I’d Rather be a Sinner than a

Cyborg
Lucy Tatman
LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

ABSTRACT Upon which Christian theological metaphors and models is Donna

Haraway’s understanding of ‘cyborg’ ontologically dependent, and how and why
might it matter? This article explores the possibility that Haraway’s cyborg is a
saviour-figure, made partially in the image of a transcendent God. It suggests that
cyborgs do have an origin story, and that their story is inseparably linked to the
theological development of Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history, which is itself
linked, arguably, to the technological developments of the Industrial Revolution.
Taking Haraway at her word, or at least her Christian theological words, reveals a
disturbingly indifferent cyborg-God, one perfectly at ease with apocalyptic
imagery and feats, but one who does not comprehend that apocalyptic rhetoric
was never meant to be taken literally.

KEY WORDS apocalypse ◆ cyborg ◆ ontology ◆ salvation ◆ second coming ◆ sin

What do you get when you combine three biotech companies, a handful of
patents, and a Noah’s Ark full of cloned animals? . . . Farmers are already
cloning prized cows and pigs, a practice that will balloon if, as expected, the
Food & Drug Administration approves the marketing of milk and meat
from clones later this year. (Weintraub and Keenan, 2002: 94)

Is this what has become of the dream of a land flowing with milk and
honey?
Two years ago I finally wrote a first draft of this article – ‘finally’
because I had been deeply intrigued for at least 10 years by Donna
Haraway’s curious and consistent use of Christian theological metaphors
and models. ‘Incarnation’, ‘salvation history’, ‘apocalypse’, ‘the Garden of
Eden’, ‘the God of monotheism’, ‘the god-trick’, ‘crown of thorns’, ‘the
suffering servant’; these terms appear, repeatedly, in her work (Haraway,
1991a: 150–1, 154; 1991b: 189, 193, 195; 1992: 88–9; 1997: 10). Although not
a typical practice, it is quite possible to read Haraway’s texts as meaning-
ful primarily in relation to the theological concepts she uses. Or, to take her
at her word when she writes that hers is ‘an imagination of a feminist

The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications

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52 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1)

speaking in tongues’.1 It is odd. Two years ago there were still some
people who were fascinated, shocked and excited and concerned by
Haraway’s bold claim that ‘we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology’;2
that we humans are ‘creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who
populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted’.3 Today such a claim
no longer seems to shock or fascinate. Cyborgs are becoming, or perhaps
already have become, passé, a matter of indifference. It is odd. Two years
ago it did not occur to me that I might one day, unknowingly, be drinking
the milk of a cloned cow, or pouring gravy upon a clone-chop. But it
seems that some sort of flood has indeed subsided only recently, that the
Ark is aground once more, and that all the creatures coming forth are
cyborgish to an extreme. Which is to say, I would like to argue that Donna
Haraway is even more of a prophet than she usually is acknowledged to
be, and that her offering of a cyborg soteriology (or her vision of salvation
by cyborg) is, from a feminist theological perspective, abundantly prob-
lematic. As problematic, in fact, as the notion of salvation by Jesus Christ.4
No Christian fundamentalist, still Haraway is a deeply faithful author,
and one who acknowledges her Irish Catholic background.5 Is it a coinci-
dence, I wonder, that cyborgs as she writes of them not only attempt to
‘subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust’6 but also seem to
have a particular affinity for the outcast, the despised: women and other
‘others’? To whom, exactly, are the cyborgs’ blasphemous words and
deeds most welcome? Is it by those who are perceived as relatively
powerless, marginal, disposable – the very subjects usually interpreted to
be most in need of some sort of revelation, liberation and salvation? What
familiar story is echoed here? Is Haraway offering cyborgs as the saviours
of the 21st century? I believe she is.
Although Haraway writes that ‘the cyborg incarnation is outside
salvation history,’7 lacking an ‘origin story in the Western sense,’8 and
‘completely without innocence’,9 she nonetheless situates cyborgs in ‘the
Garden’,10 albeit a Garden lacking the omniscient gaze of a transcendent
God. (She is particularly disdainful of the all-seeing god-trick in ‘Situated
Knowledges’.)11 I suspect that such epistemic reliance upon the concepts
of a Garden, a transcendent God, and especially the notions of salvation
history and apocalypse signals, to slightly misquote Haraway, ‘a
disturbingly . . . tight coupling’12 between cyborgs and the very funda-
mental assumptions embedded in the western Christian symbolic
universe against which she writes. To put it another way, it may well be
the case that the ‘cyborg incarnation’ is not and cannot be situated
‘outside’ salvation history, ‘outside’ a story that includes, in one way or
another, an omniscient, transcendent God, that includes the threat (or the
promise) of an apocalypse, and that, perhaps most importantly, includes
a yearning for salvation. The notion of ‘salvation by cyborg’ is of course
rather different from that of ‘salvation by God’, but it seems to me that
 Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 53

both sorts of salvation assume (a) a human need for it, and (b) that
salvation must (or has, or will, or just possibly might) happen in history.
But now I am writing ahead of myself. Upon what theological metaphors
and models is Haraway epistemically dependent, particularly in her
essays ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ and ‘Situated Knowledges’?

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to

feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy
is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has
always seemed to require taking things very seriously. . . . Blasphemy
protects one from the Moral Majority within, while still insisting on the need
for community. . . . At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the
image of the cyborg.13

With these words Donna Haraway begins ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. She

concludes the second paragraph of the same essay with the following
claim:

Liberation rests on the construction of consciousness, the imaginative

apprehension of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of
fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experi-
ence in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but
the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical
illusion.14

Faith, blasphemy, reverent worship, the Moral Majority, community,

liberation, oppression, a struggle over life and death . . . take away these
theological/religious concepts, and I suggest one is left with practically
no meaningful content whatsoever. While it could be argued, of course,
that community, liberation, oppression, and a struggle over life and death
are not, by themselves, inherently or necessarily theological terms or
notions, when they are used as key concepts within a self-consciously
‘faithful’ myth, as components of an irreverent but deeply held commit-
ment to the liberation of various communities from various, intersecting
and overlapping forms of oppression, when they are used to affirm,
explicitly, faithful life rather than senseless death-through-apocalypse,
then I think that the text supports a reading of them as theological
concepts. Moreover, Haraway’s generous use of theological terms and
concepts is not a playful or ironic introductory strategy, although it is both
playful and ironic.
Throughout both essays, she consistently depends on theological
metaphors and models to help illumine or make clear what it is that she
is writing for, what it is that she values. For example, in ‘Situated Know-
ledges’ she repeatedly writes for ‘faithful knowledge’,15 and in ‘A Cyborg
Manifesto’, when asserting ‘the noninnocence of the category “woman” ’,
Haraway affirms such ‘noninnocence’ precisely because: ‘In the fraying of
54 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1)

identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possi-
bility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day
after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history.’16 Later,
she suggests that ‘perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with
animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western
logos’.17 Instead of being the Word made flesh, Haraway suggests that we
are, and need to reflect seriously upon what it means to be, part organism
and part technology – both monstrous and illegitimate.18 Furthermore,
being illegitimate, there is, according to Haraway, no reason to ‘expect
[our] father to save [us] through a restoration of the garden. . . . [A] cyborg
would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and
cannot dream of returning to dust.’19
But here Haraway’s use of theological concepts becomes rather para-
doxical. It is clear that she is not advocating faith in a transcendent,
omnipotent and very masculine Father God. However, as I mentioned
earlier, she does situate cyborgs in the Garden; in fact, she notes that
cyborgs have never been expelled from it – that they, meaning we, were
never originally innocent, and thus never incurred the punishment (or the
guilt) that comes with original sin.20 Nevertheless, I would suggest that
unless a cyborg can imagine, and can imagine in horrifying detail, ‘return-
ing to [silicon] dust’, then there is no sense in Haraway’s desire ‘to see if
cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust’,21 no
sense to her affirmation that cyborgs might weave something other than
‘a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends
salvation history’.22 And if cyborgs really are part animal, then ‘mud’ is as
good a metaphor as any for expressing our intimate connection to the
physical, material stuff of the earth, including other earth creatures.
Haraway’s aims, while prophetically admirable, get a bit scrambled when
she depends too heavily on theological metaphors.
On the one hand, she holds that any myth of an originally blissful,
perfect past, carrying with it a longing to return to such an innocent state,
is a terribly dangerous myth upon which to feed. Cyborgs are not babies,
needing to be looked after constantly and basically incapable of doing
anything or anyone any harm. No, cyborgs are instead quite dangerous
entities, and we ignore this fact at our peril. We have proven to be capable
of doing great, great harm to each other, to the more muddy creatures of
the earth, and to the earth itself. In short, we are anything but innocent.
(Oddly, Haraway seems at times to forget, but I think it is necessary to
remember, that all humans do start out as babies, as touchingly and
defencelessly innocent creatures.)
On the other hand, for Haraway this earth is the only garden there is.
Cyborgs seem to be quite stubbornly attached to it, perhaps even more
stubbornly attached to this particular rubbish-strewn garden than those
who dream of ‘the Second Coming and their being raptured out of the
 Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 55

final destruction of the world’.23 Cyborgs care, indeed care lovingly24

about the world, a world ‘that can be partially shared and friendly to
earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance,
modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness’.25 But again,
Haraway stresses that a ‘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’.26 There is nothing
wrong with both/and logic, but.
Here I would like to pause and, rather than continue to ply you with a
relentless barrage of Haraway quotes, reflect a bit upon the theological
concepts she uses so often, in particular the notions of salvation history,
the apocalypse, and a transcendent God – all of which Haraway seems to
associate with Christianity-since-its-inception. To begin with, ‘salvation
history’ is the English translation of the German term Heilsgeschichte, a
uniquely Christian theological term which, unlike cyborgs-according-to-
Haraway, does have an origin story. It became ‘a prominent technical
term’ in the 19th century through the work of the German theologian J.C.
von Hofmann, and has come to mean, basically, that God both has acted
and will act again in history to save the elect (O’Neill, 1983: 248). From the
perspective of Heilsgeschichte, the whole of history is read as a progressive
movement toward the realization of God’s ends. For example, the
historical fact of the Israelites is read as providing the necessary ground
and context for the birth, life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. (Let me stress
that salvation history is Christian history – and this fact matters.)
However, Heilsgeschichte is not only concerned with reading God’s
actions in the past, but also with assuring the chosen ones of God’s actions
in the future, albeit at the end of the future. There is thus a strongly eschato-
logical dimension to Heilsgeschichte, or a concern with last or end times.
Here, theologically, ‘apocalypse’ (technically meaning revelation or
unveiling) fits in as a subcategory of eschatology – the study of end times
or last things. And here it is vital to be aware of the fact that the first time
the term ‘eschatology’ was used was in 1844, ‘where it was used in a
disparaging sense’ (Hanson, 1983: 183; emphasis added). Although we in
the West seem to take it for granted that ‘thoughts about The End’ are
somehow transhistorical, perhaps even an eternal and unchanging
element in humans’ lives, they do not seem to be, or at least they did not
require their own theological concept until the middle of the 19th century.
Even then, its initial reception was one of ridicule. My point is that
salvation history is, theologically, a recent notion. So too is eschatology, so
too is western culture’s fixation on the topic of ‘the End’.
I do not believe it is a coincidence that Heilsgeschichte first appeared
in Germany, in the middle of the 19th century, as a theological term
conveying an assurance of the progressive movement of history toward
God’s ends. The Industrial Revolution was occurring at about the same
56 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1)

time, in and around the same place. Among the well-educated, well-fed,
bourgeois elements of society, at least, the ‘truth’ of historical progress
toward something ‘nicer’, something ‘better’, was certainly beginning to
be felt. Machines were making life easier, or at least more profitable, for
the privileged few. But then, there were others who did not feel that things
were progressing smoothly at all. I believe it was Karl Marx (1818–83)
who mentioned something about there needing to be a different sort of
revolution, and a rather cataclysmic one at that, in order to clear away all
that constrains the ‘free development and movement of individuals’
(Marx, 1978: 198). It’s an astonishing coincidence, of course, but in the late
1830s, when Marx was studying law and philosophy at the University of
Berlin, he attended the lectures of the theologian Bruno Bauer, who,
apparently, ‘taught that a new social catastrophe “more tremendous” than
that of the advent of Christianity was in the making’.27 But to return to
those machines which were to play such an important role in spreading
prosperity and enabling the free development of all: those machines were,
I suspect, fairly frightening to many people. They were loud, and huge,
and heavy, and many of them caused black smoke to belch forth into the
sky, and they ‘ate’ people who got to close to them, didn’t treat them with
respect. Keep those machines in the back of your minds . . .
The curious thing about Heilsgeschichte/salvation history is that it can
accommodate, conceptually, both a smooth sort of man-made (but God-
willed) sense of historical progress, and a more irruptive, even violent sort
of ‘progress’. It can do so because, theologically, its roots reach back more
than 2000 years, all the way back to the Jewish notion of apocalypse, or
revelation. From a theological perspective, it is important to understand
that the Jewish apocalyptic tradition is a little odd (as is the Christian one),
and only flourished for, relatively speaking, a short time (both like and
unlike the Christian one) – a time encompassing that particular time
before, during and after which Jesus lived. There are several curious
things about ‘apocalypse’.
First, apocalyptic literature is, as a genre, strange. Characterized by
richly symbolic language, including a great deal of cataclysmic ‘natural’
upheaval and bloody confrontations between good and evil, such texts
are not meant to be taken literally, but are meant to be taken as a/the truth
revealed by God Above to a specific, and always somehow special, group.
‘Apocalypses’ are at least as much about revelations of usually hidden
divine mysteries as they are about any ‘end’. That is, they are not only
teleological, but also epistemological tales. Haraway appreciates the fact
that they are about The End, but not the fact that they are also about
knowledge, knowledge that does not end when the story does, if it does.
Importantly, in their religious contexts, they seem always to begin their
lives as stories by and for the underdogs, the militarily and religiously
oppressed and persecuted. They promise a happy ending for the
 Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 57

oppressed, and a miserable, never-ending comeuppance for those who

had been behaving nastily to others. However, part of what makes apoca-
lyptic literature such hopeful literature (for some) is that these texts were
often written as a prophecy about an event (or series of events) that had
just recently already occurred. Accordingly, in their contexts, at least their
Jewish contexts, the ‘end’ promised by all manner of revelations was
never in fact a final or ultimate end. Rather, it was simultaneously the end
to and knowledge about a specific period of injustice. The writers of such
texts were able to say, in effect, ‘Yes, things are (were) awful, but look, the
bad guys will get (got) what is (was) coming to them.’ The authors also
stressed, simultaneously, the need for believers to keep behaving in the
ways they ought to be behaving, for, it is strongly implied, a future end
could always be otherwise.
To oversimplify things, before Jesus’ time, when the Israelites as a
people and nation were doing fairly well, they attributed their success to
the fact that they were keeping their covenant with God, and that, in
return, God was keeping up God’s covenant with them – which meant
that God was on their side when they went to war (and thus they won),
and that the earth itself (because it had been created by God) was yielding
up to them abundant harvests. When, however, things were not going so
well, the reason was that they were not keeping to their covenant with
God, who was thus allowing them to suffer the consequences. Eventually
(approximately 250 years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and during
a time of political and military defeat) it occurred to some that no matter
how well they kept their covenant with God, they were still being badly
oppressed by their enemies/conquerors. What was needed, they felt, was
an awfully powerful God to swoop in and set things right again, prefer-
ably in a flashy, crashy manner that would leave their enemies very, very
dead, and the Righteous very well-off indeed. Unfortunately, this did not
happen. What did happen was the destruction of the Second Temple in
Jerusalem (in 70 of the Common Era), and, with time, more Jewish
diasporas. To reinject some Haraway here, it is awfully curious to me that
she writes that, for cyborgs, ‘the task is to survive in the diaspora’.28 I
return to this later.
The issue at hand, however, is that Christianity inherited (or borrowed,
or perhaps stole) the notion of the apocalypse as a solution to times of
turmoil and crisis on earth – as the last word concerning earthly matters.
And, not surprisingly, whenever there have been times more turbulent or
crisis-ridden than usual, the spectre of the apocalypse appears, hovers
over and within the fringes of the western Christian symbolic universe,
pervading the unconscious if not the consciousness of all who inhabit
such a universe. The interesting thing, I think, is that after Jesus did not
come again in a timely fashion, apocalyptic imagery and rhetoric were
shelved by the guardians of mainstream Christian doctrine. They
58 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1)

promoted instead a focus on the state of one’s individual soul, and

stressed the need to obey the Church. Thus, historically, apocalyptic
thoughts have been a regular occurrence primarily within ‘fringe’
elements of Christianity. It has only been since the mid-19th century that
thoughts about a ‘final’ apocalypse (i.e. how it might be brought about or
avoided) have been becoming a much more central preoccupation. Today,
to quote feminist theologian Catherine Keller, ‘if apocalypse cannot be
situated within most people’s belief systems, neither does it lie outside of
our subjectivities: it metabolizes both within us and outside of ourselves.
I don’t even believe we can step outside of it if we want to’ (Keller, 1996:
xi–xii).
I appreciate Keller’s point, and I believe that cyborgs in particular are
apocalyptic creatures – not by choice, but by birthright. Even though
Haraway dismisses the notion that cyborgs have an origin story, I think
they do. I think that cyborgs are not nearly as illegitimate as Haraway
wishes they were. And I believe that the more we reflect upon cyborgs
(our) admittedly recent origins, the better the possibility (though never
the certainty) that we might be able ‘to subvert the apocalypse of return-
ing to nuclear dust’ – or environmental ruin, or death by NATO missiles
or cluster bombs, or even simple animal starvation.
I suggest that cyborgs were born in the middle of the 19th century, the
curious but legitimate (if a little perverse) product of the trinitarian union
of salvation history, the Industrial Revolution and Marxist thought. Nour-
ished in equal parts by a growing belief in progress (whether smooth or
violent, God-less or God-willed) combined with hope in and a fear and
loathing of the machinery supposed to be making such ‘progress’ possible
– fear on the part of those who did and who did not work with the
machines, loathing on the part of those who had to, hope shared unequally
by all – the cyborgs’ genesis story isn’t pretty, but it is a genesis story
nonetheless. A genesis story already written in, of all places, The New
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In the course of [the Industrial Revolution’s] dynamic development

between 1750 and 1900, important things happened to technology itself. In
the first place, it became self-conscious. . . . Second, by becoming self-
conscious, technology attracted attention in a way it had never done before,
and vociferous factions grew up to praise it as the mainspring of social
progress and the development of democracy or to criticise it as the bane of
modern man, responsible for the harsh discipline of the ‘dark Satanic mills’
and the tyranny of the machine and the squalor of urban life.29

Although I believe Haraway is wrong to say that cyborgs have no

origin story, I think she is absolutely right when she states that the issue
confronting cyborgs is how ‘to survive in the diaspora’. For although
cyborgs have a time of birth, we have no one specific place of birth.
 Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 59

Cyborgs do not have a homeland. At this time our only permanent

address is our email address, and we usually have several of those.
Cyborgs are diasporic creatures.
What’s more, cyborgs do not have, and have never had, the promise of a
homeland. No God ever spoke to any cyborg, ever made a covenant with
any cyborg, or ever lived and died for any cyborg. Cyborgs know full well
that the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition has proven, especially
throughout the 20th century, to be particularly ineffectual, whereas
cyborgs have accomplished all sorts of things, many of them flashy,
crashy and awe-inspiringly destructive of their enemies. However, the
image of a transcendent God floating in space (proclaiming to see and
thus to know everything – like a spy satellite?), everywhere yet nowhere
in particular, a God feared and loathed and simultaneously hoped for, this
is, for a cyborg, an image as familiar as its/her/his own face in the mirror.
It is simply no big deal. Cyborgs are made (at least partially) in the image
of God, and know this even better, perhaps, than the most fervent Christ-
ian fundamentalist.
It is here, I believe, that Haraway’s playful and ironic rhetorical
strategy, that is, her usually oppositional or negative epistemic reliance
upon Christian theological metaphors and models, reveals a positive
ontological relationship between cyborgs and the transcendent, omni-
scient, omnipotent God whose ‘nature’ she writes against. What is more,
Haraway knows this, even though as soon as she confesses this ‘truth’ –
that ‘modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s
ubiquity and spirituality’ (emphasis added)30 – she writes, for just a
moment, as though there is a difference, a distance, even a dichotomy
between people and machines. Stressing this difference, she writes, ‘our
best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because
they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves. . . . People are
nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether,
quintessence.’31 But to begin from the premise that ‘we are cyborgs [and]
the cyborg is our ontology’ requires Haraway, I think, to take much more
seriously that which, on the page following her ‘modern machinery is an
irreverent upstart god’ comment, she once again affirms: ‘our joint
kinship with animals and machines’.32 I suggest that it is precisely as our
machines/ourselves that we cyborgs do make incarnate irreverent,
upstart Gods.
Or, cyborgs are related to the transcendent omni-God of the Christian
tradition, related just as closely as we are related to any machine, any
technological gadget, just as closely as we are related to chimpanzees.
After all, cyborgs do have the capacity to see from space; there is no
escaping our presence, for they, we, can Netscape ourselves practically
anywhere while being nowhere in particular (or in seat 24B of Lufthansa
flight 516, for instance); and although most of us are scared by what we
60 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1)

can do, we harbour the hope that cyborgs will somehow save us from
ourselves, will come up with a miraculous technological solution that will
restore the Garden of Eden we (some of us) have been polluting and
destroying at such an alarming speed. Put metaphorically (and in saying
this I mean that it is literally true and literally false, at one and the same
time), as cyborgs we make incarnate the Second Coming.
Once again God is present on earth, in our midst, and we, collectively,
are that unrecognized God. On the one hand, we have proven to be sadly
impotent when it comes to alleviating needless suffering: feeding the
hungry, clothing the naked, providing shelter for the homeless. On the
other hand, possessing the know-how and the devices to destroy all life
on earth several times over, we are already overly omnipotent. Multi-
national genetic engineering companies are racing each other to make
belief in immortality – through the sequencing of an individual’s genetic
code – a marketable commodity, in the not too distant future, for the un-
believably wealthy. The unbelievably eccentric are already freezing their
bodies in order that they might be resurrected in the future. And it will
happen. It will happen. Cyborgs are the new way, truth, and above all
else, life; whosoever does not believe in them will be pressured, their
conversion forced. And like some of the more unpleasant Christian
missionaries, there are cyborgs who are quite, quite ruthless. (Bill Gates
springs to mind.) But regardless of how ruthless or how kind are the
cyborgs in question, it behoves us to remember, I think, that missionary
work is the right hand of colonization. I might be a little more sceptical
than Haraway is about the liberatory potential of cyborgs for precisely
this reason. There was, I believe, absolutely nothing wrong with the
message that we should love our neighbours as ourselves, but look at
what all has happened in the name of the messenger. But then, I think that
Haraway too is worried about cyborgs’ relations to God and Christianity.
Her worry is revealed through her constant repetition and rejection of
those theological concepts she (and I) keep inflicting upon you.
As this point is crucial, I restate it. According to Haraway, ‘the cyborg is
our ontology’.33 She also writes that ‘the cyborg incarnation is outside
salvation history’.34 ‘Immortality and omnipotence are not our goals’;35
‘the god-trick is forbidden’.36 ‘Cyborg writing must not be about the
Fall’.37 The cyborg ‘was not born in a garden’.38 But, again, and to quote a
pre-cyborg English fellow, ‘The lady protests too much, methinks.’ The
very terms of her protest reveal, I suggest, the very non-innocence of
cyborgs – a non-innocence she so rightly insists upon. The cyborg incar-
nation – the merging together of flesh and machine, the dependence of
flesh upon technology for life, and the dependence of technology upon
flesh in order to be animated – the cyborg incarnation begun in the 19th
century is as inseparable from God and salvation history as it is in-
separable from the Industrial Revolution and the thought of Karl Marx;
 Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 61

Heilsgeschichte spoke to some large, loud machines, to the animals who

profited from them and suffered beside them, and in response the cyborg
said, ‘Hey, look what I can do.’ ‘It’s God’s will,’ replied Heilsgeschichte.
‘No,’ interjected Marx, ‘it’s the inevitable outcome of the collective efforts
of the people working for the people.’ ‘The end is coming’, proclaimed
Marx and Heilsgeschichte, accidentally in unison. ‘What are you talking
about?’ said the cyborg, ‘I’ve only just begun.’ ‘Save us’, cried Heils-
geschichte and Marx, again, coincidentally, in unison. And Haraway
knows, I think, that the cyborg is a soteriological device, a ‘saviour-myth’
addressed to us in all our woundedness, dare I say it, in our fallenness.
‘We have all been injured, profoundly’, notes Haraway.39 And in response
to the fact of our injuries she suggests that cyborg imagery might help to
bring about ‘regeneration’ if not ‘rebirth’, and that ‘the possibilities for our
reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous
world without gender’,40 and, just possibly, without end. A world that, in
some ways, is now as it was in the beginning and will be forever. Yet she
knows as well that cyborgs commit god-tricks on a daily basis, and are
tempted, continually, by the goals of immortality and omnipotence. She
knows that we fall prey to these temptations, and daily enact our prayer
to ourselves: let it be done according to my will, for I am a God.
In short, I suggest that rather than being situated (miraculously)
outside salvation history, salvation history, including all manner of god-
tricks and never-ending stories of endings apocalyptic, is the only history
cyborgs have ever known. However, the end to salvation history does
indeed rest in our hands, which is a terrifying, if potentially liberating,
thought.
As cyborgs we have proven to be awfully curious creatures; we seem to
like to do, to realize, everything we can imagine. We seem to be obsessed
with turning potentiality into actuality – and then watching what
happens when we do. Unfortunately what happens is usually far more
destructive and messy than we had anticipated, and we don’t seem to like
cleaning up our messes. We are young, for Gods, and can’t be bothered
with such mundane chores. And anyway, that is what mothers and maids
are for – cleaning up other people’s messes. (And here let me note that
many cyborgs may not be as genderless as Haraway wishes.)
On the other hand, precisely because cyborgs can and do imagine in
exquisite detail all sorts of apocalyptic endings to this world, we are
growing comfortable with such thoughts. Why is this, possibly, good
news? Because it may be the case that the more familiar and comfortable
we become with a virtual apocalypse, the less likely it is that we’ll feel a
need to enact a real-life apocalypse. Cyborgs just possibly might not be
bothered with distinguishing between virtual reality and non-virtual
reality – that sort of reality which is not only felt and experienced but
which also leaves its marks on animal flesh. The feel and experience of
62 The European Journal of Women’s Studies 10(1)

apocalypses without end (and without mark), apocalypses which can be

programmed to play themselves out over and over again, this may just
satisfy a cyborg’s curiosity.
More possibly good news: as diasporic creatures who hold out no hope
for deliverance into a promised land, cyborgs are used to making and
remaking temporary homes – and delighting in them, here and now,
wherever and whenever here and now happen to be. Cyborgs may just
have the capacity to perceive, and to cultivate, any ‘where’ as a garden.
A few final words. Haraway repeatedly acknowledges, and rightly so,
cyborgs’ non-innocence. Of God, she notes, ‘No one ever accused the God
of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference.’41 What scares me the
most about cyborgs is not our non-innocence, or our animal/techno-
logical/Godly capacity to harm one another, but precisely our Godly and
technological capacity for indifference. Back when people were people,
the notion that humans were never innocent was conveyed by describing
them as ‘sinners’. The nice thing about the metaphors ‘sin’ and ‘sinner’ is
that they include, implicitly, an understanding of humans as fleshy,
passionate, and as capable of acting on their passion, their desire. The
deeply troubling thing about cyborgs (to me) is our seeming disembodi-
ment, our lack of passion, our ability to remain indifferent in the face of
situations that cry out for passionate response. If it is true that the sins of
the fathers are visited upon the children, then we need to take seriously
Our Father’s sin of indifference. To be blunt, we need to take seriously
cyborgs’ inherited/inherent capacity to not give a damn about anything.
It may be neither the God nor the machine but the passionate, pleasure-
and-knowledge-seeking human animal in us we need to nurture for our
survival. Or, it may be the sinner, not the cyborg, that saves us in the end.

NOTES

1. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 181.

2. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150.
3. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 149.
4. For a particularly good introduction to the problems with certain Christian
understandings of salvation, see Carlson Brown and Bohn (1989).
5. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 173.
6. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151.
7. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150.
8. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150.
9. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151.
10. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 157.
11. ‘Situated Knowledges’; 189, 193, 195.
12. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 152.
13. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 149.
14. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 149.
 Tatman: I’d Rather be a Sinner than a Cyborg 63

15. ‘Situated Knowledges’: 187, 190, 197, 199.

16. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 157–8.
17. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 173.
18. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151.
19. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151.
20 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 157.
21. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 151.
22. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 158.
23. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 185.
24. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 190.
25. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 187.
26. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150–1.
27. ‘Marx and Marxism’, in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1997: 531).
28. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 170.
29. ‘Technology’, in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (1997: 460).
30. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 153.
31. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 153.
32. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 154.
33. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150.
34. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 150.
35. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 188.
36. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 195.
37. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 175.
38. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 180.
39. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 181.
40. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’: 181.
41. ‘Situated Knowledges’, 193.

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Carlson Brown, Joanne and Carole R. Bohn, eds (1989) Christianity, Patriarchy, and
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Lucy Tatman is a feminist theologian/philosopher, currently researching the connections

between western cultural images of the sacred and different women’s epistemic,
moral and political agency. She has taught in the Programme on Gender and
Culture at the Central European University, Budapest, and is now continuing her
search for that elusive tenure-track position. Her book, Knowledge That Matters:
A Feminist Theological Paradigm and Epistemology, was published in 2001
by Sheffield Academic Press, UK. Address: 9246 Regents Rd., Apt. G, La Jolla, CA
92037, USA. [email: lucytatman@yahoo.com]