issues are misguided because we cannot begin with any prior or assumed discrimination or division. This is something that, at best, emerges from an exploration of relationalities. To be sure, though, these connections are emphatically not intermediaries between preexisting poles striving to make often paradoxical connections, which is what we find evidenced in Hefner’s work. To cast some further light on Hefner’s schema, it might be useful to consider another coinage that grapples with the notion of the cyborg, but that also articulates it in terms of paradoxical connections. Andy Clark, the philosopher behind the concept of the ‘natural-born cyborg’, in fact, has much in common with Hefner’s ideas. For Clark, Our cyborg future, like our cyborg present and our cyborg past, will depend on a variety of tools, techniques, practices, and innovations. What they will increasingly have in common is that deep humancenteredness [. . .] These will be technologies to live with, to work with, and to think through.63

Clark, like Hefner, places humans unambiguously at the centre of his understanding of technology. Both theorists claim a connection with the term ‘cyborg’, but through their similarities, we can see that Hefner’s understanding of that figure, like Clark’s, must be distinguished from Haraway’s. Returning to the taxonomy of cyborgs presented earlier, technologies wrap around a humanocentric core that is enhanced but not jeopardised: this is ‘humanityþ ’.64 Clark’s and Hefner’s projects closely resemble transhumanist philosophies that cling to substantive notions of (human) nature. Technologies are read by Hefner and Clark as constituting our external environment – our culture, which is itself a new ‘nature’65 – and as constituting our inner selves. Indeed, we cannot understand ourselves aside from technologies. While I agree with this

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inseparability, I part with these theorists where they ground such claims in appeals to (human) nature. As Clark writes, ‘the fluids are already mingling and have been at least since the dawn of text, and probably since the dawn of spoken human language. This mingling is the truest expression of our distinctive character as a species.’66 Undergirding Clark’s notion of mingling here, in common with Hefner’s approach to humans and technologies, is a sustained upholding of the separateness of the human. This is where the boundary lines are redrawn; technologies are incorporated firmly within the sphere of human nature and are used to solidify ‘the gap’ between humans and ‘non-cyborg animals’.67 In the light of the distinctions that remain in Hefner’s analysis, it seems fair to comment that his theological anthropology is undergirded by at least a tacit substantive account. Human nature is central to Hefner’s account of nature, which demonstrates a strong anthropocentrism that belies human technological engagements. This links to a notion of imago dei that marks human uniqueness by relating technology to creative impulses at the centre of human nature, which is how humans reflect and bear God’s image. Strikingly, though, Hefner’s reference to (human) nature exposes tensions in that concept and thereby tensions in the substantive view: the notion of the ‘natural’ is used to legitimise technologies that otherwise seem threatening or dangerous, but in the process, we lose sight of what it is to be ‘natural’, which itself is a prospect that scares us.68 Is there a way out of these conceptual trappings? CYBORGS, GOD(S), AND GODDESSES This question returns us to the notion of the cyborg, as articulated by Haraway. The cyborg is not substantive because it is deeply critical of notions of (human) nature, and this marks the key difference between Hefner’s and Haraway’s schemas. Hefner and Clark, unlike Haraway, begin with assumptions about humans, technology and God that they can make connections between. From this, we see how the substantive account that underwrites these assumptions contributes to an anthropocentrism that must be opposed if we are to fully acknowledge our (con)fusions with (non-)others.

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While it will be necessary to now explore alternative ways of theologically appropriating the cyborg, we can first reflect on what we have learnt from an analysis of Hefner’s attempts. Hefner indicated a genuine endeavour to construct a relational account of the cyborg and theology, and we can take some of his suggestions about how we relate to God and other creatures as part of a complex community, different to previous theological figurations of those relationships, to inform further investigative work. Hefner’s comments on creativity begin to overcome the schism between God and humans because creativity is an activity that we can share in. For Hefner this means that technologies are not about alienation or artifice, and we can subsequently develop an account of technology that does not immediately mark technologies as an object of fear. However, to posit the opposite and claim that technologies are fully natural does not move us away from attempts to assess technologies against a predetermined, ahistorical idea(l). Imago dei, I propose, needs instead to be figured in critical, non-substantive and nonanthropocentric terms. Before looking at theological responses to this challenge, it is worth assessing how Haraway’s own stance on relationality might inform such a theological investigation. A significant opportunity to explore how theological relationality, in terms of creativity shared between God and humans as explored in this chapter so far, might be figured by Haraway can be found in her closing comments from the Manifesto. Here, Haraway writes, ‘though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’.69 In this key passage, Haraway suggests a schism between the cyborg and the goddess. Both are divided along a plane of transcendence, and so may parallel a divide between humans and God. The fact that Haraway operates with the assumption of this schism, though, means that her work may suggest substantive differences, and so may have more resonances with Hefner’s work than indicated thus far in this chapter. This does not accord well with the rest of Haraway’s emphasis on relationality and implosion. As some commentators such as Elaine Graham have noted, ‘in an essay which celebrates the end of dualisms [. . .] one final – and overlooked – ontological boundary

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[remains,] that between heaven and earth.’70 How, in short, can discussion of fusions and confusions, that have already been highlighted as fundamental aspects of a cyborgian ontology, be interacted with this metaphysical-theological division? Although Haraway suggests an alarming boundary between the cyborg and the goddess, which has been questioned by writers in the bourgeoning field of posthumanist theology for its backwards step in an essay of otherwise refreshing and radical shake-ups,71 on closer inspection, I propose that this figuration is as radical as anything else that Haraway writes. For Haraway: We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that ‘god’ is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics.72

This passage reminds us of the finer nuances of Haraway’s approach to cyborgs that derives from her methodology, which involves taking up ‘polluted histories’ and working with(in) them, by challenging them.73 God and the goddess may be dead for Haraway, but they have ongoing significance in our technological milieu, and we need to work out how to adequately articulate that ‘revivification’. Haraway, we might then say, inherits the language and notion of the goddess, but denies the desirability of returning to an ideological or material romanticised notion of that figure. In its place, Haraway advocates that we opt for the cyborg. What does Haraway ‘inherit’ through the goddess? The goddess, for Haraway, embodies and represents the overlapped poles of nature and gender. Here, as Graham writes, the goddess ‘risks remaining effectively a romanticisation of humanity’s engagement with nature, a reversion to Edenic bliss that is no longer available in a highly-technologised western context’.74 Haraway, of course, wants to refute such dualistic associations, and she thus posits the cyborg/goddess schism to present her case for the alternative. A consideration of Haraway’s specific use of the cyborg against the grain of its technophilic transhumanist roots, revising and re-articulating that figure, demonstrates that her cyborg represents an alternative, imploded ontology. It is that non-binarised, non-dualistic approach that Haraway finds favour with, over the trends that she identifies in the shorthand figure of the goddess.75

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The figure works as a shorthand reference because of the juxtaposition (and not necessarily opposition) of the goddess and the cyborg. As Graham notes, the dualism suggested by the goddess, ‘between the spiritual and the material, immanence and transcendence [. . .] informs all others’.76 The dualism is referred to when we ask key questions of our technologies in substantive terms such as asking how we figure ourselves along the line suspended between divinity and animality, where assumptions about both ends of the spectrum, as well as of ourselves in terms of human nature, are made as pre-requisites for our concerns about edging too near to either. Ultimately, all of these substantive assumptions are revealed as being abstracted and simplified and lead to straw conceptions that are uncritical and unhelpful. If this is the continuum implied by the goddess, then the cyborg challenges it in favour of a messier and more critically reflexive milieu marked by (con)fusions and implosions. In the latter worldview, everything is interlinked to such an extent that transcendence taken as discreteness or escapist idealism is untenable. For Haraway, this includes transcendentalism, a spiritual movement that emphasises the purity of the individual against society. Such a notion, however, ‘is deadly [. . .] these holistic, transcendentalist moves promise a way out of history, a way of participating in the God trick. A way of denying mortality.’77 If, in other words, to be a god(dess) is to transcend and/or to disappear from the world, then we are not, nor can we ever be, gods.78 Contrary to transhumanist fantasies, we keep our feet firmly on the ground. Haraway’s cyborg/goddess construction, then, relates to immanence and transcendence. As Rosi Braidotti suggests, ‘the emphasis on immanence’ that emerges from the polarised cyborg/goddess structure ‘allows us to respect the bond of mutual dependence between bodies and technological others, while avoiding the contempt for the flesh and the trans-humanist fantasy of escape from the finite materiality of the enfleshed self’.79 Haraway’s rejection of the goddess identity demonstrates her preference for the immanent, for the chthlucene in its situatedness and groundedness, and for our milieu of sprawling and (con)fusing connections. With this in mind, the goddess is to be understood on a deeper level as bearing a (hi)story and a mythology that Haraway simply

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does not find favour with. This (hi)story is sharply divided between transcendence and immanence, men and women and nature and technology. The cyborg, instead, subverts the myths that legitimise these structures, and these are by and large traceable to myths of origin that inform our attitudes to ourselves and particularly our technologies, as well as to the world more generally.80 By pledging allegiance to the cyborgian identity, Haraway declares her endeavour to work critically against the myths that have colonised us. The goddess, for Haraway, uncritically inherits many of these myths and thus is an undesirable identity. In claiming solidarity with the cyborg, Haraway actively chooses to reject the identities that have typically been reserved for her as a woman. Instead, Haraway significantly appropriates the overwhelmingly masculine identity of the cyborg (as it had been presented in popular culture at Haraway’s time of writing, but also interestingly since then)81 and reworks its meanings in favour of connections rather than schisms. The ‘goddess’ metanarrative remains an option for us; Haraway does not pretend as though it never existed, yet, to the contrary, she recognises how compelling it is for us.82 This informs her work with the cyborg, which is about persuading people of the alternative assessment of our hybrid ontologies. Although this alternative option is difficult, jarring and (con)fusing, it is presented as fruitful for how we see ourselves as firmly embedded in an ever-shifting technocultural milieu that we as humans are not central to. In dividing the cyborg and the goddess, however, does Haraway necessitate a prior demarcation of transcendence in order to emphasise a radical and cyborgian immanence? It is important to note here that both cyborgs and goddesses are bound in the spiral dance. Haraway first introduces the notion of ‘spiral dancing’ in her Cyborg Manifesto with regards to a practice in Santa Rita jail that was ‘at once both spiritual and political’.83 The spiritual dimensions of the dance, embodied by the goddess (figure), are rooted in neopaganism, where it symbolises the cyclicality of death and rebirth.84 Although Haraway may find issue with the natality implied by ‘rebirth’, this is counteracted by the open-ended political dimensions of the dance.85 Because of the way that political and

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spiritual elements intertwine in this dance, I argue, Haraway can be read as sketching out not an either/or predicament between the cyborg and the goddess, but a recognition of the identities that work across differences; that do difference differently. By this, attention is given to the (con)fusions and implosions that do not absorb or subsume difference into a homogeneous conceptual category. Rather, a sense of difference is retained, but it is radically dynamised, fragmented and reworked. It is not a matter of clear-cut sameness or difference. The goddess, to this end, is not the antithesis of the cyborg but rather is the ‘polluted history’ that the cyborg works both with and against, and must somewhat reconcile itself to. The spiral dance emphasises this, but we should be cautious not to reify the identities performing the choreography. In other words, this complex and irreducibly confusing relationality needs to be located at the level of the cyborg as well as the wider network. What this may necessitate is a richer understanding of how relationality figures transcendence by reworking differences at every level. Given the significance of Edenic symbolism and myths here, theology is a useful critical partner. Theology can offer a nuanced appreciation of fabulated mythologies-as-(hi)stories that convey far more than one narrative about escapism. Without these contributions, Haraway’s own work risks perpetuating the ideas that she critiques insofar as her cyborg becomes the secularised and liberal humanist subject, the celebrated progeny of the Enlightenment and its undergirding deistic beliefs. Csicsery-Ronay Jr refers to this simulacral predicament as a symptom of a culture of ‘artificial immanence’,86 which I have diagnosed in Haraway’s work, particularly in her explication of the chthulucene. We need to weave the more nuanced (hi)stories of Eden and wider theological anthropology into our time and context, as part of a recognition, reflection and articulation of the confusions that concomitantly weave us. All of this points towards a new approach and indeed even what Brenda Brasher regards as a decisive but difficult paradigm shift, from classical theological anthropology to ‘theological cyborgology’.87 The merit of this term is that it circumvents anthropocentrism and invites theologians into the fore of technological and cyborgian concerns, all of which place great emphasis on the notion of relationality.

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What is additionally useful and insightful about the coinage ‘theological cyborgology’ is that it incorporates the critical deconstruction of the human,88 in particular the liberal humanist subject, which in turn leads us to question the God to whom that figure relates.89 Imago dei, in this context, is especially instructive because it narrates a (hi)story that can be rearticulated according to a relational (and cyborgian) view, so long as it is not taken exclusively to refer to humans as inherently bearing it (either fully or as a capacity) as according to the substantive (and functionalsubstantive) view. This was the key shortcoming of Hefner’s approach: Hefner naturalised technology to incorporate it within a substantive model of human nature, rather than taking the cyborgian challenge posed by Haraway as an opportunity to more radically rethink what it is, or more pertinently what it isn’t, to be ‘human’. Although Hefner made some valid and useful points about technology, including that it is widespread and prompts introspection, we need to not be content with stopping short at substantive ideas, but to push beyond them. We need to throw ourselves into the spiral dance in order to recognise implosions and ways of doing difference differently, as is suggested by the cyborg figure. Relational accounts of imago dei that are not tethered to substantive notions can be useful here. The ‘spiral dance’ is about tracing out dynamic and imploded, (con)fused relationalities. These relationalities are different from relationships; they are emphatically non-inertial, as well as non-normative and non-prescriptive as there are no preconceived expectations that are able to be brought to an assessment of them. We start almost anew with every relationality, but they extend into complex, chaotic and (con)fused (hi)stories that intersect with different narratives, identities and ideas. It is this kind of dynamism and intangibility that could be brought to a reflection on imago dei: as Gregory Peterson notes, ‘to be in the image of God is to be like God in some relevant way, but also unlike God at the same time, as an image is like and unlike that which it reflects or represents’.90 There is recognition here of a difference between God and that which images Him, without which we would be inundated with simulacra of God.91 This is avoided by a creaturely dimension to

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imago dei, where the human is deconstructed and refigured in complex networks that are not simulacra of God, but are rich in their own (hi)stories. Technologies, as parts of these networks, are to be figured as one part in this milieu, but they are not to be localised or incorporated solely into human nature as Hefner and Clark did, because there is to be no substantive account of (human) nature for them to be affiliated to. Technologies are but some of the actors, (con)fusing with multiple others, as they dance the spiral dance. We may never be able to fully understand it, but we can become more aware of the moves that the dancers take, and appreciate the profoundness and intricacy of it all. Imago dei, in a theological cyborgology, is likely to be about this choreography that brings together multiple actors. It is not about keeping our feet or ourselves rooted in Eden, as the next chapter will explore and demonstrate, but it is about being moved and caught up in the dynamic rhythms and cacophonies of the world in which we exist.

CHAPTER 7

Eden: Return or Refigure?

Cyborgs, as articulated by Haraway, are non-teleological, dynamic and deal in (con)fusions and implosions. These traits challenge embedded assumptions that we have of humans and human nature. In theological anthropological terms, human nature has typically been figured as static, stable and discrete, which is best characterised as a substantive set of interpretations (including functional interpretations, but that still see humans as somehow dominant, powerful or central). What the cyborg demands is a non-substantive relational and critical approach that does not begin with identities that are connected through relationships, but rather that begins with the far less concrete or tangible ways of relating, including fusions and, ultimately, confusions. The question here remains about how we might interact these notions of cyborgs with the still problematic notion of Eden, in making steps towards what has been suggested as a ‘theological cyborgology’ (in place of ‘theological anthropology’). The investigation thus comes full-circle and we ironically find ourselves back at the start: what do we understand by Eden; why is it significant; can we articulate a relational understanding of it? Another way of posing this last question might be to ask whether cyborgs, as relational figures, are themselves locatable in the Garden in some way and, if so, then how. Suggestions have been made to consider Adam and Eve as cyborgs or the snake as a cyborg, but what would either of these mean in the light of Haraway’s anti-Edenic

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comments, and the significance and symbolism of Eden more generally for contemporary technocultures? RUPTURES: EDEN/CYBORGS In the last chapter, tensions between the cyborg and the goddess were noted in Haraway’s account. This may parallel how Haraway opposes the cyborg to Eden. Eden is a key part of the creation myth, from which we derive many assumptions about (human) nature. The centrality of the human here is a significant part of that which Haraway critiques: Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other.1

For Haraway, then, the fact that humans were made by God in the Garden of Eden, which is a paradisiacal garden signifying completeness, order and innocence, has profound consequences for our current self-understandings. We see Eden as symbolic of innocence because of how we sinned and fell, and our present sinful state is thus counterpoised to a prior sinless and innocent state. According to Haraway’s reading of Eden, this juxtaposition leads us to understand our present condition as one negatively marked by autonomy and alienation. We can certainly discern this in many theological accounts of technology that see it as troubling: one of the more foremost among these is presented by Brent Waters, who, while by no means a neoLuddite or an anti-technologist, is nonetheless concerned about the attitudes that technology emerges from, reinforces and masks.2 These are widely associated with a postlapsarian view, where the artifice of technology is repeatedly measured against the prior idyllic state of nature. For example, Waters characterises the modernist outlook as a deeply technological one, where ‘moderns have been attempting for quite some time to make their life artificial, reflecting the desire to reject the human condition that is grounded in nature’.3 Here, technology is opposed to a prior (human) nature that, although

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Waters doesn’t define in these terms, is clearly influenced by a vision of nature promulgated by Eden as wholesome, where technology is absent in any clear or conventional way.4 Although Waters claims to espouse an eschatology that moves away from origins,5 given his favouring of (human) nature that is concordant with theological anthropogeny, it seems that Waters’ anthropology and attitudes to technology are strongly informed by an emphasis on Eden as opposed to the world, and as desirable. Origins shape our projections of ends, it seems, and both mythological times bookend the human experience and resultantly become the measure for the present. Haraway writes against this, arguing that we should start from the here-and-now, the chthulucene, as opposed to Eden and other literal utopias, that is, places of no place. Just as Waters divides Eden from the world, so too does Haraway, yet, crucially, her cyborg ‘does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden’ and ‘cannot dream of returning to dust’.6 What Haraway conveys is hostility to the way that Eden compels us with at least an imagined or idealised chance of return. The cyborg, having no familiarity or place in Eden, emphatically denies that possibility of return. It ‘subvert[s] the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy’,7 which is typically technology. Thus, the symbolically charged verdurous landscapes encountered at the end of films such as Gravity (2013), as well as Terminator: Genisys (2015), and 28 Days Later (2002), are arguably suggestive of an Eden-like bliss absent of technology following a (post-)apocalyptic dystopia, which is denied as a possibility for the cyborg.8 The cyborg instead realises that we cannot abandon our technologies as though they are merely auxiliary or prosthetic parts of ourselves. Technologies are more deeply integrated with us than that. According to Haraway, Eden clearly informs our ideas of soteriology, whereas ‘the cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history’.9 The cyborg is not motivated by secluded retreats to a former land void of technology, as we find in the films listed above where the going gets tough, and the tough get going, so to speak. There is, put differently, no happy ending for the cyborg. This is because the cyborg realises and revels in its technological

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complicity, such that nothing (i.e., technology, organisms, humans) can be isolated or abstracted against its other enmeshed parts; there can be no final (substantive) resolve. This cyborgian logic is opposed to the discrete identities found in Eden. Here, technology is absent, and so a yearning for a romanticised, ‘natural’ habitat is vindicated. Thus, while, for theologians such as Waters, ‘the rule and reign of Christ does not lead the world back to Eden’,10 Eden nonetheless continues to inform our attitudes to technology and something of our hopes for the future, in accordance with a certain vision of (human) nature that first appeared in the Garden. The Edenic myth, in short, gives us a (human) nature and a starting point that is reflected in our hopes and expectations for an endpoint, or a telos, in which we are delivered from the artifice of technologies. Contra this account, Haraway distances herself from the notion of natality at the root of ‘nature’ and locates the cyborg elsewhere: ‘the cyborg is not “born” but it does have a matrix! Or better, it doesn’t have a mother, but it does have a matrix! It wasn’t born in a garden, but it certainly was born in a history’.11 The focus is on the present with all of its entanglements, and the (hi)stories that shape it, rather than understanding the present against the yardsticks of origin and telos. With these yardsticks, Haraway argues, ‘history is erased, for other organisms as well as for humans, in the doctrine of types and intrinsic purposes, and a kind of timeless stasis in nature is piously narrated’.12 Against this stasis, Haraway denies the cyborg any stake in Eden, which is the ἀrxh (arche¯; beginning) that ‘erases history’. Again, tensions between immanence and transcendence, and between the cyborg and the goddess (respectively) appear. The denial of Eden means that attention is not taken away from the nuances of the present, and we do not yearn for salvation inspired by, or marked by a return to, the Garden. The issue for Haraway is that this salvation mythology infiltrates our cultural sensibilities, including attitudes about others and ourselves;13 ‘we have all been colonised by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse’.14 Humans, for example, are seen as elevated and special against the other creatures of Eden. To this end, the Eden myth operates alongside a substantive account of (human) nature, where nature remains as a secure backdrop or even a failsafe to

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our distinctly human characters that seek expansion and exploration. Alfonso Cuaron’s film Gravity (2013) expresses this notion well, where the protagonist, Ryan, dramatically ventures through mishaps and escapades in space and eventually returns to the safe haven of earth in an Eden-like tableau. The significance of Eden here manifests in how, ‘in the Garden, Western “man” may begin again the first journey, the first birth from within the sanctuary of nature’.15 For Haraway, the distinctness of Eden is traceable in our escapist fantasies of rebirth and transcendence. What we need instead are narratives of regeneration, monstrosity16 and immanence, where discreteness is thoroughly discredited in favour of relationality and (con)fusions. Like others, I am sceptical about Haraway’s emphasis on radical immanence whilst calling for the need to overcome categories, distinctions and binaries. I concur that we need to find a way to start with our relationalities and the (hi)stories that narrate them rather than discrete utopias, but to continue to isolate and discriminate against Eden and transcendence is surely a self-limiting aspect of Haraway’s theories. Particularly as, in more self-reflexive and autobiographical parts of her work, Haraway concedes the ongoing significance of religion rather than to call for radical immanence and secularity away from ‘sky gods’: I know in my heart that [. . .] I could have remained a Roman Catholic and thought anything I wanted to think if I was willing to put enough work into it, because these universal stories have that capacity, they really can accommodate anything at all. At a certain point you ask if there isn’t another set of stories you need to tell, another account of an unconscious. One that does a better job accounting for the subjects of history.17

While Haraway recognises the compellingness of religious narratives here, her comments demonstrate how the Edenic metanarrative is problematic in terms of its detachment from ‘the subjects of history’, and this is what the figure of the cyborg attempts to re-address. In other words, Eden offers us an alternative, mythological land and time outside of our own, and to the extent that we use it to guide our own attitudes regarding (human) nature and technology, it detracts us from the complexities of our own situation and leads us to see that situation in an eschewed way.

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The cyborg, for Haraway, must necessarily be posited as an alternative to Eden and outside of that mythology because of how accommodating Eden is as a metanarrative. There is the impression here that the Eden myth proliferates by absorbing and ‘cannibalising’18 different stories, in turn leading us to assess things through a singular, narrow lens.19 Illustrating this, we tend to regard technologies in terms of technophobia or technophilia deriving from Edenic assumptions of human nature as perfect or fallen (sinful), rather than beginning with relationalities and critical attention on the imploded context as an alternative grounding. Another example of a ‘cannibalising’ discourse, for Haraway, is psychoanalysis and its championing of Oedipal stories. This is in fact seen as part of the Eden metanarrative that we are inheritors of and have culturally appropriated.20 As Arthur Walker-Jones notes, psychoanalysis depends ‘on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of women/nature’.21 The goddess figure codifies such a logic of difference; the cyborg, however, directly challenges that by skipping ‘the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense’, and hence it ‘would not recognise the Garden of Eden’.22 The cyborg and Eden (and their undergirding figurations and mythologies), in short, appear to be sharply distinguished.23 In making this claim, though, caution needs to be exercised so as to avoid a reading of humans and technologies in a similar vein to Waters’, where humans are seen as created with an originary perfection from which they have since fallen into a world of technology where cyborgs dwell. If cyborgs are not from Eden, then Haraway may vindicate Waters’ position that also makes distinctions between the Garden and technology. On the one hand, this makes sense: the cyborg, for Haraway, ‘is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence’.24 These traits suggest that the cyborg belongs in a kind of anti-Eden which is, true to the etymology of ‘utopia’, a place of no place; like Eden, a mythological place. Haraway uses this utopian cyborg standpoint to argue against our binarised, anthropocentric worldview that, she contends, is rooted in notions of the Garden. In effect, Haraway posits a distinction between the world as structured according to

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binaries marked by the Edenic myth, and the world as figured according to cyborgian principles of implosions and (con)fusions. In positing the cyborg as a utopic counterpoint to Eden, though, Haraway is selective over what she wants to include in her cyborgian world, her chthulucene. This is contradictory to the logic of implosions, which is about bearing differences rather than opposing or absorbing and subsuming them. As Haraway herself puts it: [T]aking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts.25

Why should this mean, however, that theology, specifically Eden mythology, should be itself demonised or opposed to science? Is Eden, as a significant (hi)story, not a part of ‘the boundaries of daily life’, and does it not therefore require an equally skilful reconstruction? I would argue that Haraway’s polemical reading of cyborgs paradoxically suggests troubling dualisms that contradict her own anti-dualistic sentiments figured by the cyborg. Foremost among these dualisms is that between Eden and the cyborg, although it suggests further associated dualisms between immanence and transcendence, utopia and chthulucene and theology and science. The way that Haraway figures the cyborg as immanent and as outside of Edenic salvation history results in further exclusions that de-emphasise the theological in favour of the scientific and the ‘sensible’, which is strongly favoured over categories of belief.26 Although Haraway usefully acknowledges the ‘colonising disputes of Christianity’ here, by associating belief solely with a category of religion she is neglecting an epistemology that embeds belief in scientific and other practices. This simplifies and stratifies our (hi)stories in an age and a time that we simply cannot afford to do so. Indeed, as Haraway writes mere lines after critiquing religious histories of belief, claiming that it is non-chthulucean, ‘staying with the trouble, yearning toward resurgence, requires inheriting hard histories, for everybody, but not equally and not in the same ways’.27

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In short, binaries and categories undermine how: Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.28

Although ‘infidel’ suggests an unfaithfulness and an opposition to Eden, we should be reminded of the ‘blasphemy’ that Haraway opens her Manifesto with, which involves ‘taking things very seriously’ rather than apostasy.29 The term ‘heteroglossia’, more significantly, as linguist Mikhail Bakhtin notes, refers to ‘another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way’.30 Refraction, rather than opposition, binary or dualism, is key here. The task is not to reject stories or metanarratives, but to work with them via a critical hybridity, and to refigure and rearticulate them. With this in mind, we are compelled to ask: is there an alternative way of figuring Eden through the critical lens of the cyborg? CONTINUITIES: EDEN-CYBORGS To summarise briefly, Waters dichotomises technology and nature in terms of sinfulness and Edenic innocence (respectively). Insofar as Haraway denies both innocence and nature, brought together by an Edenic outlook,31 it could be argued that she makes a similar assertion. However, to posit such a dichotomous view of pre- and post-lapsarian human nature is to oversimplify the matter. There are fundamental continuities between human nature as made in the image of God, and technological expression that manifests in the technocultural milieu that we are inseparable from. This means that there are continuities between original and fallen human nature, and they can be traced in reflections on technology from, among others, Philip Hefner. According to Hefner, ‘we are, first of all, thoroughly natural creatures’,32 and this is reconciled with how our future is ‘thoroughly conditioned by science and technology’.33 To briefly recapitulate, Hefner sees human nature as inherently technological, and he assimilates this within a theological framework that, unlike Waters’, does not align technologies with fallenness. To this extent, Hefner

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could be seen as evincing a notion of homo faber, where humans, seen as creators, remake themselves and their world in accordance with a certain theologically legitimised reading of human nature. As Anne Foerst writes of this concept: God has created humans in God’s image, which includes creativity and intuition as well as artisanship. If we are creative, we praise God by celebrating God’s glory and by participating in God’s creative power.34

To engage in technological activity, according to Hefner and to those who espouse a view of homo faber, is to act in a way entirely in accordance with human nature as designed by God via imago dei. Hefner’s account means that human nature always has been technological and thus technology is natural. This marks the close parallels between his theology of the ‘created co-creator’ and Andy Clark’s notion of the ‘natural-born cyborg’.35 The continuities between theological anthropogeny and ongoing human action in the world are here emphasised contra an account of lapsarianism. Indeed, for Hefner, ‘the fall is rejected except in a decisively figurative manner, since we cannot accept that humans ever existed in a prior state of perfection’.36 Whereas Waters uses the Fall as a schism between Eden and human expulsion from the Garden to inform his critical reading of technology, then, Hefner makes no such division. Instead, Hefner argues that ‘the creature who bears the image of God is the same creature who lives in original sin’.37 In this sense, humans were created as incomplete (and hence, neither wholesome nor perfect). While, in the light of the fact that emphasis is maintained in Hefner’s work on naturalness, this does not challenge Eden as an originary point, on the other hand how the human is figured within Eden as an innocent figure in a serene paradise is certainly challenged. Connoting this sentiment, Haraway writes in the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ that, ‘with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either’.38 This is a difficult statement: does it mean that cyborgs were never in the Garden, or that they never left? Both Hefner and Haraway seem to converge on the idea that innocence is the chief issue concerning Eden,39 but if Eden is reconceptualised such that it is no longer regarded as a landmark of

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purity and discrete identities that tessellate into a neatly ordered whole, then we may not need to oppose it to our technocultural milieu, as was presented in the previous section. In other words, rather than positing a cyborgian, utopic counterpoint to Eden that is equally problematic, an alternative articulation of Eden in terms of non-innocence might seem viable and even desirable. Strikingly, closer assessment of the surrounding symbolism of Eden reveals that the notion of the ‘Garden’ does not suggest something necessarily ‘natural’.40 A garden is a space that we typically reserve for leisure activities, and we invest ourselves in the land to this end by growing plants and vegetables, and building spaces to play, gather or eat.41 These are non-innocent practices that encourage us to reconceptualise ‘nature’. While I am cautious of the etymological inferences of nature as a term, for Haraway: We must find another relationship to nature besides reification, possession, appropriation and nostalgia. No longer able to sustain the fictions of being either subjects or objects, all the partners in the potent conversations that constitute nature must find a new ground for making meanings together.42

With this in mind, the shared space of gardens (and more generally the trope of nature) can be reconsidered in relational terms, where emphasis is given to the shared construction of meanings and the politics of cohabitation that are always ongoing and complex.43 If such notions can be read into Eden, then a cyborg articulation of it can be ascertained. This, I propose, requires intensive ‘gardening work’ pertaining to interpretations of imago dei that I have discussed at length, whereby notions of human nature are consequential for notions of nature (and techno-nature, or even, highlighting the antithesis of technology and nature in substantive Edenic ways, techno-nature) more broadly. Firstly, a substantive interpretation of nature must be overcome. The garden, in short, conjures problematic notions of nature-asdiscrete or as ‘other’, whereas, in reality, there is no isolatable ‘nature’ as such. This marks one way in which Haraway rejects Eden; it conceals too much about our amalgamations in favour of notions of discreteness. For example, ‘nature’ is, for us, packaged, marketed and heavily commercialised,44 and our desires for such romanticised

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natural spaces, namely gardens, rely on images of naturalness as distinct from the artificial or unnatural.45 In this sense, gardens are discrete spaces that function to compartmentalise nature and culture. And yet, according to Haraway, our journeys to these places ‘become tourist excursions that remind the voyager of the price of such displacements – one pays to see fun-house reflections of oneself’.46 Insofar as gardens are determined and maintained by humans, they are human(ocentric) constructions that can only reflect our own human(ocentric) ideologies back to us. This ordered worldview conceals the (con)fusions that mark our imploded, cyborgian ontologies, where there can be no clear divisions that segregate spatially and/or symbolically. By realising how these boundaries are constructed, we can begin to deconstruct them and focus instead on the lived practices that take place in gardens as a means to refiguring them, as, for example a functional account of (human) nature suggests. Again, though, we find here that substantive assumptions are instructive: gardens are spaces design(at)ed for human ends, which are underwritten by a certain view of human nature closely related to ‘the story of Adam’s commission in the Garden as planetary park ranger, with the special power to name his charges’.47 Here, to reiterate, humans are divided over and above that which they tend to. With gardens, although there is an involvement of humans, nature and technology, it is humans that are decisive and that strive to assert themselves as being in control. A parallel of this functional-substantive view of (human) nature can be discerned in Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, where the fenced-off and tilled garden-like Compounds, also referred to as ‘castles’ with elitist connotations, create deep hostilities between those inside and those outside.48 The issue with gardens, as depicted here, is not that they incorporate different parts, but that they displace categorical boundaries as perimeters. Technology, nature and humans may coexist in the garden, then, but each garden is bordered by a human ordering of the world. The destructiveness of this human ordering manifests in Atwood’s series with ‘Paradice’ being the site of a very human apocalypse,49 in a manner strongly redolent of Haraway’s assessment of Eden.50 Spatially and

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symbolically, this humanocentrism also results in the additional understanding of nature as wilderness or Other against the ‘artifice’ of the garden(er).51 Gardens do not (immediately) go deep enough in our challenging of boundaries because they are precisely defined by them. They are, in other words, too neat and ordered for the chaotic and (con)fused relational world of the cyborg. On the other hand, while I have argued against this functional view of imago dei insofar as it has a tendency to return to substantive differences between humans-as-stewards and the rest of creation, I have also noted that in its moving towards an emphasis on action over substance, there is scope to articulate a non-anthropocentric position that leads towards relationality and interaction. Paying due attention to action in any given context or (hi)story involves acknowledging, to various degrees, dynamism rather than inertia. Inertial views are problematic as they lend themselves to anthropocentrism, where the human is seen firstly as stable and substantive, and secondly as central to other categories. With regards to the Eden narrative, emphasis on dynamism undercuts notions of paradise, as Claus Westermann notes: It is a ‘land of delight’ (Eden), a rich and beautiful land reflecting the fact that God and man are not yet separated. It is not really a garden of God, because man has created it primarily to provide for man; but God can be close to man in the garden. It is important however that God puts man in the garden to till it and keep it. This means that it is no fairyland, no Utopia, no Paradise for ‘blessed bliss’, but that it is a land which needs tilling and care. The idea of a Paradise which is a perpetual state of bliss is quite foreign to the Old Testament.52

While Westermann maintains an anthropocentrism in his interpretation of Eden, he emphasises action in developing a functional account of (human) nature that challenges a static, substantive notion of nature as paradisiacal. Substantive readings are what we tend to assume of Eden in a culture bereft of theological insight that leaves us with straw notions of sky gods and detached transcendence that do not necessarily reflect the richness of theological traditions and (hi)stories. Against these readings, the need to ascertain more accurate, nuanced and critical insights is at the core of my argument calling for a theological engagement with the cyborg figure.

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The challenging of substantive notions, particularly accounts of the human as special and central, is consolidated by realising how actions are always interactions. By refocusing on such interactions, we then realise that ‘gardens’ are inclusive places, where ‘nature’ is accordingly refigured by Haraway: [Nature] is not the ‘other’ who offers origin, replenishment, and service. Neither mother, nurse, nor slave, nature is not matrix, resource, or tool for the reproduction of man. Nature is, however, [. . .] figure, construction, artefact, movement, displacement. Nature cannot preexist its construction.53

Emphatically, Haraway writes against substantive or functional humanocentric attitudes to nature. Instead, the concept of ‘nature’ is expanded to account for the complex ways in which all identities are processual and relational. Just as I have advocated a criticalrelational interpretation of human nature (via imago dei) that can acknowledge implosions and (con)fusions, so too do we need to develop a concomitant relational interpretation of nature. The two views, of nature and human nature, read in the context of Eden and the Garden, go hand-in-hand, and rethinking what it is to be human necessitates reconsidering our non-central place in vast networks, which requires rethinking nature also as a network. The resultant relational articulation need not exclude Eden, but it will demand a constant struggling against substantive notions of (human) nature in its ongoing reflection and interrogation of these networks and ‘fields of difference’.54 IMPLOSIONS: CYBORGS IN THE GARDEN How are we to ensure that we appropriately figure both cyborgs and Eden in this relational framework characterised by chaos, (con)fusions and flux? How are we to avoid the anthropocentrism that is deeply rooted in our sensibilities? Two recent attempts have been made to reconcile cyborgs with Eden: one regards Adam and Eve as cyborg in an ironically blasphemous way that subverts some of Haraway’s subversions in the Cyborg Manifesto; another claims that the infamous serpent is emblematic of cyborgs in the Garden. I will consider each of these in

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the light of the preceding discussion, in an attempt to ascertain the grounds for a viable interaction of cyborgs and Eden, leading towards a theological cyborgology.

Original humans as cyborg? Although, as many have noted, ‘one of Haraway’s most challenging assertions is that Cyborg is not to be contextualised in any story of origin’,55 one theologian who works closely on Haraway’s cyborg figure attempts to do just that: Jeanine Thweatt-Bates boldly reads the cyborg into Eden. In her own words, ‘I dare to imitate Haraway’s use of provocative figures to shape an answer that flatly contradicts her original assertion that the cyborg does not belong in the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve as cyborg.’56 For Thweatt-Bates, this ironic approach attempts to blaspheme against Haraway’s own blasphemy.57 This involves taking seriously that which it is working with, and reminds us that the cyborg is a stuttering and incomplete discourse that must be subject to ongoing and critical analysis,58 including from that which it critiques itself. In other words, the cyborg does not have the final say on Eden, and Thweatt-Bates’ arguments ensure that the discussion continues. And yet, there is undeniably the impression that, by assimilating the cyborg into Eden in a manner so disregarding of Haraway’s comments to the contrary, Thweatt-Bates conveys a sense in which the Edenic mythology is affirmed and vindicated. It appears, to return to a point raised earlier, as a ‘cannibalising metanarrative’. Here, Thweatt-Bates’ ironic take on Haraway’s work undoes itself; for Haraway, ‘irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true’.59 ThweattBates’ rendering of Adam and Eve as cyborgs arguably resolves these figures into a larger whole, namely the Edenic metanarrative. Within this framework, Thweatt-Bates affirms notions of nature and origin that have been exposed as problematic in this chapter and throughout this investigation. What we instead need to explore is a more ironic tension that holds incompatible things together without seeking to integrate them or homogenise their differences. Comparing this position to the equally problematic alternative explored

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earlier in this chapter that dualistically opposes cyborgs and Eden, we realise that what is needed is a way of ‘doing difference differently’, and this is suggested by (con)fusions that place strong emphasis on critical relationality. A key part of this critical relationality, then, needs to be able to account for tensions without resorting to dialectics and dualisms, as this would otherwise form a larger whole where the parts are discretely defined against one another (this is the case with substantive approaches to theological anthropology). Therefore, we cannot merely oppose Eden and cyborgs as Haraway’s Manifesto might initially suggest, but instead a somewhat subversive reading, particularly a theological one that is able to respond to the challenges raised by the cyborg, is crucial. What Thweatt-Bates seeks to convey in her theological account of Adam and Eve as cyborg, similar to Hefner, is a denial of innocence and purity. She writes, ‘there is no innocence to be regained for the cyborgs in the Garden; to be cyborg is to know good and evil, that is, to know that innocence is illusory’.60 In declaring a lack of innocence, Thweatt-Bates does not want to cling to notions of humans as created in isolation from the rest of creation or as innately bearing imago dei as a means of justifying any of our actions. Rather, ‘God marks this creature, the human, as unique in no way other than God’s chosen relation to it; [. . .] the human is not “alone in the world”.’61 A move towards relationality is suggested here, both with God as well as with other creatures, and it is this kind of noninnocent ontology that Thweatt-Bates theologically appropriates from Haraway’s blasphemous figures and ideas. This ontology is noninnocent because it is not pure. We cannot idealise a time when we were perfect and nor can we strive to restore ourselves to that illusory state of perfection. It is possible to find support for this move in Haraway’s own work: ‘My focus is the figure of a broken and suffering humanity, signifying – in ambiguity, contradiction, stolen symbolism and unending chains of noninnocent translation – a possible hope.’62 In lieu of an innocent or perfected possible state of being, Haraway emphasises our brokenness (against Edenic claims to holism). Theologically, our suffering necessitates some kind of salvation, yet Haraway rejects it as

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part of her radical immanence. In short, the cyborg cannot be saved, and it certainly ‘does not depend on salvation through heterosexual reproductive coupling orchestrated by an all-knowing Father’.63 By denying a prior state of perfection, there is nothing for the cyborg to be saved from or returned to. Thweatt-Bates’ reading of the cyborg as bearing imago dei does not necessarily challenge this critique of soteriology. Imago dei is primarily made to be about relationality in cyborgian terms, which for ThweattBates simply means ‘to have been made a creature who is simultaneously kin and other: to God, to other humans, and to nonhumans’.64 Thweatt-Bates here refers to the tools and materials of anthropogenesis (i.e., the dust of the ground;65 Adam’s rib) in questioning the ordering and naturalness of Edenic creation and existence. This emphasis on (con)fused parts and borrowings, or identities built of bricolages, indicates a technological creatureliness that can work difference differently via a critical-relational interpretation. Here, as Terence Fretheim notes, ‘creation is a seamless web’ that includes not only creaturely relations, but also those with the Creator, where God is to be distinguished but not separated from the world. There is, it seems, a closer intimacy between all beings and actors in the Garden, both creaturely and divine. Jurgen Moltmann’s claim that ‘the image of God always corresponds precisely to the presence of God in the world, for it represents that presence’ gestures towards this. It does so by sketching out a nuanced and mediated sense of presence that works at collapsing the problematic dualism between God/man and transcendence/immanence discerned in Haraway’s work. There is scope to develop this, in my estimation, with emphasis on articulation rather than representation, for representation suggests a stand-in or acting on behalf of, which in turn conjures impressions of divine absence and human ventriloquising. Articulation allows for the reflection and inclusion of other voices and perspectives, but in a way that tells those different (hi)stories differently. What Thweatt-Bates’ paralleling of the cyborg with the original humans leaves open to criticism, however, similarly to Hefner’s theological position that undergirds it, is that it stops short of a deep interrogation of (human) nature because of how the cyborg is assimilated into pre-existing figures. By this, I refer to the way that

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the human remains central in Thweatt-Bates’ account, even amidst the interconnections between different beings that she identifies. Tellingly, for Thweatt-Bates, ‘the cyborg pair in the Garden are what they are because of the construction and contestation of these boundaries’ between human and divine, human and animal, human and human.66 The boundaries and the humans pre-exist and determine the cyborg. This is arguably similar to trans/humanist depictions of the cyborg where the specifically human is re-presented, for example, in space (or in cyberspace), by cyborg figurations.67 As Thweatt-Bates goes on to say, ‘the boundaries do not disappear in our acknowledgement of our construction and negotiation of them – they become conditions of relationship, not obstacles preventing it’.68 This passage indicates that we need to take the cyborg deeper than hooking it onto pre-existing figures and identities. For Haraway, ‘“we” did not originally choose to be cyborgs’,69 and so, rather than seeing the boundaries associated with the human(ocentric) ordering of the world as coming prior, we need to see the relational and imploded field of difference as prior, that human(ocentric) boundaries later overlaid. If somehow this could be recaptured in our mythological articulation of the Garden, then there would be a possibility of interacting cyborgs with Eden albeit in an ironic, subversive and even blasphemous way.

Serpent as cyborg? One way of working around this hurdle of humanocentrism is to suggest that other figures in the Garden parallel the cyborg figure. This serves as a way of reminding us that it is not just humans that are to be regarded as cyborg, as though being cyborg were an evolutionary lineage kept exclusively for humans (as is suggested by proponents of transhumanism where we also find reference to the cyborg). Cyborgs are (con)fusions of different parts, so to speak of only one figure as cyborg does a disservice to these more deeply imploded ontologies. To this end, Arthur Walker-Jones advocates a reading of the serpent in the Garden as cyborg: ‘In the Eden story, the serpent is [like the cyborg] a boundary constructing and confusing monster.’70 The serpent, for example, is described as ‘craftier’ than other wild

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animals made by God, and it speaks directly to humans (Genesis 3:1), thereby challenging the notion that language is exclusively a marker of human uniqueness.71 It may seem to reside within our typical classifications and orderings, but it also – craftily – challenges them, not unlike the cyborg itself as Haraway articulates it. For Walker-Jones, it is significant that the serpent in particular be read as cyborgian because not only does it remind us of creaturely ambiguities and confusions that are associated with the cyborg figure, but additionally it emphasises the moral ambiguities that are central to the Edenic mythology. On this point, ‘the serpent represents symbolically the potential for both positive and negative, good and bad, blessing and curse’.72 Walker-Jones intentionally nuances the reading of the Fall by reminding us of the benefits that came through eating the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.73 In this reading, a technological existence is mandated by the conditions of the Fall, where technologies now mediate between humans and the land in the interests of survival, contrary to the more harmonious existence of humans and others in Eden. It is, in Walker-Jones’ account, not about the Fall as unambiguously caught up in sin and punishment, but about living with the implications – both good and bad – of what the forbidden fruit has given us. This is not, as Walker-Jones stresses, ‘a Star Wars ethics where the forces of good and the forces of evil are easily distinguishable because the good wear white and look like us’.74 Put differently, distinctions between good and bad are by no means as clear-cut as we would like to assume and, for Walker-Jones, in like fashion, this is also the case for our Adamic orderings and taxonomies of species in the Garden. Ultimately, in Walker-Jones’ reading, there is a focus on relationality: ‘The serpent and the trees are actants co-creating humanity.’75 Humans do not exist or function independently of other beings, but are shaped by (as well as shaping of) others. This corresponds to a deep sense of relationality presented by Bruno Latour under the notion of ‘actor-network theory’. Latour centralises his account on action, but this is emphatically not associated solely with conscious agents (such as humans)76 and action is instead ‘a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that

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have to be slowly disentangled’.77 Actions thus forge complex interconnected webs across multiple actors, where ‘an “actor” in the hyphenated expression actor-network is not the source of an action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it’.78 In other words, in Edenic mythology, the snake, the tree and the human are all interconnected via actions, such that action is always interaction. In theological anthropological terms, a fully decentred functional-relational interpretation seems to be espoused, which is a significant effect of referring to the snake as cyborg. We see something of this in how the mythological serpent of Eden is held ‘disturbingly’ close to humans in shaping their identities. To recapitulate a central thesis about cyborgs explored and emphasised throughout this investigation, as Haraway puts it, ‘far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling’.79 This signifies implosions where critical relationality is our only viable ontological position because discrete or stable identities are discredited amidst a world of chaos, flux and (con)fusions. This seems to correspond with Walker-Jones’ account of the serpent in Eden: ‘the snake is [the humans’] partner in acquiring the wisdom and discernment they need to fulfil their vocation as humans’.80 What is problematically suggested here, though, is a sense of human nature (or destiny) as discrete, however much it is ascertained via recourse to various ‘partners’. These partners remain ‘other’ to the human, which suggests that, while knots and confusions are discernible in Walker-Jones’ account resembling actor-network theory, the deep fusions equally fundamental to cyborg hybridity are downplayed or unrealised. Actor-network theory is not ‘incapable or unwilling to find stable and fully formed humans and nonhumans populating the world’,81 and there is, ultimately, a discrete sense of human nature to be secured. This suggests a broadly substantive reading of theological anthropology. Notions of stability as well as completeness (i.e., ‘fully formed’), however, run contrary to the guiding principles of the cyborg and of its accompanying (con)fusions and critical relationality. Something more substantive is affirmed, which coincides better with a ‘companion species’ approach outlined by Haraway in her post-

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cyborg work. Companion species, in my view, remain caught up in notions of nature and the ways that we structure and order it taxonomically and often anthropocentrically. It contrasts the cyborgian implosions that include technologies in complex and (con)fusing ways. With the cyborg, ‘there is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic’.82 The serpent of Eden does nothing to speak of these technological (con)fusions, and so cannot arguably be regarded as a cyborg. Given the way that Walker-Jones presents the snake as a ‘partner’ to humans, I would suggest that it serves as a more viable model for companion species. As Haraway describes this post-cyborg theory of companion species, ‘we make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love’.83 These fleshly, almost benevolent, relations place greater emphasis on otherness, and so they are predicated on differences. The cyborg, contrariwise, does difference differently via a principle of critical hybridity that bears and reworks difference across complex relationalities. In the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, for example, Haraway discusses how ‘the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us’.84 Cyborgs significantly go beyond solely fleshly relations as technologies take us further into the virtual. These cyborgs are complex and far from benevolent. As Haraway goes on to say, ‘the ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as they are materially.’85 With the spread of cyborgian technologies, an Edenic mythology that neglects interrogations of power or that retreats to notions of naturalness or organic creatureliness can only have limited use or gain. A cyborgian articulation of Eden, to combat this, needs to be able and willing to scrutinise at a deep and fundamental level the ways that beings interrelate, and to allow for technology to be seen as part of such interrelations. It needs to abandon innocent, unified or holistic starting points, and for this reason it cannot be reconciled with an understanding of the Fall that Walker-Jones’ serpentine cyborg inevitably brings our attention to. While Walker-Jones ambitiously attempts to rework taxonomies and categories via the snake, ultimately,

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Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a onceupon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.86

The ‘otherness’ of cyborgs here might refer to how they have been typically figured in marginal positions against the central human subject, and how they acquire a subversive power from these liminal dwellings.87 Interestingly, though, if cyborgs are to seize these ‘tools’ (i.e., (hi)stories) to guarantee their survival and not salvation, then deriving from this, cyborgs need to re-articulate rather than reject myths of Eden, and dispel of notions of original innocence accordingly. ARTICULATIONS: RETURN TO EDEN? From this analysis of two readings of cyborgs in Eden, what is clear is that a viable theological appropriation of the cyborg, and the basis of a theological cyborgology, must not regard the human as central, as this implies a substantive core to human (and nonhuman) nature. This substantive core suggests discreteness of identities rather than fusions or confusions; divides the human from the cyborg; and gives us an imagined state of innocence to which we long to return. Instead, we are to use the cyborg as a way of renegotiating the human – divine boundary in a way that removes the possibility of purity or innocence from our mythological, theological or metaphysical sensibilities. More exploration of transcendence, however, is needed here. For Haraway, it is not possible to escape the sticky networks of the present in which we are fundamentally enmeshed. Transcendence is seen as a form of escapist fantasy that allows us to visualise a way in which we are somehow removed or distant from the immanent.88 To be fully immersed in the immanent is to be non-innocent and to dwell with others via relationality and (con)fusions. It is in the light of this emphasis on radical immanence that the problematisation of Eden as offering a mythological counterpoint to our non-innocent position can be framed. Ideas of origin link to ideas of transcendence

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for Haraway, insofar as an ‘immediate vision of the origin’ suggests the hope that ‘perhaps the future can be fixed. By saving the beginnings, the end can be achieved and the present can be transcended’.89 We cannot be seduced by such notions of fixity, or by a possibility of transcendence because these attitudes offer us hope of salvation from our present situation, whereas no such escapism is possible. As Peter Scott convincingly argues, though, transcendence and immanence need not be a zero/sum game in the way that Haraway presents it.90 Instead, transcendence itself can be noninnocent insofar as it is refigured among networks thickly knotted with relationalities. The (hi)stories that narrate these knots comprise immanent contexts whilst also partly transcending interactors. This refigures our understandings of both transcendence and immanence in ways that go beyond Haraway’s own articulations. Drawing on this, the cyborg can affirm Eden, but only by regarding it in decisively non-innocent ways. To this end, consider again Thweatt-Bates’ work where, although humans were made in the Garden, they cannot be said to have enjoyed any kind of originary innocence. Interestingly, Haraway does not seem to discard this position: But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naivete of innocence.91

In short, by denying a pre- and post-lapsarian nature as the subject of the cyborgian critique of Eden, we cannot discriminate between innocence and guilt. Consequently, we cannot berate ourselves for our allegedly ‘fallen’ or ‘guilty’ nature because such a nature does not exist, or at least certainly not in substantive terms. Emphasis must not be given to moral presumptions about identities, but instead to the complexity of (con)fused identities and critical relationalities. This is because there is no innocent nature(s) against which to assess conduct, as cyborgian implosions resist such an antithetical standpoint. If we are to affirm Eden in this framework, then, provocatively, cyborgs must be seen as never having left the Garden. On the one hand, this may be a striking observation, given that Haraway also declares

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in the same essay (and elsewhere) that ‘cyborgs have no natural history, no origin story, no Garden of Eden and thus no hope of, nor interest in, simplistic unity or purity’.92 Yet the point is that if the Eden mythology is refigured so that it avoids notions of ‘simplistic unity or purity’, then it is no longer to be necessarily regarded as oppositional to the cyborg. Indeed, as Jennifer Gonza´lez goes on to say, ‘nevertheless, given their multiple parts, and multiple identities, they [cyborgs] will always be read in relation to a specific historical context’.93 The task is not to liberate cyborgs from problematic notions of Eden, as this would make the cyborg into an escapist or transcendentalist fantasy. We must instead work with these notions and (hi)stories in new and nuanced ways.94 In this way, we cannot distinguish ourselves from Eden. Admittedly, this may be a difficult point to comprehend given that the cyborg cannot recognise nor return to Eden. Yet in making this point, I agree with Monica J. Casper, who calls for a ‘(re)situating’ of cyborgs ‘within the conditions of their origin in order to make sense of them analytically and politically’,95 and I add theologically, too. The goal here, as Haraway cites of Jim Clifford as a viable practice for the chthulucene (that I have posited cannot be fully realised without theological engagement given the influence of theological narratives), is to tell ‘stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections’.96 An alternative articulation of Eden as part of this endeavour both constitutes and enables such surprising relationalities. Engagement with multiple (hi)stories (con)fuses the narratives, meaning in particular that notions such as immanence and transcendence are not radically demarcated. Narratives of transcendence, for example, impact our figurations of the more immanent in decisively non-innocent ways. Effectively, with this in mind, saying that we, as cyborgs, have never left Eden is not wholly different from saying that, as cyborgs, we have never been in Eden. This is because the Eden that cyborgs cannot recognise or cannot dream of returning to is reconsidered in our own theological and mythological reflections. To be sure, I am not proposing here an assimilation of the cyborg to Eden. Rather, I am holding cyborgs and Eden, as (con)fused and co-informative, in a tension

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that demands ongoing critical work of both. I offer no resolutions unlike Thweatt-Bates’ reading of Adam and Eve as cyborgs, or WalkerJones’ reading of the snake as cyborg. To identify the cyborg with any particular person or being is to affirm the substantive discreteness of that figure in a manner perhaps more befitting of companion species. The cyborg is instead about (con)fusions, and as such, I suggest the cyborg (and Eden) as a set of questions that demand ongoing investigation. To briefly summarise my proposals for an ongoing critical dialogue between cyborgs and Eden: (1) The cyborg questions theology and Eden about its dependence on innocent subject positions in a range of forms. In these Edenic narratives, humans are seen as bearers of prelapsarian innocence in moral terms that impact our assessments of technology. There is also the substantive account most commonly read out of Eden that promotes discreteness of species and (id)entities, and beings are thus seen as innocent in their separateness and non-complicity with others. The cyborgian perspective challenges these attitudes, and instead emphasises our deep-seated interconnectedness and (con)fusions, where nothing can be decontextualised or abstracted from this complex milieu. (2) Eden must responsively question the cyborg about its emphasis on implosions and non-innocence: how, in short, can the cyborg articulate a valid sense of (con)fusions if it also sees fit to discard or discredit certain problematic theological notions such as transcendence or Eden? For a viable sense of critical relationality, these must be considered and not cast aside. Failure to do this affirms positions and mythologies of innocence by posing a radical and dualistic ‘other’ outside of the imploded system. Theological anthropology rooted in, whilst also reflecting on and nuancing, Eden holds the cyborg to account on the grounds of its emphasis on (con)fusions and critical relationality, and can moreover offer insights into how God might closely figure into such a deeply interconnected world.

We can evidently learn from both figurations of the cyborg in the Garden about how to articulate a ‘theological cyborgology’ that is suitably responsive to the key traits and critiques raised by the cyborg. However, we must ensure that we avoid trying to resolve the cyborg into something problematically ‘whole’ or ‘complete’.

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In relational terms, seeing Adam and Eve as cyborg can help us renegotiate the divine– human boundary, while seeing the snake as cyborg can remind us that we need to renegotiate this alongside divine-animal and human –animal boundaries. All of these views triangulate and respond to the deep (con)fusions implied by the critical relationality of the cyborg. Seeing the snake as cyborg can aid us in combating anthropocentrism, while seeing Adam and Eve as cyborg can resist our desire to regard (human) nature as dualistic and as ruptured around the key theological and soteriological moment of the Fall. Taking all of these points on board means that cyborgs are not just single figures in the Garden, but they are everywhere: ‘cyborg figures have a way of transfecting, infecting, everything’.97 Myths of origin, including Eden, cannot be seen as an exception here. All ideas, ideologies and identities infold; they are relational, imploded and (con)fused. In this cyborg articulation, Eden is refigured – perhaps dramatically so – but it is by no means excluded.

CONCLUSION

Doing Difference Differently: Towards a Cyborg Theology

CYBORGISATION By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.1

We are cyborgs. What does this mean? In one sense, cyborgs are about mixings of different parts, namely cybernetic and organic. To be a cyborg is thus to be defined in a way that emphasises such amalgamations; other words that can be used to highlight this are ‘chimeras’ and ‘hybrids’. One might be a cyborg, then, if cybernetic or even prosthetic implants are incorporated into one’s body. Prosthetic limbs until recently have been less mechanical or computational, but now emerging technologies are pioneering new forms of prostheses that can provide sensibility and neurologically stimulated control, among other things. Other cybernetic implants might be devices such as pacemakers, which regulate bodily functioning in a way not dissimilar to that envisioned by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, who proposed to apply findings from the use of a Rose osmotic pump in mice, to explore ways of technologically adapting human bodies, thereby allowing them to venture out into space and to explore new territories. In the not-toodistant future, as SF indicates and conveys to us, implanted computer

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chips may soon be grafted onto or into the body, denoting another level of human-machine fusions that have captivated the excitement and attention of technologists such as Kevin Warwick. Warwick implanted a cyborgian chip into his arm that enabled his body to interact with his environment and even with his wife in new communicative ways, immersing him further deeper in a technological lifeworld that arguably, at least according to media reports of his prototypes and research, makes him ‘more’ cyborg. On the other hand, as the discussion throughout this book has revealed, these fusions do not necessarily make us more cyborg: they may in fact more notably and perhaps more alarmingly, as many commentators claim, make us more or less human. In these accounts, cybernetic technologies are either absorbed within an understanding of humanness; or they are alternatively rejected and othered from such understandings. In the former instance, notions of humanness may be open to changes on a corporeal and physical level but some substantive traits such as reason, cognition or freedom (as some of the most commonly cited examples) are left intact. In the latter instance, cyborgian technologies are perceived as threatening on a deep and fundamental level to what it is to be human, and so they are not able to be assimilated within such notions. The ‘gates of difference’ in these cases are movable, yet not removable: the human requires a logic of sameness and difference in order to sustain itself. This means that some cyborgian technologies can comfortably be accommodated within the ‘human’ label, whereas others traverse a boundary and thus are positioned beyond the limits of humanness. In this instance, though, they nonetheless serve a function in demarcating where the conceptual ‘ends’ of the human are: this essentialises what it is to be human and thereby reveals a substantive approach to humans (as well as to technologies). Alternative articulations of the cyborg challenge this logic, and this provides us with another way in which we might be considered cyborgs. Regardless of the state of any physical fusions, which can be assimilated or rejected by assumptions about the human (i.e., a human with a pacemaker is still regarded as a human and not a cyborg, whereas in SF, a human with computerised, mechanised or cybernetic appendages is portrayed as in some way – for better or

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worse – superhuman, which suggests a degree of otherness), cyborgs suggest an alternative conceptual approach to our understandings of ourselves and the world. This is what it means, in Haraway’s terms, to be ‘theorised and fabricated hybrids’: on a figurative level, we live in complex systems that incorporate the cybernetic and the organic in inseparable ways, and to this end we can be considered as cyborgs (along with other actors in such systems, given that cyborgian identities are not exclusive to humans). Cyborgs are thus not necessarily about physical and corporeal fusions, but are about the demands of living in complex worlds, with technologies that enable new possibilities and new patterns of relationality, with species that must kill and be killed and where all actions bear wider consequences. The upshot of this is that, while facing up to the impact that in particular our historical technological and industrial developments have had on the wider environment, we cannot seek to ‘save’ the planet by similar appeals to technology in contemporary times. Technologies were previously at the forefront of utopian visions and attempts to perfect human societies, but they have also brought about new modes of relations in industrial and capitalist societies that have had negative consequences for human relations and for ecological attitudes.2 That is not to say, of course, that we should not seek out modest interventions to promote a more responsible environmental ethic: what need to change are the attitudes behind such interventions so that humans are not to be rendered the sole protectors of the environment, the sole destroyers or the sole agents involved, operating via passive technological tools. The complexity of the situation has always exceeded this, and perhaps now more than ever. Similarly, we cannot expect, anticipate, or place hopes in liberation from a decaying world, because to do so is to denounce close affinities that we have with other actants in terms of our significant impact on them, and vice versa. Moreover, it is to act in an inconsequential way that neglects the weightiness of our actions, and that operates according to an arrogant attitude that at best is deficient or misguided, but that at worst perpetuates the damages done by elitism. Sharp lines, in this dualistic and hierarchical logic, are drawn between oppressors and oppressed, and the disregard for the latter

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and abuse of power by the former can be seen to parallel divides made between humans and nonhuman others (animals, environment, technologies) – as well as divisions and subjugations within the category of the human, manifesting in malaises including colonialism, classism, sexism, racism, ableism, etc – insofar as everything is ordered to the idealised form of the human. From these parallels, we see how notions of nature and human nature – ecology and anthropology – are deeply intertwined. Liberation only makes sense within a logic that both posits and denies these entanglements in a selective manner, which is consequential while refusing to accept complicity. Contrariwise, cyborgs challenge the validity and ethics of such selective separations. They emphasise the consequences of their actions (as well as bearing the consequences of others’ actions) and cannot expect salvation or deliverance from them, either by their own means, or by divine means. In other words, cyborgs are firmly embedded on the ground and cannot escape the realities of their situation that shapes them and that they shape in turn. This is Haraway’s position, which Elaine Graham pithily summarises: ‘Her thesis is that science will not deliver the brave new world and no external force, technological or divine, will intervene to help us.’3 The cyborg must learn to take accountability for its conduct and, perhaps more accurately, for its stake in the complex relationalities that it is part of and that exceed it. Taking heed of such networks and relationalities means not starting from the monad and extending out from it, as has been largely the norm with humanocentric attitudes to technologies. Instead, the relational is always ontologically prior and, out of this, (id)entities are formed and reformed in dynamic ways. Taking relationality first in what I propose as a cyborgian reflection and critique is a difficult endeavour. This is purposive: theorising about cyborgs, and also as cyborgs, should not be easy, but is intended to provide a methodology or approach that allows us to slow down our lines of action and to reflect on the assumptions that underwrite them. Why do we think of ourselves in a certain way? Why do we use this to desire the things we do, or to undertake the lines of action that we seek or envisage? Cyborgs can never be an easy subject to work with because of how, as David Gunkel writes, ‘cyborg

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subjectivities, always in the plural and always in flux, are initially formed in and by the flow of information. Cyborg subjects, therefore, tend to be [. . .] essentially insubstantial.’4 To act as though the cyborg has been resolved or fully understood is to erroneously substantivise that figure. Given that cyborgs are in flux, are partial, and are caught in chaotic and complex networks and systems of relationalities, the cyborg demands and provides an opportunity for ongoing reflection and critique that is always embedded in shifting contexts. To think with the cyborg, as a cyborg, is to think anew in the freshness of the present context, which is foregrounded, but it is also to take heed of the histories and narratives – which I have termed ‘(hi)stories’ – that have shaped those contexts. This, I propose, includes theological stories such as Eden, which in part goes against Haraway’s statement that the cyborg would not recognise Eden and cannot dream of returning to dust. However, it is also consistent with Haraway’s views about mythological stories and fabulation, and I turn to this in sketching out a cyborg theology and anthropology. FABULATION To be considered a ‘cyborg’, then, does not necessarily, and indeed should not, equate to one singular assumption or set of identities. To regard the cyborg as such is to oversimplify it as an abstract figure. This is one of the chief problematics with our notions of humanness and what it is to be human: it is far too easy and tempting to reduce the figure of the human to images and snapshots. These snapshots may see the human as, for example, special or above other animals; as sinful; as perfectible; as in need of salvation. What these have in common is that they are all theological assessments of the human that are derivable from anthropogeny and from Genesis, where humans were made in the Garden of Eden. In all of these cases and more, presuppositions of the human influence and inform our assessment of our actions. The human, in other words, is measured against ideal types. Pertinent for an exploration of cyborgs are the ways that these ideal types are coded into the ways that we design and engage with technologies, which shape and respond to our ongoing interactions with the world. Early cybernetics, for example, responded

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to humanocentric notions of control and agency, and this is written into the context of the cyborg in a way that cannot be overlooked or abandoned. Otherwise, we risk construing the cyborg as a ‘man in space’, a free-floating and abstract construction that is assimilated into the substantivism that it seeks to critique and deconstruct. The cyborg bears multiple and complex (hi)stories that are weaved into its mechanical and metaphorical fabrics. It was not born in a garden, but it is made and remade in ongoing constructive and deconstructive practices in networks and relationalities. This is an inevitably collaborative enterprise that involves a range of actors: significantly, humans are not the only ones. We as humans are not isolatable or elevated in our conduct or efficacy above other animals, but rather as cyborgs we must reflect upon and realise all sorts of mutual entanglements that highlight how action and agency is dispersed. Haraway, consistently throughout her works on primates, cyborgs, companion species and the chthulucene, links the denial of entanglements and the elevation of the human to a certain understanding of humans as made in Eden, in the image of an all-powerful God. On the basis that this mythological narrative fuels our reckless and escapist desires in terms of a pursuit of power and control via technological means (and also underscoring fears about technologies and the point at which we lose control over them and they become controlling over us), Haraway rejects Eden as a site of origin or return for the cyborg. Without a paternalistic God in whose image humans were made, the cyborg is apparently thrown upon its own resources: The cyborg has no myth of origins, because it has no parents and, significantly, no divine creator. It is self-creating and self-sustaining, a pastiche of components rather than an organic being with a beginning and an end, thereby released from both nostalgic yearning for lost youth and from teleological justification.5

Ironically, though, to regard the cyborg as self-sustaining in this way is to continue to affirm certain aspects of the Edenic anthropogenic (and cosmogenic) narrative that the cyborg otherwise critiques. It is the human perceived as self-governing and self-sustaining that is problematic in an ecological and ethical perspective, and so the cyborg should not be understood in a similar fashion.

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Rather than denying Eden outright, then, which may amount to a similar predicament as a denial of God encapsulated by Nietzschean thought that has been strongly linked with humanism and transhumanism insofar as, ‘having done away with the creator of the universe (God), the Ubermensch must become the creator of his (sic) own reality’,6 an alternative way of refiguring and articulating it as a (hi)story is needed for the cyborg. This means resituating Eden in our own context and practices and using critical reflective tools to understand how it has shaped our attitudes. It means finding ways to articulate Eden differently, so that Eden is not a utopia or paradise. Typically, and even in Haraway’s own work, Eden has been figured on the grounds of sameness or difference: as either a radically different elsewhere; or informing attitudes that discourage uses of technology in our own world, suggesting a parallel between the givenness of nature in Eden and in the world that technology compromises or challenges.7 And yet, while challenging models of salvation rooted in the Edenic garden, technology continues to affirm notions of salvation that resonate with Eden insofar as they seek to offer deliverance from a fallen world. These approaches continue to regard technology as a discrete category that affirms substantive notions of (human) nature, whereas in practice, as cyborgs highlight, such separations are difficult to uphold in theory and in practice. The boundaries between self and other, between organisms and technologies, and between same and different have never been more explicitly porous and contestable. Within this framework of contested, imploded and (con)fused boundaries, Eden must be refigured and rearticulated from our own situated and embedded contexts. This is not a projection of allotropic or utopian dreams, but a way to reconcile ourselves with the impacts of ours and others’ conducts. From this place, we tell stories, we refer to stories previously told and we forge new possibilities for future stories. This is fabulation: it is not an innocent escapism, but it is about the stories that are always tethered as histories to that which they fabulate from, making for interesting and imploded worlds in which we inescapably dwell. I have referred to these conceptual, enacted and consequential narratives as (hi)stories. As Haraway puts it, ‘good stories reach into rich pasts to sustain thick presents to keep

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the story going for those who come after’.8 In other words, we cannot reject Edenic or indeed broader theological (hi)stories because they are part of the rich tapestry of narratives that we draw on in making sense of ourselves and the world, where technologies are an inseparable (and imploded) part of both. While the cyborg, as Haraway proclaims, was not made in Eden and nor can it return, we can posit that the Garden that Haraway refers to is interpreted in a certain, namely substantive way, featuring notions of (human) nature and discrete identities. It is this substantively figured garden that the cyborg does not recognise. By reflecting on our relationship to Edenic (hi)story, though, we can re-articulate the garden in criticalrelational terms via a cyborg theology. Here, we can reflect accurately on what it means to live at the nexus of multiple narratives and tropes, both cyborgian and theological. IMPLOSION With the cyborg, we cannot truly separate, or render as discrete any beings or phenomena, including the human (and nonhuman). Certain accounts of humans deriving from theological anthropology, namely substantive ones, have had a tendency to favour understandings of the human as elevated insofar as humans uniquely bear imago dei, and so are strongly differentiated from other creatures. These accounts need to be resisted and challenged. They are predicated on practices of exclusion – of animals, as well as nonnormative or non-‘ideal’ humans, who have historically been divided on the basis of gender, race, sexuality or disability, to name but a few examples. At best, to act as though beings or species are discrete is to overlook the ways that all beings interrelate and that all actions have far-reaching consequences; at worst, it is to more deeply obscure interconnections in order to promote self-interests in a way that does harm to ‘others’ (where such ‘others’ are malleably defined). Technologies, as various iterations of the cyborg from astronauts to internet users reveal, can be seen as expanding the human and perpetuating the myth of human dominance and discreteness, but they also present an opportunity to interrogate the human by merging us with ‘artificial’ parts or by fundamentally connecting our actions to

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the world. This latter trend corresponds to the figurative cyborg articulated by Donna Haraway. It is this notion of the cyborg that I espouse in pursuit of a non-exclusive ethics. The cyborg can guide us to acknowledge how all things are interconnected in inseparable ways, thereby discrediting appeals to a discrete human subject.9 We should take the deep connections between ourselves, other species, and the world that are made more manifest through technology as a way of starting, not with a set of assumptions such as the presupposed separateness of the human, but with the complex ways that relationalities comprise us as sites of implosions. This is something that is modelled by the figure of the cyborg, which emphasises fusions to such an extent that different parts are confused and are not only non-discrete, but moreover cannot be categorically distinguished. (Chief among these is a (con)fusion between organic and mechanic parts: with biosynthetic technologies, for example, where does the organic-biological end and the mechanic-technological begin?) The cyborg thereby offers an opportunity to refigure our identities in a way that is inclusive of technologies but also of their openness. In theological anthropological terms, this necessitates a dynamic view of humans and other creatures that can respond to openness in a decentralised sense. For this, I propose shifting from a substantive view of imago dei to a critical-relational one, where the image of God is not an innate property exclusive to humans but is something dispersed among networks. Connoting these sentiments, Sigurd Bergmann writes, ‘the whole map of separated areas with regard to the natural, the technical, the social and the human must be overcome’.10 The perspective that I offer, a critical relationality inspired by and inclusive of the cyborg, moves from focusing on discrete individuals to recognising the interactions and relations that (re)construct all actors in ever-shifting ways. Imago dei is thus not about remaining human (for what this means is malleable and often defined by exclusion, particularly according to substantive accounts), but is about recognising the specific attachments that bring together all actors, including technologies, who are both responsive and responsible. This images not the omnipotence of God, but His compassion for, and entanglement with, creation in its complexity and richness.

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Theology cannot be excluded from these explorations, but must be considered as a set of (hi)stories among others that are deeply entwined, (con)fused and influential (even in our apparently secular technoculture, which still clings to religiously guided mythologies and attitudes). Crucially, though, we must develop ways of critically engaging with these (hi)stories in order to respond to the questions and challenges that new technologies bring. The complexity and (con)fusions of our present situation are arguably more visible than ever,11 and it is inadequate to cling to substantive notions of the discrete human, or to rely on anthropocentric accounts in assessing our technologies or our surroundings. The (hi)stories that narrate these attitudes must be returned to and critically reflected upon, and that has been my endeavour here. I have explored alternative articulations, figurations and fabulations of Eden and theological anthropology that Haraway overlooked in her cyborgian rejection of Edenic mythology. I have used the cyborg as a lens through which to critically consider interpretations of imago dei, and I have additionally used certain accounts of imago dei and Eden as a lens to critically consider the cyborg. Critical-relational approaches that recognise the (con)fusions of all (hi)stories can be used as a basis for expressing a way to rethink categories of human/ nature/technology. In lieu of these categories, I propose a cyborg theology that does difference differently: it circumvents substantive notions of discrete (human) nature and anthropocentrism by taking implosions and relationality as a decentred starting point where nothing can be discretely divided. To close, I summarise the proposals for such a cyborg theology that I hope will be able to inform further work in this field. To be sure, these proposals are intended to be suggestive rather than prescriptive, and they outline a methodology for engaging complex and intricate figures and (hi)stories rather than attempting to fully resolve them. In short, a cyborg theology should be able to: (1) Take account of contexts, which involves an awareness of multiple actors that interconnect in (con)fusing ways; (2) Be attentive to the narratives and (hi)stories that shape our understandings, as well as to the ways that we continue to shape them;

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(3) Advocate a decentred approach to the field(s) in question that does not prioritise any particular group but strives to recognise the ways that multiple actors have equal importance and influence; (4) Ensure that it does not rely on substantive assumptions by placing emphasis on interactions as they dynamically unfold, and using these to challenge prior notions of discreteness and taxonomy; (5) Recognise that its work is never resolved or complete, for that would suggest lapsing into a substantive approach that concretises different identities. Such work is instead always ongoing; (6) Maintain its critical and reflective enterprise to always challenge assumptions and interrogate the relationalities between different (id)entities and (hi)stories; (7) Avoid excluding groups or notions such as technology (as we saw with substantive anthropologies influenced by Eden mythologies) or Eden itself (as Haraway misleadingly attempted with the cyborg). It should instead engage with these ideas in a relational way where we realise how they are instructive (hi)stories for us, but with which we can maintain a critical relationship; (8) Emphasise that our relationality with all (id)entities and (hi)stories is necessarily immersive, interactive and inclusive. Tropes and fabulation are useful ways to articulate relationality, but we must recognise that we cannot totally transcend the connections that dynamically constitute us and others. Instead, we must tether practices of fabulation to the world in order to refigure transcendence and immanence in non-innocent, imploded ways.

By working with these suggestions that draw on insights appropriated from a critical reading of cyborgs, I propose that we can figure ourselves as cyborgs, but this does not mean that we are beyond the influence of Eden. Cyborgs are made of muddy (hi)stories that defile rather than defy the notion, or ‘purity’, of mythological Edenic mud. In accordance with Haraway’s cautions, this resists attempts to return to paradisiacal ‘dust’ or to pursue escapist alternatives; although, in my theological response to Haraway, Eden remains an important part of our (hi)stories. As I have argued, we are fully relational beings, and we relate in narratival and (con)fusing ways. For relational theologian Carter Heyward, ‘It is much easier to be established in the garden we have learned to call Paradise than to pick up our beds and walk into the world. But walk j yes, run j into the world j seek humanity j find God.’12 With the cyborg, we find

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ourselves in the world, as Heyward suggests. However, we unlearn Paradise by deconstructing its narratives. We also interrogate and challenge rather than ‘seek’ humanity, which highlights my calls for a specifically critical understanding of relationality, rather than one that can lapse into substantive attempts to find the ontological ‘human’ or any form of the nonhuman against which it is divided. By making these amendments to Heyward’s comments, though, we do not necessarily hinder our ability to ‘find God’. Indeed, the God that we may find among implosions and (con)fusions suggests that imago dei is also dispersed among a chaotic world. This is not humanocentric or even centric in any wider sense, but encourages us to look at relationalities in an always fresh and inclusive way that bears multiple (hi)stories that give way to new entanglements.13 Cyborg theology, as a critical, reflexive and ongoing embedded enterprise, can help us to find a richer sense of imploded relationality that bears and refigures (hi)stories and identities – including humans, natures, and technologies – by doing difference differently. As cyborgs, creatures of multiple, imploded and (con)fusing (hi)stories, we constantly realise: ‘I am not by myself. I am not my self. I begin here.’14

Notes

INTRODUCTION

WHY CYBORGS AND THEOLOGY?

1. Cf. Paul Morris, ‘A Walk in the Garden: Images of Eden’, in Paul Morris and Deborah Sawyer (eds), A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), 21. 2. When humanoid robots closely resemble us but not enough to be regarded with full levels of sameness, the anxieties and unease that this generates is often referred to as ‘uncanny valley’. Against this, we seek to recoil to notions of difference that technologies, in an aesthetic sense at least, have already challenged. Troubles such as this prompted by a dialectic of sameness and difference are what I seek to address and reassess in this investigation. 3. Daniel Dinello, Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 6. 4. Ibid., 2. 5. Ibid., 119. 6. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 178. 7. Ibid., 151. 8. Samantha Jane Calvert, ‘“Ours is the Food that Eden Knew:” Themes in the Theology and Practice of Modern Christian Vegetarians’, in David Grumett and Rachel Muers (eds), Eating and Believing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vegetarianism and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 123–34. 9. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 149. 10. For Durkheim, though, the sacred and the profane coincide in that the worship of totemic gods is considered to be symbolic of a worship of society. Such entanglements of allegedly binary parts are a useful way to contemplate the cyborg, particularly theologically, as I argue throughout this investigation.

202

Notes to Pages 11 – 21

11. Max More, for example, comments on the absent father motif (‘A Letter to Mother Nature’, in Max More and Natasha Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader: Classical and Contemporary Essays on the Science, Technology, and Philosophy of the Human Future (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2013), 449). This seems to inform techno-utopian visions of humans-as-deified in lieu of a controlling God (cf. Michael Zimmerman, ‘The Singularity: A Crucial Phase in Divine Self-Actualisation?’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 4, No. 1–2 (2008), 361), which is a problem associated with uncritical assumptions derived from theological accounts that do not adequately reflect back upon them. Contrariwise, I advocate such reflections in this investigation. 12. Katherine Hayles, ‘Afterword: The Human in the Posthuman’, Cultural Critique, No. 53 (2003), 137. 13. Haraway, MW@SM, 39. 14. Ibid., 135. 15. Ibid., 12, 14. 16. Haraway, HLaL, 128. 17. Elaine Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 58. 18. Haraway, ‘SF’; Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (London: Virago, 2011), 1–14. 19. Haraway, ‘SF’. 20. Cf. Noreen Herzfeld, Technology and Religion: Remaining Human in a Co-Created World (Pennsylvania: Templeton Press, 2009), 77 –8. 21. Haraway states her method as follows: ‘I [. . .] take my own polluted inheritance – cyborg is one of them – and try to rework it [. . .] I take the tropic systems that I have inherited and try to do something with them against the grain’ (HLaL, 103). 22. Haraway, HLaL, 107; cf. Haraway, SCW, 1. 23. Cf. Haraway, HR, 245. 24. Cf. Haraway, ‘MiW’, 236. 25. Haraway, ‘CaL’, 10 (original emphasis).

CHAPTER 1 IMAGO DEI: ANTHROPOGENY & THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 1. Haraway, ‘MiW’, 211. 2. An excursus of the secularisation thesis is beyond the parameters of the present investigation; for a useful overview of this, see: Linda Woodhead and Rebecca Catto (eds), Religion and Change in Modern Britain (Oxon: Routledge, 2012). 3. To be sure, certain theologians including David Cunningham have argued that it does not necessarily have to be the case that animals are not made

Notes to Pages 21 – 27

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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according to God’s image; rather, Genesis, like all biblical texts, is vague and its silence on certain matters can be open to various interpretations. (David Cunningham, ‘The Way of All Flesh: Rethinking the Imago Dei’, in Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough (eds), Creaturely Theology: On God, Humans and Other Animals, (London: SCM Press, 2009).) The point that is made here is not to discredit positions like Cunningham’s – indeed, I have a great deal of sympathy for these interpretations, as shall become clear throughout the discussion – but is to provide an overview of dominant interpretations in theological and cultural history. Lynn White Jr, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, Science, Vol. 155, No. 3767 (1967), 1205. Steve Fuller, Humanity 2.0: What it Means to be Human Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 182. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books, 2002), 31. Gerald McKenny, ‘Transcendence, Technological Enhancement, and Christian Theology’, in Ronald Cole-Turner (ed.), Transhumanism and Transcendence: Christian Hope in an Age of Technological Enhancement (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011), 185; Sadie Plant, ‘Coming Across the Future’, in Joan Broadhurst-Dixon and Eric Cassidy (eds), Virtual Futures: Cybernetics, Technology and Post-Human Pragmatism (London/New York: Routledge, 1998), 30. Andrew Linzey, Animal Theology (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 59; White Jr, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, 1205. Gray, Straw Dogs, 37. Cf. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 15. Anne Kull, ‘Speaking Cyborg: Technoculture and Technonature’, Zygon, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2002), 285. Haraway, WSM, 82. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 26. Sigurd Bergmann, Creation Set Free: The Spirit as Liberator of Nature (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005 (1995)), 1. Marc Cortez, Theological Anthropology: A Guide for the Perplexed (London/ New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 8 –9. Harold Hatt, Cybernetics and the Image of Man: A Study of Freedom and Responsibility in Man and Machine (Nashville/New York: Abingdon Press, 1968), 71. Cortez, Theological Anthropology, 11. David Clines, ‘The Image of God in Man’, Tyndale Bulletin, Vol. 19 (1968), 54. Ibid., 55– 61. Ibid., 60– 1. Cortez, Theological Anthropology; Noreen Herzfeld, ‘Creating in Our Own Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Image of God’, Zygon, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2002), 303– 15.

204

Notes to Pages 27 – 31

22. Noreen Herzfeld, In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002), 16 (my emphasis). 23. Jacques Derrida usefully reflects on theology, logocentrism and dualism with regards to the ‘essential’ difference between the human and the animal that I explore here. For Derrida, language creates a difference and enacts a power over animals (The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008 (2006))). (Cf. Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 3; Augustine, City of God, Book XII, Chapter 2, 473; Linzey, Animal Theology, 18). 24. Ron Broglio, ‘When Animals and Technology are Beyond Human Grasping’, Angelaki, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2013), 2. 25. Augustine, City of God, Book XII, Chapter 1, 472. 26. Linzey, Animal Theology, 12 –19; cf. Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapters 2 and 13. 27. Ibid., 18. 28. Cf. Niels Gregersen, ‘Varieties of Personhood: Mapping the Issues’, in Gregersen, Drees and Gorman (eds), The Human Person in Science and Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 1–20; Anne Foerst, God in the Machine: What Robots Teach Us About Humanity and God (London: Plume, 2005), 158–90; Søren Holm, ‘The Nature of Human Welfare’, in DeaneDrummond and Scott (eds), Future Perfect? God, Medicine and Human Identity (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 45–55. 29. Bret Stephenson, ‘Nature, Technology and the Imago Dei: Mediating the Nonhuman Through the Practice of Science’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Vol. 57, No. 1 (2005), 6. This also coincides with a feminist critique of the western intellectual tradition that is significant in posthumanism; cf. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 27 –8. 30. Cf. Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 5. 31. Julian Offray de la Mettrie, ‘L’Homme Machine’, in Aram Vartanian, La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine: A Study in the Origins of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960 (1751)), 170. 32. Ibid., 149. 33. The association between animals and machines, it should be noted, is not accidental: Mettrie’s work was closely related to Rene´ Descartes’ notion of animal-machines. For Descartes, animals were automata that lacked in thought and self-consciousness. They were machine-like, which vindicated certain ways that humans used them by affirmation that, theologically, humans were created in God’s image and were given dominion over them. While Descartes may be used to affirm a theological sense of human distinctness, however, Mettrie leaves little room for this: humans, animals, and machines are commonly mechanistic in their natures. 34. SF plays heavily on this trope of robots in the image of humans and the threat of the same in the other: cf. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927); Blade

Notes to Pages 31 – 39

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54. 55.

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Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982); Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015); Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973). David Fergusson, ‘Humans Created According to the Imago Dei: An Alternative Proposal’, Zygon, Vol. 48, No. 2 (2013), 449. Alistair McFadyen, ‘Imaging God: A Theological Answer to the Anthropological Question’, Zygon, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2012), 918–19. White, ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, 1205. Hatt, Cybernetics and the Image of Man, 209. Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009), 10 –11. Herzfeld, Technology and Religion, 44. Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 238; cf. Daniel Halacy Jr, Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman (New York/Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965), 14. Linzey, Animal Theology, 143. Haraway, SwtT, 47 –8. Linzey, Animal Theology, 144– 6. Ibid., 145. Paul Hansen, ‘Becoming Bovine: Mechanics and Metamorphosis in Hokkaido’s Animal-Human-Machine’, conference paper given at ‘Animals in Asian History, Society, Thought’, University of Manchester, 25 January 2013. Cf. Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism (San Francisco, CA: Conari Press, 2010), 71–2, 124–5. Linda Woodhead, ‘Apophatic Anthropology’, in R. Kendall Soulen and Linda Woodhead (eds), God and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006), 243. Isaac Asimov, ‘Runaround’, https://www.5novels.com/ScienceFiction/ Asimov33/27210.html (1942) (accessed 10 September 2015). Gregerson, ‘Varieties of Personhood’, 2. Foerst, God in the Machine, 160–1, 188–9; Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (New York/London: Routledge, 2002), 30, 92, 108; Hatt, Cybernetics and the Image of Man, 253. European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs, ‘Draft Report with Recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (2015/2103(INL))’, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do? pubRef¼-//EP//NONSGML%2BCOMPARL%2BPE-582.443%2B01%2BDOC %2BPDF%2BV0//EN (31 May 2016) (accessed 19 January 2017), 12. Ibid., 5; cf. also 17– 18 for a presentation of ‘European values’ that are recommended in robotic design in order to safeguard the welfare of the human. A substantive attitude to humans, as well as to the nature of the Western-centric values themselves, is deducible here. Herzfeld, In Our Image, 90 (my emphasis). Anna Case-Winters, ‘Rethinking the Image of God’, Zygon, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2004), 818.

206

Notes to Pages 39 – 44

56. For example, on an interactive level, different beings are seen as coconstitutive through their ongoing relations, and on an intra-active level, we might consider how our own bodies are populated by and homes to more ‘foreign’ bacterial and microbial matter that is necessary for their own functioning in an equally co-constitutive way. 57. Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology, 35. 58. Haraway, WSM, 287. 59. Herzfeld, In Our Image, 25 –31. 60. Anne Kull, ‘Cyborg Embodiment and the Incarnation’, Currents in Theology and Mission, Vol. 28, No. 3/4 (2001), 283. 61. Broglio, ‘When Animals and Technology are Beyond Human Grasping’, 8. 62. For a more detailed discussion of this, see Joy, Why We Love Dogs, 37 –72. 63. Cunningham, ‘The Way of All Flesh’, 106. 64. Hefner, The Human Factor, 85. 65. Celia Deane-Drummond, ‘In God’s Image and Likeness: From Reason to Revelation in Humans and Other Animals’, in Lieven Boeve, Yves de Maeseneer and Ellen van Stichel (eds), Questioning the Human: Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 61. 66. Augustine, City of God, Book XII, Chapter 2, 473. 67. Ray S. Anderson, On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982), 30. 68. Herzfeld, In Our Image, 80. 69. Haraway, HLaL, 106. 70. David Kirchhoffer, ‘Turtles All the Way Down? Pressing Questions for Theological Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century’, in Boeve, de Maeseneer and van Stichel (eds), Questioning the Human, 185. 71. Peter Scott, ‘The Postnatural as Anti-Human? Resurrection, Natality and Creatureliness’, in Elaine Graham (ed.), Grace Jantzen: Redeeming the Present (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 224. 72. F. LeRon Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology: After the Philosophical Turn to Relationality (Grand Rapids/Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 181 (my emphasis). 73. Carole Cusack, ‘The End of the Human? The Cyborg Past and Present’, in Christopher Hartney and Andrew McGarity (eds), The Dark Side: Proceedings of the VIIth International Conference for Religion, Literature and the Arts 2002 (RLA Press, 2004), 226. 74. Margaret Atwood presents how stories define humanness, while also noting that stories are technologically mediated and influenced (‘A State of Wonder: How Technology Shapes Story’, https://vimeo.com/138888472 (accessed 23 September 2015)). 75. Avtar Brah and Annie Coombes, ‘Introduction: The Conundrum of Mixing’, in Brah and Coombes (eds), Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), 1. 76. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 45 – 54

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77. Jennifer Gonza´lez, ‘Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research’, in Chris Hables Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook (New York/ London: Routledge, 1995), 275. 78. Hugh Gusterson cautions against essentialising the cyborg in a similar manner, and he comments on the need to note ‘the full extent of its shape-shifting ability’ (‘Short Circuit: Watching Television with a Nuclear-Weapons Scientist’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 115). 79. Joseph Schneider, Donna Haraway: Live Theory (New York/London: Continuum, 2005), 140. 80. Plant, ‘Coming Across the Future’, 31 (my emphasis). 81. Haraway, HLaL, 103. 82. David Gunkel, ‘We Are Borg: Cyborgs and the Subject of Communication’, Communication Theory, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2000), 335.

CHAPTER 2

NATURE & HUMAN NATURE

1. Sam Levin and Nicky Woolf, ‘Tesla driver killed while using autopilot was watching Harry Potter, witness says’, Guardian, https://www.theguardian. com/technology/2016/jul/01/tesla-driver-killed-autopilot-self-drivingcar-harry-potter (1 July 2016) (accessed 3 January 2017). 2. In addition to this, the company who made the driverless vehicle, Tesla, came under fire for issues with the design of their technology, which raises another important point that emphasises the complexity of systems where multiple agents interact. 3. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964 (1954)), 23. 4. Ibid., 4. 5. Cf. Ted Peters, ‘Progress and Provolution: Will Transhumanism Leave Sin Behind?’, in Cole-Turner (ed.), Transhumanism and Transcendence, 74. 6. Cf. Sven Wagner, The Scientist as God: A Typological Study of a Literary Motif (Heidelberg: Universita¨tsverlag Winter Heidelberg, 2012), 232; Karel ˇ apek, R.U.R: Rossum’s Universal Robots (London: Oxford University Press, C 1936 (1921)), 68 –9. 7. Adapted from Peter Scott, Anti-Human Theology: Nature, Technology and the Postnatural (London: SCM Press, 2010), 1. 8. Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). 9. ‘Nature’ derives from the Latin ‘natura’, which is used to refer to notions of birth and origin, and this is reflected in similarly derived words including ‘natality’ and ‘native’ (Cf. Gordon Kaufman, ‘A Problem for Theology: The Concept of Nature’, Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 65 (1972), 339). 10. Hatt, Cybernetics and the Image of Man, 64. 11. Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 68.

208

Notes to Pages 54 – 59

12. Bronislaw Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred (Malden/Oxford/ Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 102. 13. Atwood, In Other Worlds, 48 –9. 14. Peter Scott, ‘The Resurrection of Nature? Problems in the Theology of Nature’, Theology in Green, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1994), 33. 15. Atwood, In Other Worlds, 49 (my emphasis). 16. Cf. Alfred Lord Tennyson, LVI, In Memoriam A. H. H., Vernon P. Squires (ed.) (New York/Boston/Chicago: Silver, Burdett and Company, 1906 (1850)), 72. 17. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 (1651)), 84. 18. Dominic Robinson, ‘Ecclesial-Narratival Model of the Imago Dei’, in Joshua Farris and Charles Taliaferro (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology (Surrey/Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 207–208. 19. Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology, 196. 20. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 20 (original emphasis). 21. To this end, Joshua Farris notes that, for Augustine, the image of God is ‘internal’, ‘real’ and ‘natural’ (‘A Substantive (Soul) Model of the Imago Dei: A Rich Property View’, in Farris and Taliaferro (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, 168.) 22. In the context of technologies, it would be pertinent to also consider here if a robot or other (semi-) autonomous device killed someone how the culprit would be treated. Would they be seen as agential? Or would blame be placed on the designer, or the user, as indeed is suggested by the case of the first death caused by a driverless car? (https://www.ft.com/ content/013d6f46–3f12–11e6–9f2c-36b487ebd80a (1 July 2016) (accessed 3 January 2017)) The difficulty in responding to these questions with any unshakeable certainty may demonstrate something of the shortcomings of the substantive approach, particularly in our current context: we do not know enough of any kind of essential identities in order for substantive models to be truly convincing. Instead, a model that accounts for complexities and relationalities, where blame and culpability are dispersed across numerous agents, seems more preferable and useful. 23. On this point, it could be noted that God also directly commands the sea creatures in like fashion to humans to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1:22), thereby suggesting a wider creaturely agency. An Augustinian reading would challenge this, however, instead noting the moral uniqueness of humans as they are given moral laws and codes directly from God (Ex. 20:1–17; Deut. 5:6 –21). There is, of course, the matter of the serpent that is punished by God for a deductively moral transgression; Augustine may circumvent this by highlighting human agency in the Fall, yet it is a point that I return to and discuss in Part Three. 24. Augustine, City of God, Book XII, Chapter 22, 502. 25. Ibid., Book XXII, Chapter 24, 1072. 26. Ibid., 1072–3. 27. Joy, Why We Love Dogs, 73 –5.

Notes to Pages 60 – 71

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28. David Meconi, ‘The Dual-Functionality of the Imago Dei as Human Flourishing in the Church Fathers’, in Farris and Taliaferro (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, 200. 29. Augustine, City of God, Book XII, Chapter 22, 502. 30. Cf. Augustine, City of God, Book XIII, Chapter 3, 513. 31. Cf. Caroline Stichele and Todd Penner, ‘Terminatrix: Visualising the End of Creation in The Animatrix’, in Caroline Stichele and Alastair Hunter (eds), Creation & Creativity: From Genesis to Genetics and Back (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006), 149. 32. Augustine, City of God, Book XII, Chapter 1, 471. 33. Although the questions raised by Humans (and indeed many other SF titles) about technological free will may seem farfetched, many commentators including Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec speak with a degree of confidence that we could be faced with these questions in our own time before long. Either way, the point about technological agency is one that we already encounter: driverless cars may not have free will, for example, but they are causally efficacious. As such, the questions raised by Humans and other SF notably have their corollary in our own experiences. 34. Frances Yates, ‘The Rosicrucian Enlightenment’, cited in David Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 50. 35. Finn Bowring, ‘The Cyborg Solution’, Science, Seeds and Cyborgs: Biotechnology and the Appropriation of Life (London/New York: Verso, 2003), 268. 36. Jurgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation (London: SCM Press, 1985), 231. 37. Nick Bostrom, ‘Transhumanism FAQ 3.0’, h þ , http://humanityplus.org/ philosophy/transhumanist-faq/ (accessed 20 December 2012). 38. More, ‘A Letter to Mother Nature’, 449. 39. Ibid., 450. 40. Ellul, The Technological Society, 132. 41. Chris Hables Gray, Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age (New York/ London: Routledge, 2002), 84. 42. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, ‘The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway’, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1991), 396. 43. Haraway, PV, 202. 44. Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology, 202. 45. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 46.

CHAPTER 3

POSTHUMANISM: THE END(S) OF THE HUMAN?

1. Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xv. 2. Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge/Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2014), 2.

210

Notes to Pages 72 – 76

3. Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick, Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 76. 4. Bill Joy, ‘Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us’, Wired, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2000), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html (accessed 30 September 2012). 5. Nick Bostrom, ‘Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority’, Global Policy, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2013), 20. 6. Nick Bostrom, ‘The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence’, http://www. nickbostrom.com/ethics/artificial-intelligence.pdf (2011) (accessed 7 January 2017); ‘Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence’, http:// www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html (2003) (accessed 7 January 2017). 7. ‘Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence’, Future of Life Institute, http://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/ (accessed 7 January 2017); Tim Adams, ‘Artificial Intelligence: “We’re like children playing with a bomb”’, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ technology/2016/jun/12/nick-bostrom-artificial-intelligence-machine (12 June 2016) (accessed 7 January 2017). 8. Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (Oxon: Routledge, 2004), 145. 9. Although this is an inconsistent categorisation in the literature on posthumanism, Nayar develops a similar distinction on non-theological grounds (Posthumanism, 3–5); other critical posthumanists also more tacitly develop a distinction based on their close critical, as opposed to linear/ temporal readings (cf. Badmington, Alien Chic; Stefan Herbrechter, Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis, (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2013)). 10. Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 192. 11. Brent Waters, From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Postmodern World (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006), x. 12. Herzfeld, Technology and Religion, 8. 13. Nick Bostrom, ‘Transhumanist Declaration’, Humanityþ , http:// humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-declaration/ (1998) (accessed 27 August 2013). 14. Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 17. 15. Bostrom usefully claims that ‘transhumanism can be viewed as an extension of humanism, from which it is partially derived’ (‘Transhumanist FAQ’). 16. Eugene Thacker, ‘Data Made Flesh: Biotechnology and the Discourse of the Posthuman’, Cultural Critique, No. 53 (2003), 75. 17. Oliver Davies uses dualism to link theological anthropology, through humanism, to transhumanism in discussing how the mind is the seat of control of the body and the wider material world in accordance with the logic of homo faber (‘Neuroscience, Self, and Jesus Christ’, in Boeve, de Maeseneer and van Stichel (eds), Questioning the Human, 80).

Notes to Pages 76 – 79

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18. Stephen Garner, Transhumanism and the Imago Dei: Narratives of Apprehension and Hope (PhD Dissertation) (University of Auckland, 2006), 36. 19. Indeed, the transhumanist movement tellingly has developed a public image of itself as ‘Humanityþ ’ (See http://www.humanityplus.org, where the tagline is ‘elevating the human condition’ (accessed 20 April 2015)). 20. Russell Blackford, ‘The Great Transition’, in More and Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader, 421. 21. Ronald Cole-Turner, ‘Transhumanism and Christianity’, in Cole-Turner (ed.), Transhumanism and Transcendence, 193. 22. Bostrom, ‘Transhumanist FAQ’. 23. Antje Jackele´n, ‘The Image of God as Techno Sapiens’, Zygon, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2002), 293. 24. Ibid (my emphasis). 25. Keith Annsell-Pearson, cited in Andy Miah, ‘Be Very Afraid: Cyborg Athletes, Transhuman Ideals & Posthumanity’, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 13 (2003). 26. This coincides with the logic of ‘natural selection’ while also challenging the ‘naturalness’ of it, given the human hand in developing the posthuman. Cf. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1964 (1859)). (This connection to Darwin underscores my use of ‘evolutionary’ in the labelling of this posthuman figure.) 27. I have developed this idea elsewhere; see Scott Midson, ‘Ex Anthropos: Implications of the Creation of the “Posthuman” for the (Created) “Human”’, Journal of the Academic Study of Religion, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2013), 270–87. 28. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein – or The Modern Prometheus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 (1818)), 57. 29. Ibid., 114. 30. It should be noted that these fears are deeply Western-centric and are far less prominent in, for example, Japan, where robotics is bourgeoning. This espouses my argument linking Christian theological anthropology with dominant Western attitudes to technology. Cf. Ana Matronic, ‘Why We Should Raise Our Robots Like Children’, Guardian, http://www. theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/14/ana-matronic-why-we-shouldraise-robots-like-children (14 September 2015) (accessed 17 September 2015); Frederik Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia (Tokyo/New York: Kodansha International Ltd, 1988). 31. Frequently, the critique is centred on dehumanised corporations, where the lure of technology or profit has taken companies’ interests away from humanity (Dinello, Technophobia!, 202.) 32. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (London: Virago, 2004), 285.

212

Notes to Pages 79 – 85

33. Not all posthumans, of course, have a will to destroy; the posthumans in Atwood’s novels, for example, the ‘Crakers’, are child-like and harmless, which further foregrounds the human destructiveness throughout the saga (Cf. Wagner, The Scientist as God, 171– 2, 182–5.) 34. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (London: Profile Books, 2003), 101. 35. Ted Peters, Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom (New York/London: Routledge, 2003), 89. 36. Waters, From Human to Posthuman, 144. 37. Haraway, ‘MiW’; cf. Linzey, Animal Theology, 144–6. 38. Cf. Haraway, WSM, 296–301. 39. Barbara Tunick, ‘Meat Without Murder’, Vegetarian Times, http://www. vegetariantimes.com/article/meat-without-murder/ (2006) (accessed 11 September 2015). 40. Cf. Willem Drees, ‘Introduction’, in Gorman, Drees and Meisinger (eds), Creative Creatures: Values and Ethical Issues in Theology, Science and Technology (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 8. 41. For Gerard Loughlin, in this fashion, ‘Hollywood is rigorously traditional’ (Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology, (Malden/Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 125). To be sure, though, not all SF is ‘traditional’, and it can facilitate a more critical questioning of identities in the style that I am proposing throughout this investigation. 42. To illustrate this point, consider recent films ranging from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, where the scientific experiments on apes backfire for humans; to The Avengers: Age of Ultron, where one rich scientist’s pursuits of artificial intelligence mimic Dr Frankenstein’s pursuit of artificial life, and the progeny becomes the villain who must be destroyed, neutralised, or at least quelled in order for human life to continue as ‘normal’. 43. Elaine Graham, ‘The Final Frontier? Religion and Posthumanism in Film and TV’, in Michael Hauskeller, Thomas Philbeck, and Curtis Carbonell (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 361–70. 44. Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, ‘What is a Posthumanist Reading?’, Angelaki, Vol. 13, No. 1 (2008), 101. 45. Peters, Playing God?, 211. 46. Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred, xi. 47. Nayar, Posthumanism, 12–15. 48. Francesca Ferrando, ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations’, Existenz, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2013), 31. 49. Badmington, Alien Chic, 145. 50. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 11. 51. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, 119. 52. Ibid., 89 (my emphasis).

Notes to Pages 85 – 95

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53. Ibid., 295. 54. Sharon Betcher, ‘Putting My Foot (Prosthesis, Crutches, Phantom) Down: Considering Technology as Transcendence in the Writings of Donna Haraway’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3/4 (2001), 39. 55. Ibid., 40. 56. Nayar, Posthumanism, 11. 57. Robert Pepperell, The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain (Bristol: Intellect, 2003), 100. 58. Gunkel, ‘We Are Borg’, 336. 59. Ibid., 337. 60. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 286. 61. Herbrechter and Callus, ‘What is a Posthumanist Reading?’, 100. 62. Annette Burfoot, ‘Human Remains: Identity Politics in the Age of Biotechnology’, Cultural Critique, No. 53 (2003), 64. 63. Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology, 15. 64. Laurence Tamatea, ‘If Robots R-US, Who Am I: Online “Christian” Responses to Artificial Intelligence’, Culture and Religion, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2008), 156. 65. Wolfhart Pannenberg, cited in Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology, 136. 66. Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1993), 20.

CHAPTER 4

CYBERNETICS AND ORGANISMS: FUSIONS

1. Gray, Cyborg Citizen, 2. 2. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965 (1948)); Plug & Pray, Jens Schanze (dir.) (2010). 3. Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (London: Serpents Tail, 1999), 108. 4. Hatt, Cybernetics and the Image of Man, 48. 5. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 84. 6. Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1964), 69. 7. Ibid., 71. 8. Hatt, Cybernetics and the Image of Man, 294. 9. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 7. 10. Davis, TechGnosis, 123. 11. Ibid., 97. 12. Ibid., 113.

214

Notes to Pages 96 – 97

13. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993 (1991)), 49 –50. 14. For Latour, this is a product of the modernist enterprise that he labels ‘the modern Constitution’, which ‘allows the expanded phenomenon of the hybrids, whose existence, whose very possibility, it denies’ (ibid., 34). 15. Haraway is critical of these binaries and dualisms through her figure of the cyborg: see ‘Manifesto’, 177. 16. An alternative emphasis on systems would suggest different conclusions, which I reveal through subsequent cyborg figures that emerge from different perceptions of cybernetics. Wolfe discusses how this focus on the system has become increasingly the case in later work on cybernetics in the shift from first-order cybernetics (observed systems) to second-order (observing systems): see Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, 3 –29. 17. Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., 52–3. 18. The evolutionary posthuman can either dialectically affirm the limits of the human, or, in a more transhumanist reading, it can mark an aspiration for the humanist subject to realise through technological augmentation. In both readings, as discussed in the previous chapter, evolutionary posthumanism affirms the substantive human. 19. There is a substantial amount of research on gender and the cyborg; indeed, Haraway herself constructs her notion of the cyborg in response to the previously androcentric notions of it considered in this chapter. Although my research necessarily touches on such gender discussions, arguably, this bank of scholarship comprises a standalone sub-discipline of cyborg studies that sits outside the remit of my investigation. My sidestepping of it is by no means an attempt to downplay the importance of such research, but rather I outline a foundation to interact the cyborg with theology; from here, subsequent studies could reappraise the question of gender in light of theological cyborgology. For more detailed discussion of gender and the cyborg, see: Gill Kirkup et al. (eds), The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (London/New York: Routledge, 2000). 20. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space’, Astronautics (1960), 27. 21. In demonstrating this, Hayles discusses Gillian Brown’s work, noting that ‘the body is understood as an object for control and mastery rather than as an intrinsic part of the self’ (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 5). The liberal humanist subject associated with Cartesianism typically expresses having a body rather than being a body, which means that technological changes or augmentations to so-called ‘hardware’ (i.e., bodily matter) have no impact on our cognitive self, or ‘wetware’. (At the same time, terms such as ‘hardware’ and ‘wetware’ common in posthumanist discourse highlight our equivalence to computational machines, thereby positing a sense of sameness and continuity.)

Notes to Pages 97 – 101

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22. Hayles, ‘The Life Cycle of Cyborgs: Writing the Posthuman’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 323 (my emphasis). 23. Gray, ‘An Interview with Jack E. Steele’, in Gray (ed.), Cyborg Handbook, 62. 24. Davis, TechGnosis, 111. 25. Manfred Clynes, ‘Cyborg II: Sentic Space Travel’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 35. 26. Ferrando, ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism’, 28. 27. Cf. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 72 –80. 28. Dinello, Technophobia!, 119. 29. Cf. Tony Milligan, Nobody Owns the Moon: The Ethics of Space Exploration (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015), 86 –9, 175–6. 30. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 150–1. 31. Haraway, PV, 137. 32. Ibid., 137. 33. Haraway, SwtT, 11. 34. Clynes, ‘Sentic Space Travel’, 39. 35. For Clynes, ‘Homo sapiens, when he puts on a pair of glasses, has already changed. When he rides a bicycle he virtually has become a cyborg’ (‘An Interview with Manfred Clynes’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 49). 36. Indeed, as Clynes and Kline envisage, astronautic cyborgian technologies are removable and so are non-permanent appendages to the body/self, which remains overall intact (‘Cyborgs and Space’, 27). 37. Bowring, ‘The Cyborg Solution’, 274 (original emphasis). 38. Gray, Cyborg Citizen, 183. 39. Cf. Ellul, The Technological Society, for a discussion about the dehumanised and technologised world in which we supposedly find ourselves, where ‘men now live in conditions that are less than human’ (4). 40. Mark Oehlert, ‘From Captain America to Wolverine: Cyborgs in Comic Books, Alternative Images of Cybernetic Heroes and Villains’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 219–32. 41. Cf. Gill Haddow et al., ‘Cyborgs in the Everyday: Masculinity and Biosensing Prostate Cancer’, Science as Culture, http://www.tandfonline.com/ doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2015.1063597 (2015) (accessed 10 September 2015). 42. Here, with Linda Hogle (‘Tales From the Cryptic: Technology Meets Organism in the Living Cadaver’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 203–16), I take transplanted organs as indicative of (medical) cyborg technologies because their transfer from one body to another necessitates surgical technologies, and bringing something external into the body. Recently, face transplants have also become a possibility, which may involve a more critical questioning of ‘self’ and ‘other’, but that depends on how the technology is appropriated over time. 43. Admittedly, this question may be difficult to answer given the vast range of medical cyborg technologies (cf. Kevin Warwick, ‘The Cyborg Revolution’,

216

44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

Notes to Pages 101 – 107 NanoEthics: Studies of New and Emerging Technologies, Vol. 8, No. 3 (2014), 266–72). My purpose in this section is to introduce rather than resolve the overarching trends and issues that this group of cyborgs touches upon. Elaine Graham, ‘In Whose Image? Representations of Technology and the ‘Ends’ of Humanity’, in Deane-Drummond, and Scott (eds), Future Perfect?, 58. Bowring, ‘The Cyborg Solution’, 274 (original emphasis). For posthumanist theologian Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, this total control is impossible to achieve for medical cyborgs, given how there is a ‘dependence on mechanism that cannot be ignored or denied’ (ThweattBates, Cyborg Selves, 19). Ted Peters, ‘Perfect Humans or Trans-Humans?’, in Deane-Drummond and Scott (eds), Future Perfect?, 29. Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, 286. Peters, ‘Perfect Humans or Trans-Humans?’, 29. Ibid. Indeed, for Charles Dechert, a core principle of cybernetics is about norm reinforcement (Dechert, ‘The Development of Cybernetics’, in Dechert (ed.), The Social Impact of Cybernetics (Nortre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 12). Dan Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole, ‘Becoming Dishuman: Thinking About the Human Through Dis/ability’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016), 3, cf. 8. Ibid., 13. Cf. Joanna Zylinska (ed.), The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (London/New York: Continuum, 2002), 3. This is referred to as ‘desiring the normal, embracing the non-normative’ (Goodley and Runswick-Cole, ‘Becoming Dishuman’, 12). Ibid., 5. Miah, ‘Be Very Afraid’. Thacker, ‘Data Made Flesh’, 77. Haraway, MW@SM, 202. Simon Bacon, ‘“We Can Rebuild Him!” The Essentialisation of the Human/Cyborg Interface in the Twenty-First Century, or Whatever Happened to The Six Million Dollar Man?’, AI & Society (2012), 9. Consider, for example, Chappie, Neill Blomkamp (dir.) (2015); or RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven (dir.) (1987). Kevin LaGrandeur, Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Artificial Slaves (New York/London: Routledge, 2013), 61. Philip Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 31 –42. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001 (1964)), 9. Roy Ascott, ‘Back to Nature II: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century’, in More and Vita-More (eds), The Transhumanist Reader, 444.

Notes to Pages 107 – 114

217

66. Atwood, In Other Worlds, 211. 67. Paul Teusner, ‘New Thoughts on the Status of the Religious Cyborg’, Journal of Technology, Theology, and Religion, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2010). 68. Kim Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls: Feminism, Popular Culture and the Posthuman Body (London/New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007), 120. 69. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7. The androcentric language of McLuhan’s analysis can be appropriated here but would also be worthy of a gender-based analysis alongside that of the cyborg more generally. 70. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London/New York: Verso, 2008 (1995)), 37. 71. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 118. 72. Ibid., 9. 73. Ibid., 320. 74. Margaret Atwood also suggests something to this end in reflecting on ‘our robotic future’ through SF narratives and the technologies that we use to imagine or develop them (Atwood, ‘Are Humans Necessary? Margaret Atwood on Our Robotic Future’, The New York Times, http://nyti.ms/ 1yUD3zU (2014) (accessed 9 December 2014)). 75. Bukatman, Terminal Identity, 196. 76. Ibid., 296, 301; cf. Ferrando, ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism’, 30.

CHAPTER 5

FIGURATIVE CYBORGS: CONFUSIONS

1. Linda F. Hogle, ‘Tales From the Cryptic: Technology Meets Organism in the Living Cadaver’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 203– 18. 2. Sarah Knapton, ‘Three-parent babies: House of Lords approves law despite fears children could be born sterile’, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ science/science-news/11432058/Three-parent-babies-House-of-Lordsapproves-law-despite-fears-children-could-be-sterile.html (24 February 2015) (accessed 23 March 2015). 3. Anne Kull, ‘The Cyborg as an Interpretation of Culture-Nature’, Zygon, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2001), 50. 4. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 152–3. 5. Cf. Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, ‘Artificial Wombs and Cyborg Births: Postgenderism and Theology’, in Cole-Turner (ed.), Transhumanism and Transcendence, 106. 6. Ibid. 7. To this end, Haraway’s cyborg can be seen to parallel Ihde’s theory of hermeneutic relations with technology (Technology and the Lifeworld, 80 –97). 8. I have elsewhere referred to technology emerging from a human(ocentric) world as ‘ex anthropos’; see Midson, ‘Ex Anthropos’, 270–87. 9. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 150.

218 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

Notes to Pages 115 – 123 Haraway, ‘SF’. Haraway, HR, 89. Haraway, HR, 87. Schneider, Donna Haraway, 23. Haraway, HR, 91. Stephen Garner, ‘The Hopeful Cyborg’, in Cole-Turner (ed.), Transhumanism and Transcendence, 91. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 150–1. Haraway, ‘MiW’, 210–1. Schneider, Donna Haraway, 61. Haraway, SwtT, 132. Haraway, ‘SF’. Haraway, SwtT, 104. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 210. Haraway, HLaL, 103. Haraway, HR, 324. Thweatt-Bates, ‘Artificial Wombs and Cyborg Births’, 107. Csicsery-Ronay Jr, ‘The SF of Theory’, 396. Kevin Warwick, I, Cyborg (London: Century, 2002). Oliver, cited in Warwick, I, Cyborg, 237. Arthur House, ‘The Real Cyborgs’, http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/ projects/the-future-is-android/ (20 October 2014) (accessed 24 March 2015). Andrew Orlowski, ‘Captain Cyborg accepts another degree from puny humans’, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/captain_cyborg_gong (26 July 2012) (accessed 24 March 2015). Warwick, I, Cyborg, 61. Haraway, PV, 102–103. House, ‘The Real Cyborgs’. Warwick, I, Cyborg, 4. Haraway, PV, 3. Scott, ‘The Postnatural as Anti-Human?’, 217. Ibid., 292. Kevin Warwick, ‘Cyborg Morals, Cyborg Values, Cyborg Ethics’, Ethics and Information Technology, Vol. 5 (2003), 134; cf. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 72 –80. Warwick, I, Cyborg, 298. http://www.kevinwarwick.com/ (accessed 24 March 2015). Warwick, I, Cyborg, 151. Ibid., 1. Ibid. Ibid., 303. Adam Pryor, ‘Jeanine Thweatt-Bates. Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman’, Theology and Science, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2013), 162. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 123 – 130

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47. Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3. 48. Davis, TechGnosis, 14. 49. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 6–7. 50. Ibid., 136. 51. Ibid., 198. 52. Haraway, HR, 328. 53. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 86. 54. Cf. Haraway, PV, 138–9. 55. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 197. Interestingly, this distinction overlooks the fact that the first cyborg was an animal; it was a murine subject fitted with a ‘Rose osmotic pump’ (Clynes and Kline, ‘Cyborgs in Space’, 27). Cyborgs seem to ironically perpetuate a trend where they subvert origins, including their own. 56. Haraway, MW@SM, 11. 57. Cf. Hayles, ‘The Life Cycle of Cyborgs’, 321. 58. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 198 (original emphasis). 59. See Floris Kaayk (dir.), ‘Metalosis Maligna. An Extraordinary Diease’ (http:// www.metalosis.com/video.html) (accessed 29 September 2012). 60. Cusack, ‘The End of the Human?’, 234. 61. Schneider, Donna Haraway, 58. 62. Haraway, SwtT, 109. 63. Haraway, HR, 297. 64. Bruce Mazlish, ‘The Fourth Discontinuity’, Technology and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1967), 3. 65. Haraway, CSM, 11. 66. Monica J. Casper, ‘Fetal Cyborgs and Technomoms on the Reproductive Frontier: Which Way to the Carnival?’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 185. 67. Ibid., 21. 68. Toffoletti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls, 21. 69. For Rosi Braidotti, the dialectics of otherness is predicated on the assumed centrality of the humanist subject, which has a marginalising effect on anthropomorphic others (on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, normality, ableism, idealism) but also spanning to cover ‘more ontological categorical divides between Man and zoo-morphic, organic or earth others’ (The Posthuman, 68). Although some divides are scrutinised across Haraway’s works, my concern with companion species is that they prioritise the earthly and the living as a category, with a certain amount of distinction from the ‘lives’ of technologies that cyborgs invite more reflection on. 70. Haraway, SwtT, 13. 71. Ibid., 50. 72. Ibid., 55. 73. Gordon Kaufman, ‘Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol “God”’, Buddhist-Christian Studies, Vol. 20 (2000), 18.

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Notes to Pages 130 – 140

74. Haraway, CSM, 15. 75. Kaufman, ‘Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol ‘God’’, 43 –56; cf. Pope Francis, Laudato Si, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si. html (May 2015) (accessed 23 January 2016), 16 –17, 48, 84. 76. Haraway, SwtT, 2. 77. Ibid., 55. 78. Indeed, there is scope to develop an incarnational or ecological theology that places as much emphasis on our kaino6, our present time and world, as Haraway does, provided that it acknowledges technological confusions and fusions as a part of that world that are as constitutional and nonremovable as any other being or part. 79. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 58. 80. Haraway, ‘SF’. 81. Haraway, WSM, 42 (my emphasis). 82. Haraway, SwtT, 29. 83. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 160–1. 84. Haraway, SwtT, 105. 85. Haraway, HLaL, 136; cf. Haraway, PV, 314.

CHAPTER 6

CREATION, CREATURES AND CREATIVITY

1. These forms of hybridity are documented in (synthetic) biology with genetic splicing procedures, cloning etc. (Cf. Sarah Franklin, ‘Origins’, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.) They resonate with ‘hybridity’ as a concept in, for example, racial theory (where the term has its roots) (Brah and Coombes (eds), Hybridity and its Discontents, 3 –6), engineering (e.g., hybrid cars as powered by both diesel and electricity) and literature (cf. Octavia Butler, Lilith’s Brood/Xenogenesis Trilogy (USA: Grand Central Publishing, 1987 –9)). 2. A cursory glance at Mary Shelley’s infamous Frankenstein story, as well as its cultural derivatives in SF, amply indicates this sense of duty and ties between creators and created, which have strong theological corollaries. 3. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 13 –104. 4. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 177. 5. Wagner, The Scientist as God, 231–2. 6. Hogle, ‘Tales From the Cryptic’, 214. 7. Philip Hefner, ‘Created to be Creators’, Metanexus, www.metanexus.net/ print/essay/created-be-creators (February 2003) (accessed 11 November 2014). 8. Cf. Ferrando, ‘Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism’, 29. 9. Hefner, The Human Factor, 189. Hefner’s list, to be sure, continues, yet these points are of most significance for the discussion here.

Notes to Pages 140 – 147

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10. I do not mean to denigrate or imply non-subject status of these other categories of beings, but merely to emphasise that the non-relational understanding of the human has typically favoured such understandings. As is emerging in this discussion, my approach regards all such beings as actors of equal importance and not ‘merely’ objects or as relegated to the sidelines of humanocentric dramas. (cf. Nayar, Posthumanism, 25; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)). 11. Fergusson, ‘Humans Created According to the Imago Dei’, 449. 12. Philip Hefner, ‘The Created Co-Creator Meets Cyborg’, Metanexus, www. metanexus.net/print/essay/created-co-creator-meets-cyborg (March 2004) (accessed 11 November 2014). 13. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 149. 14. Robert Campbell, ‘Cyborg Salvation History’, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, Vol. 26, No. 1/2 (2001), 157. 15. Haraway, HLaL, 103, 105. 16. Hefner, ‘The Created Co-Creator Meets Cyborg’. 17. Ibid. 18. Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming, 41. 19. Szerszynski, Nature, Technology and the Sacred, xi. 20. Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming, 74. 21. Haraway, WSM, 165; ‘CaS’, xvi. 22. Hefner, The Human Factor, 27 (my emphasis). 23. Stephen Garner also pithily states how Hefner’s created co-creators draw on all three aspects of imago dei (Transhumanism and the Imago Dei, 29). 24. Hefner, The Human Factor, 239. 25. Terence Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), 19. 26. Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology, 240, cf. 239. 27. Ibid., 164. 28. Hefner, The Human Factor, 73 –4. 29. Ibid., 237. 30. Ibid., 155. 31. Ibid., 161. 32. Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming, 88. 33. Hefner, The Human Factor, 83 –4 (my emphasis). 34. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 151 (my emphasis). 35. Shults, Reforming Theological Anthropology, 92 –3. 36. A theological anthropological parallel of this can be traced in Linda Woodhead’s proposals for an ‘apophatic anthropology’ that is modelled on relations to an unknown and unknowable God (‘Apophatic Anthropology’, 235, 242). 37. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 177. 38. William Desmond usefully makes an elaborate critique of the ‘dialectic’ as one of the four senses of being across his philosophical works (Being and

222

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Notes to Pages 147 – 156 the Between (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995); Ethics and the Between (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001); God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008)). Connoting Haraway’s comments (cf. HR, 112), for Desmond, the dialectic resolves itself on the basis of prior ontological distinctions. Like Haraway, albeit with far less technological concerns, Desmond seeks an alternative schema to express our complex ways of (inter)relating that he terms the ‘metaxological’. This seems to resonate well with the cyborg, although a more detailed excursus of it extends beyond the parameters of this present investigation. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 151. Scott, Anti-Human Theology, 130. Ibid., 132. To be sure, Haraway notes that the chthulucene ‘is neither sacred nor secular’ (SwtT, 55), which opens up the possibility for a theological reflection as I am espousing here. Haraway, HR, 334. It may be more pertinent, however, to note that Haraway rejects transcendence rather than theology. Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming, 78. Ibid., 88. Waters, From Human to Posthuman, 99. Hefner, The Human Factor, 250 (my emphasis). Ibid., 27. Herzfeld, In Our Image, 30. Hefner, The Human Factor, 27. Ibid., 121. Waters, From Human to Posthuman, 103. Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld, 140. Hefner, The Human Factor, 155. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 151. Hefner, The Human Factor, 250. Garner, Transhumanism and the Imago Dei, 257. Hefner, ‘Created to be Creators’. Hefner, The Human Factor, 117. Hefner, Technology and Human Becoming, 76 –7. Cf. Nayar, Posthumanism, 97. Scott, Anti-Human Theology, 114 (my emphasis). Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 58 (original emphasis). http://humanityplus.org/ (accessed 23 September 2015). Hefner, The Human Factor, 160. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 139. Ibid., 197; cf. Suddendorf, The Gap, 224. Consider here Bill McKibben’s tones of woe about this matter in his aptly titled book, The End of Nature (London: Penguin, 1990). The alternative ‘ends’ of nature that I would draw attention to here have more in common with the ‘ends’ of the human highlighted by critical post/

Notes to Pages 156 – 161

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

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humanism, where such ends are actually boundaries that permit transgressions in the interests of policing and ultimately reinforcing the limits and our understandings of the human. Nature, then, like the human, paradoxically may be categorically reinforced at its ‘ends’. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 181. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 212. Abigail Kluchin, ‘The Cyborg and the Golem’, Metanexus, http://www. metanexus.net/essay/cyborg-and-golem (2003) (accessed 10 January 2014). Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 162. Haraway, HLaL, 103. Elaine Graham, ‘Cyborgs or Goddesses? Becoming Divine in a Cyberfeminist Age’, Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 2, No. 4 (1999), 423. It should be noted here, however, that other interpretations of the goddess, like the cyborg, are possible. Some of these are usefully discussed by Starhawk in her text, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). For example, goddess spirituality in Neopaganism is about complementarity rather than opposition of mythical ideas (188). The fact that the ritual cited in this book’s title features in Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, discussed later in this chapter, may indicate something of these alternative figurations of the goddess. That said, Starhawk also writes that the cyclical emphasis sustained throughout witchcraft and goddess spirituality ensures that the seeker ‘is always drawn back’ (197), which could be reflexive or to the natural. The latter is opposed by Haraway’s cyborg (see Chapter 7), and I espouse the former in developing a cyborg theology (see Conclusion). Graham, ‘Cyborgs or Goddesses?’, 428–9. Haraway, ‘CaL’, 20. Scott notes this in a strong affirmation of hybridity and theological contingency within the world: Anti-Human Theology, 139. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 90–1. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 175. Cf. Kirkup et al. (eds), The Gendered Cyborg. Haraway, ‘CaL’, 14. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 154. ‘Reclaiming Presents The 30th Annual SPIRAL DANCE (Saturday, October 31, 2009): A ritual to honor our beloved dead and dance the spiral of rebirth’, http://www.reclaiming.org/rituals/samhain.html (2009) (accessed 23 July 2015). Patricia Pisters, ‘Conceptual Personae and Aesthetic Figures of BecomingWoman’, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 119. Csicsery-Ronay Jr, ‘The SF of Theory’, 388.

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Notes to Pages 161 – 169

87. Brenda Brasher, ‘Thoughts on the Status of the Cyborg: On Technological Socialisation and its Link to the Religious Function of Popular Culture’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 64, No. 4 (1996), 819. 88. Scott, Anti-Human Theology, 71. 89. Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves, 148; Woodhead, ‘Apophatic Anthropology’, 235. 90. Gregory Peterson, ‘Imaging God: Cyborgs, Brain – Machine Interfaces, and a More Human Future’, Dialog: A Journal of Theology, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2005), 342. 91. This is perhaps one of the issues that are encountered when people discuss ‘mini-gods’ (Kevin Kelly, ‘Nerd Theology’, Technology in Society, Vol. 21 (1999), 388), which pertains to the fundamental charge of ‘playing God’. A substantive Edenic approach is espoused in such talk of gods, and it is this that I oppose in my favouring of a critical-relational approach.

CHAPTER 7

EDEN: RETURN OR REFIGURE?

1. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 177. 2. Brent Waters, Christian Moral Theology in the Emerging Technoculture: From Posthuman Back to Human (Surrey/Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 4. 3. Ibid., 67. 4. Waters, From Human to Posthuman, 144. 5. Ibid., 113. 6. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 151. 7. Ibid. 8. Campbell, ‘Cyborg Salvation History’, 163; Robert Geraci, ‘Robots and the Sacred in Science and Science Fiction: Theological Implications of Artificial Intelligence’, Zygon, Vol. 42, No. 4 (2007), 965. 9. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 150. 10. Waters, Christian Moral Theology in the Emerging Technoculture, 113. 11. Haraway, HLaL, 129. 12. Haraway, ‘MiW’, 218. 13. Arthur Walker-Jones usefully refers specifically to the ‘Eden myth’ that Haraway seems to be mostly referring to here, ‘as distinct from the story in the text’. (‘Eden for Cyborgs: Ecocriticism and Genesis 2–3’, Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2008), 269). 14. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 175. 15. Haraway, HR, 126. 16. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 181. 17. Haraway, ‘CaL’, 14–15. 18. Ibid., 14. 19. Cf. Haraway, MW@SM, 178. 20. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 151.

Notes to Pages 169 – 174 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

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Walker-Jones, ‘Eden for Cyborgs’, 265. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 151. Cf. Haraway, HR, 323. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 151. Ibid., 181. Haraway, SwtT, 88. Ibid., 89 (my emphasis). Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 181. Ibid., 149. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin/London: University of Texas Press), 324. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 180. Hefner, The Human Factor, 19. Ibid., 105. Anne Foerst, ‘Artificial Sociability: From Embodied AI Toward New Understandings of Personhood’, Technology in Society, Vol. 21 (1999), 376. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 139. Hefner, The Human Factor, 274. Ibid., 240. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 157. Ibid.; Hefner, ‘The Created Co-Creator Meets Cyborg’. Richard Bohannon, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Bohannon (ed.), Religions and Environments: A Reader in Religion, Nature and Ecology (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5. ‘Garden’, Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, http://www.oxforddictionaries. com/definition/learner/garden (accessed 10 July 2015). Haraway, HR, 126. For Norman Wirzba, advocating an agrarian garden-based ethics and ontology, ‘without the gardening work that leads us more deeply and sympathetically into the complexities and mysteries of soil, people are prone to become naı¨ve and negligent’ (From Nature to Creation, 103). The complexity of relationalities that I refer to here might have much to do with Wirzba’s sense of earth-based mysteries that surpass and thereby decentralise us. Robin Canniford and Avi Shankar, ‘Purifying Practices: How Consumers Assemble Romantic Experiences of Nature’, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 39 (2013), 1061. Wirzba succumbs to this logic in contrasting gardens to shopping centres and other built environments (From Nature to Creation, 104). Haraway, HR, 126. Haraway, PV, 247. Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 31–2. See also Danette DiMarco, ‘Paradice Lost, Paradise Regained: Homo Faber and the Makings of a New Beginning in Oryx and Crake’, Papers on Language and Literature, No. 41 (2005), 176, 193; Valeria Mosca, ‘Crossing Human Boundaries: Apocalypse and

226

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Notes to Pages 174 – 184 Posthumanism in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood’, Other Modernities, Vol. 9 (2013), 40. Atwood, Oryx and Crake, 379–85. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 151. Michael Pollan, ‘The Idea of a Garden’, in Bohannon (ed.), Religions and Environments, 139. Claus Westermann, Creation (London: SPCK, 1971), 81. Haraway, HR, 65. Cf. Haraway, PV, 381–2. Hefner, ‘The Created Co-Creator Meets Cyborg’. Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves, 172. Cf. Campbell, ‘Cyborg Salvation History’, 158. Kull, ‘Speaking Cyborg’, 286. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 149. Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves, 173. Ibid., 172. Haraway, ‘EH’, 87. Schneider, Donna Haraway, 63. Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves, 172. Cf. Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament, 54. Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves, 172. Cf. Gray, Cyborg Citizen, 139. Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves, 172. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 176. Walker-Jones, ‘Eden for Cyborgs’, 280. Cf. Suddendorf, The Gap, 48, 78. Walker-Jones, ‘Eden for Cyborgs’, 280. Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 (1667)), 236, 317; Gordon Campbell, ‘Milton’s Eden’, in Morris and Sawyer (eds), A Walk in the Garden, 223. Walker-Jones, ‘Eden for Cyborgs’, 292. Ibid., 288–9. Stephenson, ‘Nature, Technology and the Imago Dei’, 11. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 44. Ibid., 46. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 152 (my emphasis). Walker-Jones, ‘Eden for Cyborgs’, 284. Stephenson, ‘Nature, Technology and the Imago Dei’, 9. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 178. Haraway, CSM, 2–3. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 153. Ibid. Ibid., 175.

Notes to Pages 184 – 195

227

87. Cf. Haraway, ‘CaL’, 17 –18, 23; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 89; Louise Lawrence, ‘Tracing Tricksters: Creation and Creativity in John’s Gospel’, in Stichele and Hunter (eds), Creation & Creativity, 182. 88. Haraway, ‘CaL’, 14. 89. Haraway, HR, 151–2. 90. Scott, Anti-Human Theology, 132–3. 91. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 157. 92. Jennifer Gonzalez, ‘Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Notes from Current Research’, in Gray (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, 272. 93. Ibid. 94. Cf. Schneider, Donna Haraway, 20. 95. Casper, ‘Fetal Cyborgs and Technomoms’, 185 (original emphasis). 96. Haraway, SwtT, 101. 97. Haraway, ‘CaS’, xix.

CONCLUSION DOING DIFFERENCE DIFFERENTLY: TOWARDS A CYBORG THEOLOGY 1. Haraway, ‘Manifesto’, 150. 2. I do not seek to advocate or espouse a form of technological determinism here: it is not that technologies have inevitably led to the problems and changes briefly mentioned, but rather that the ideologies and attitudes that brought the technologies into existence and that steered their use have had wider consequence beyond their initial scope. Indeed, the calls argued for throughout this book to revisit and rethink such attitudes and assumptions highlights non-determinism and the complex interaction of technologies and (hi)stories. 3. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 215. 4. Gunkel, ‘We Are Borg’, 342–3. 5. Graham, ‘Cyborgs or Goddesses?’, 424. 6. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human, 174; cf. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, ‘Nietzsche and Transhumanism, Transhumanismus: “Diegefa¨hrlichste Idee der Welt”!?’ (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2016); Thomas Damberger, ‘Book Review: Sorgner’s Transhumanismus, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 26, No. 2 (December 2016), 82– 5; Michael Hauskeller, ‘Nietzsche, the Overhuman and the Posthuman: A Reply to Stefan Sorgner’, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January 2010), 5–8. 7. Bill McKibben, for example, writes that ‘we live, all of a sudden, in an Astroturf world, and though an Astroturf world may have a God, he can’t speak through the grass, or even be silent and let us hear’ (The End of Nature, 54). The givenness of the created world, connoting the given and pristine paradise of Eden, is opposed to technologies that rework and change it. Here, it is technologies and not the world itself that is opposed

228

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

Notes to Pages 195 – 200

to Eden, although this is nonetheless still part of a problematic logic that dichotomises sameness and difference. Haraway, ‘SW’, 145. Cf. Bruce Mazlish, The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993); Gilead Amit et al., ‘Ten Discoveries that would Transform What it Means to be Human’, New Scientist, No. 3033 (8 August 2015), 28 –37. Sigurd Bergmann, ‘Nature, Space and the Sacred: Introductory Remarks’, in Sigurd Bergmann et al. (eds), Nature, Space and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Surrey/Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 13. Like Latour (cf. We Have Never Been Modern), I would want to argue that our situation has always been complex, and (con)fusions have always been a part of our hybrid and relational existence. This is, in other words, not a predicament exclusively brought about by advanced technologies, but they do certainly highlight the (con)fusions and the need to decentre the human in ways that are more difficult to overlook. Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 151. The final lines of Oshii’s 1995 sci-fi anime Ghost in the Shell encapsulate this sentiment, as well as general reflection on cyborgs and humans, effectively: ‘And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite.’ Cyborg Major has recently fused with the Puppet Master, another cyborgian character, in a way that confuses and rethinks sameness and difference (as well as natality and ‘birth’). The site of fusion, which could be taken as representative of implosions in a broader sense that I have discussed, is also a site of rethinking and reflection, which I propose are the cornerstones of a cyborg theology. Jennifer Koosed, ‘Conclusion’, in Koosed (ed.), The Bible and Posthumanism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 329.

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Index

agency, 38, 57, 152 alienation, 53, 59, 140 animals as continuous with humans, 31 – 2, 33 as different from humans, 20, 21, 28, 45, 57 – 8 as made in God’s image (imago dei), 41 in industries, 36, 59 anthropocentrism, 22, 23, 29, 33, 35, 36, 52, 96, 99, 111, 126, 142, 145, 149, 152, 153 –4, 192 apophatic anthropology, 64 articulation, 115– 18, 125, 179 (see also representation) artificial intelligence (AI), 5, 20, 79 artificiality, 20, 54 – 6, 175 Asimov, Isaac, 37 atheism (see secularity) Augustine, 28, 42, 56, 57 – 61, 65, 68, 80 Bacon, Francis, 63, 68, 74 –5, 80, 86 – 7, 102 Baudrillard, Jean, 107 – 9 blasphemy, 11, 141 – 2, 171, 177

Bostrom, Nick, 73, 77, 87 boundaries (see difference) Braidotti, Rosi, 23, 159 cataphatic anthropology, 37 chthulucene (see Haraway, Donna) Clark, Andy, 123 – 6, 155– 6, 172 climate change, 35, 54 Clynes, Manfred, and Kline, Nathan, 97 – 100, 118, 121 companion species (see Haraway, Donna) confusion (see hybridity) control, 37, 48, 61 – 2, 94 – 7, 98, 105, 122, 126 corporations, 7– 8 (see also industries) created co-creators (see Hefner, Philip) creatureliness, 24, 36, 41, 51, 81– 3, 130 cybernetics, 94 – 7, 193 – 4 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (see Haraway, Donna) cyborgs, 5, 67, 93, 191 as critiques of naturalness, 67 – 8, 112 – 13, 152, 173 – 4

244

Cyborg Theology

as different from humans, 6, 7, 45, 101, 105 – 6, 118, 120 – 2, 184 as Edenic, 69 – 70, 172– 3, 177– 84, 185 –6, 187– 8, 195– 6, 199 as enhanced humans, 7, 97 – 8, 120– 1, 155 as interrogative tools, 8, 9, 12, 19, 23, 73, 83, 86 – 9, 109, 114, 116, 123, 125, 131, 139, 155, 184, 192– 3 as natural, 122, 123 – 6, 155 – 6 as non-Edenic, 9– 11, 61, 68 – 9, 115, 146, 163, 165 – 7, 169, 186 nonhuman species as cyborgs, 119, 125, 180, 189 as synonymous with humans, 99, 108, 124, 127– 8, 142 (see also prosthetics) cylons (see sci-fi) death of God, 138, 146 – 8, 157 –8, 195 (see also secularity) Derrida, Jacques, 84 – 5 difference, 7, 20, 31, 40, 47, 66 – 8, 132, 147, 161, 178, 183, 190 Dinello, Daniel, 7, 8, 99 disability, 29, 103 dominion, 24, 33 – 5, 36, 115 dualism, 29, 30, 75 – 6, 97, 158 –9, 170 Eden as escapist, 9, 10, 54 – 6, 99, 158, 168, 192, 194 in films and popular culture, 4, 55, 166 as gardened/maintained, 173– 6 as metanarrative, 2, 3, 169, 177

as Paradise, 53 – 4, 63, 65, 165, 167, 175, 183 (see also utopia) Ellul, Jacques, 50, 65 enhancement, 74, 86 – 7, 102 – 4 eschatology, 25 – 6, 34, 76 – 7, 102– 3 fabulation, 13, 69, 107, 109, 131, 146, 161, 195 – 6 Fall (see original sin) free will; freedom, 31, 57 –8, 60, 61– 5 fusion (see hybridity) gender, 8, 29, 97, 118, 158, 160 Genesis I, 21 – 2, 25, 32 – 3, 40, 51, 58 Genesis II, 31, 51, 115 genetics, 35 Gnosticism, 95, 99 goddess, 157– 60, 169 Graham, Elaine, 13, 82, 84, 101, 117, 157 –9, 192 Haraway, Donna chthulucene, 130– 1, 132, 148, 159, 186 companion species, 40, 128 – 33, 182– 3 cyborgs, 8– 9, 99, 113 – 18, 138, 157– 8, 172, 197 (see also cyborgs, as interrogative tools) primatology, 120 Hayles, Katherine, 12, 88, 94– 5, 97 health (see therapy) Hefner, Philip, 41, 139– 57, 162– 3, 171 – 2, 178, 179 created co-creators, 141 –4, 149 – 52, 154– 5, 172 Herbrechter, Stefan, 82, 88 Herzfeld, Noreen, 27, 38 –9, 40, 74, 150 – 1

Index hierarchy, 28, 29, 31, 41 – 2, 191 –2 (hi)stories, 12 – 16, 46, 62, 66, 69, 72, 83, 93 – 4, 96, 114, 115, 117 –18, 120, 131– 3, 141, 159 –61, 167, 170– 1, 184, 186, 194, 195 –6, 198 hubris, 33, 49 – 50, 79, 80, 81, 82 humanism, 22 – 3, 46, 75 – 6, 81 – 2, 103 humanocentrism (see anthropocentrism) humans as animals, 32 as creators (homo faber), 2, 42, 51 – 2, 53, 63, 64, 146, 151, 157, 172 as machines, 30 – 2, 38 as natural/non-technological, 44, 53, 66 as rational, 27 – 9, 38, 57, 63, 68, 75, 103, 114, 123 as superior, 22, 25, 41, 95, 145, 174 (see also anthropocentrism) as technological, 9, 50, 51 – 2, 56, 63, 66, 86 – 7, 142, 152– 3, 171 (see also cyborgs, as synonymous with humans) as unique, 20, 23, 25, 30 – 1, 34, 44, 156 (see also imago dei, substantive interpretations) ideal type, 29, 98, 103, 111, 139– 40, 191 –2, 193 (see also perfection) hybridity, 44 – 5, 89, 95 –6 confusion, 117 – 18, 120, 123, 127– 8, 129, 147, 149, 156, 159, 161, 163, 180, 182, 188, 197 fusion, 96, 97, 100, 104– 5, 107, 109, 116, 121, 124,

245 127 – 8, 147 (see also implosion)

Ihde, Don, 52, 56, 69, 151 imago dei, 21, 24 – 7, 43, 60, 61, 64– 5 functional interpretations, 32 – 8, 149, 151, 175 relational interpretations, 38 – 43, 89, 137, 143, 144– 5, 157, 162– 3, 176, 179 –80, 182, 197– 9 substantive interpretations, 27 – 32, 34 – 5, 36, 37, 39, 43, 44, 51, 75 – 6, 82, 129, 152 – 6, 167 –8, 175, 184 tensions between substantive and functional interpretations, 41, 57, 60, 79 – 81, 174 immanence, 130– 1, 147– 8, 159, 161, 168, 170, 184 immortality, 50, 77 implosion, 87, 89, 117–18, 158–9, 163, 174, 182–3, 188, 200 industries, 35, 54, 59, 191 innocence, 10, 54, 113, 171– 2, 178, 185, 187 internet, 49 language, 84 – 6, 171 Latour, Bruno, 39, 96 – 7, 181 – 2 Linzey, Andrew, 28 – 9, 35 – 6 McLuhan, Marshall, 106 – 9 metaphor (see tropes) Mettrie, Julian Offray de la (see humans, as machines) narratives (see (hi)stories) nature as given, 51 – 6, 60, 69, 122 as red in tooth and claw, 55 – 6

246

Cyborg Theology

OncoMousee, 81, 125 original sin, 26, 56, 60 – 3, 80, 171 –2, 187 origins, 35, 50, 68–9, 118, 140–1, 160, 166–7, 184–5, 188 perfection, 50, 62 – 4, 103 personhood, 29, 36, 38, 123, 147 Peters, Ted, 80, 83, 102– 3 posthumanism as critique of humanism, 72, 73, 83 –6, 88 as decentring the human, 71 as evolutionary (see transhumanism) as expression of humanism, 81 – 2, 86 – 8, 95, 96, 129 as other to the human, 72 – 3, 74, 77, 78 – 81, 86 – 7, 101 prosthetics, 85, 101, 103, 108, 115, 124 – 5, 127, 189 purity (see innocence) relationality between God and creatures (vertical relationality), 40, 137– 8, 140, 146 –8, 149 – 51, 157– 8, 161 – 3, 168, 178– 9, 188, 200 between humans and posthuman creations (technological; vertical relationality), 42 – 3, 62, 81 – 2, 89, 95 between species (creaturely; horizontal relationality), 39, 40 –1, 43, 81 – 3, 9, 128, 130, 144– 5, 149, 176, 178, 181– 2, 188, 191– 2, 196 replicants (see sci-fi) representation, 115, 118, 125, 179 –80 (see articulation) Robocop (see sci-fi) robots, 37, 38, 42, 72, 78, 97

salvation (see soteriology) sci-fi (SF), 8, 13 – 14, 53, 78, 79, 82, 93, 101, 105– 11, 132 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, 106 Battlestar Galactica, 6, 8 Blade Runner, 8 Ex Machina, 106 Frankenstein, 78 Ghost in the Shell, 109 Gravity, 166, 168 Humans, 62 Justice League, 5 MaddAddam, 79, 174 The Matrix (and Animatrix), 62 Robocop, 5, 6, 7, 93 Star Trek, 105 The Terminator, 5– 6, 7, 13, 93, 106 Scott, Peter, 51, 121, 154, 185 secularity, 14, 21, 22 –3, 30, 75, 76, 132, 161, 168, 170, 175, 198 solutionism, 35, 111, 191– 2 soteriology, 9– 10, 113, 166 – 8, 179, 185, 191 – 2, 195 space, 99 – 101, 107, 116, 118, 125, 168, 180, 189, 194 spiral dance, 160 – 1, 162 technophilia, 52, 59, 63, 64, 67– 8, 70, 126, 151 technophobia, 7, 42, 53, 59, 61, 65, 67 – 8, 70, 78– 80, 101, 151 teleology, 101, 103, 153, 167 The Terminator (see sci-fi) therapy, 102 – 4, 122 Thweatt-Bates, Jeanine, 73, 118, 177– 80, 185 transcendence, 99, 100, 138, 146, 147 –8, 157– 9, 168, 175, 184 –5 transhumanism, 73, 74 – 7, 86 – 7, 98, 100, 104, 120, 123, 159, 180

Index Trinity, 145– 6 tropes, 12 – 13, 15, 116, 131, 171 utopia, 4, 9– 10, 166, 169 – 70 Walker-Jones, Arthur, 169, 180 –4

247

Warwick, Kevin, 119– 23, 124 Waters, Brent, 73 – 4, 81, 148, 151, 165 –6, 169, 172 White, Lynn, 22, 33 Wiener, Norbert, 94 – 6 Wolfe, Cary, 71 – 2, 84 – 5 xenogenesis, 24, 141, 179

— Elaine L. Graham, Grosvenor Research Professor of Practical Theology, University of Chester, author of Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture

‘Scott Midson’s book blazes a new path for theology in its pursuit of the trans- and posthuman. This is cutting-edge work that we need to start to include in our academic curricula. It speaks powerfully to the world we inhabit.’ — Graham Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford

Scott A. Midson

The concept of the cyborg, or cybernetic organism, has led to notably creative explorations of the ambiguous relationship between human beings and technology. In particular, Donna Haraway argued in her famous 1991 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ that people, since they cannot escape the influence of machines, can themselves be conceived of as cyborgs. This striking idea has had considerable influence within critical theory, cultural studies and even science fiction (where it has surfaced, for example, in the Terminator films and in the Borg of the Star Trek franchise). But it is a notion that has had much less currency in theology.

CYBORG THEOLOGY HUMANS,

In his innovative new book, Scott Midson boldly argues that the deeper nuances of Haraway’s and the cyborg idea can similarly rejuvenate theology, mythology and anthropology. Challenging the damaging anthropocentrism directed towards nature and the non-human in our society, the author reveals – through an imaginative reading of the myth of Eden – how it is now possible for humanity to be at one with the natural world even as it vigorously pursues novel, posthuman technologies.

TECHNOLOGY AND GOD

— Peter Scott, Samuel Ferguson Professor of Applied Theology and Director

The result is a fresh and imaginative reading of salvation history that develops and deconstructs Haraway’s thinking even while it conceives of human beings as being part of creation, not damagingly separate from it. In the process, even as much is communicated about cyborgs and myth, Midson shows his readers how a sophisticated application of cultural theory can enrich theological understanding even as theology in turn enhances cultural studies. Offering nothing less than a retrieval of human personhood, this bold and original monograph will have considerable interdisciplinary appeal: to theologians, to philosophers and to students of social and cultural theory.

of the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester

Scott A. Midson

www.ibtauris.com

Jacket image: Robotic endoskeleton of a T-800 cyborg used in the film Terminator 2 on display at ‘Fantastic SyFy Objects’, the Royal Tapestry Factory in Madrid, 25 February, 2011 (photo by Eduardo Parra/Getty Images)

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‘Utilising the concept of the cyborg, Midson brilliantly explores the shifting boundaries and coupling relationships between human and machine. The result is a tour de force. Midson’s is a new and compelling voice on the theological scene.’

CYBORG THEOLOGY

‘Scott Midson’s book will encourage readers to reflect not just on the impact of advanced technologies on their everyday lives, but also on the deeper questions about what it means to be human in a world of hybrid beings and fluid boundaries.’

HUMANS, TECHNOLOGY AND GOD

Scott A. Midson is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Lincoln Theological Institute, University of Manchester, where he obtained his PhD in 2016. Specialising in religion and technology, and religion and posthumanism, he is a member of the Society for the Study of Theology, where he delivered a paper in 2016 on the topic of ‘Black Mirrors’. Cyborg Theology is his first book.