In JRR Tolkien's Ring ring, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, there is a member of the fisherfolk, originally a hobbit of Stoors, named Smeagol who, upon his murderous acquisition of The Ring, is granted longevity. But it is only of a physical kind, and after almost half a millennium, when he is discovered in his cave by Bilbo Baggins (uncle of the soon-to-be digitally challenged Frodo), Smeagol no longer knows himself as Smeagol. Rather, he has become...Gollum.

Now, my thought is that Tolkien was much too good a linguist for that reference to be accidental. Gollum looks and sounds much too much like golem, and the character of Gollum talks and acts much too much like a golem for it be mere coincidence. According to today's columnist, Abigail S. Kluchin, "the golem is born of dust, and it is returned to dust when its creator deems that it has fulfilled its purpose." But, for the golem, the difference is that the creator in question is not supernatural, but natural, another of the created-a human being like you and me.

And, thus, beginning with today's column-the first in a two part series titled The Cyborg and the Golem: Donna Haraway's Cyborg Feminism and the Problem of the Origin Myth, we here at Metanexus start a month-long exploration of cyborgs and artificial intelligence, of golems and Frankenstein monsters, and of science, religion, and spiritual machines. Today's columnist, Abigail S. Kluchin, a former Metanexus Intern, is currently a Senior majoring in religious studies at Swarthmore College and a student of Scott F. Gilbert, for whom she wrote this paper, The Cyborg and the Golem: Donna Haraway's Cyborg Feminism and the Problem of the Origin Myth as part of Gilbert's course Interpretation Theory 91: Mind, Body, Machine. For it is when our metaphors obtain to a reality greater than lived reality that myths, monsters, and madness are born.

Scott F. Gilbert is a professor of Biology at Swarthmore College where he teaches developmental genetics, embryology, and the history and critiques of biology. He received his B.A. in both biology and religion from Wesleyan University (1971), and he earned his PhD in biology from the pediatric genetics laboratory of Dr. Barbara Migeon at the Johns Hopkins University (1976). His M.A. in the history of science, also from The Johns Hopkins University, was done under the supervision of Dr. Donna Haraway.

--Stacey E. Ake

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Subject: The Cyborg and the Golem, Part 1/2 From: Abigail S. Kluchin Email: <abby@sccs.swarthmore.edu>

Donna Haraway's Cyborg Feminism and the Problem of the Origin Myth

"The cyborg," writes Donna Haraway, "would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."[1] The cyborg, Haraway's "ironic political myth," is a creature of partiality and non-innocence. It does not long for a universalizing creation myth or origin story, nor does it dream of a cohesive identity. Its self-images are far more slippery, its mythologies more fragmented. The cyborg inhabits a post-diaspora world that neither remembers nor believes in a time before dispersion. And its task, as Haraway claims, is "to survive in the diaspora."[2] Yet despite her insistence on the desacralized character of the cyborg's world, Haraway is still writing a myth -- a myth with a decidedly irreverent protagonist, surely, but one which is nonetheless thoroughly embedded in mythological and even religious imagery that is distinctly un-ironic in its origins. Following Marge Piercy in her science fiction novel He, She and It, I would like to read the figure of the cyborg against that of the golem, the Jewish legend of a man of clay, like Adam, brought to life through prayer and kabbalistic incantations, a legend that has persisted through centuries even to the present day.

Haraway's invocation of the cyborg is a veritable call to arms to the feminist-socialist community and beyond. "Cyborg feminists," she maintains, "have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole."[3] Her cyborg is an irreverent figure that rejects what Haraway considers the universalizing tendencies of religion as exemplified in its fundamental myths, the origin story followed by the apocalypse, a human race born as one and converging towards a recognizable end. The story of the golem is relevant here as a sped-up version, the text in miniature, of the origin story and its apocalyptic finish. Like man as modeled in Genesis, the golem is born of dust, and it is returned to dust when its creator deems that it has fulfilled its purpose.

Through the golem legend and the Biblical stories it evokes, I would like to consider the implications of the old myths and origin stories for a cyborg world and argue that they are hardly as dangerous as Haraway argues through her insistence on the irreverence of the cyborg and its refusal of the creation myth. I will argue that Haraway and cyborg feminism would do better to attend to the images of the artificial and the blurring of boundaries that such stories do in fact provide. Haraway's cyborg is a myth with a purpose, if not a unified one; it is a figure that can, particularly through writing -- which is, as Haraway claims, of "special significance for all colonized groups" -- reclaim the disputed territories of meaning, power, and pleasure.[4]

Such an endeavor requires that the cyborg avail itself of all of the tools at its disposal. Haraway claims that "cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before man."[5] I would contend, rather, that this "theorized and fabricated hybrid" must itself theorize and fabricate not only anew but also with the myths of creation and destruction, playing with the idea of original innocence rather than rejecting it outright.[6] To do otherwise is to succumb to a reactivity that subverts Haraway's own self-proclaimed subversive myth, permitting the cyborg to define itself in reactive terms rather than through the technique of recasting, refiguring, and reworking of ideas that otherwise she champions in her call to cyborg feminists to "seize the tools to mark the world that marked them as other."[7]

Haraway gradually evokes the figure of the cyborg throughout the essay, naming it again and again. "The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence."[8] It is "not reverent"; it is an appropriator of stories and blurrer of boundaries; it takes pleasure in these transgressions.[9] It is a "world-changing fiction," a "chimera," a "creature in a post-gender world."[10] It is a "creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction." The cyborg is no longer confined to the pages of science fiction; it is all of us, inevitably. Its emergence from the realm of fiction has been heralded and made possible, Haraway, argues, by the dissolution of three key sets of boundaries: between human and animal, organism (animal-human) and machine, and between the physical and non-physical.

The biological sciences, particularly Darwinian evolution, have shown up the arbitrariness of the boundary between human and animal, and, as Haraway writes, "many people no longer feel the need for such a separation."[11] The boundary between animal-human and machine initially seems less easily transgressed. Yet as people grow increasingly more attached to their machines, to the point at which deprivation of a phone, a computer, an electronic organizer feels much like an amputation, the severing of a natural extension of the body, the boundary grows more ambiguous. Perhaps most importantly, Haraway contends, machines are simply "smarter" now. What Haraway refers to as "pre-cybernetic machines" were not "self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it."[12] The integrity of the author/creator/inventor, in distinct opposition to that which was created, was preserved. Now, however,

"late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert."[13]

The final boundary transgression is related to the second: the loss of the distinction between the physical and the non-physical. Machines and the subjects of scientific inquiry have been growing steadily smaller, smaller, until they are virtually invisible and essentially ever-present, from the miniature surveillance camera to the silicon chip to the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics: "modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father's ubiquity and spirituality."[14]

The pervasiveness of the breakdown of these boundaries permits the cyborg's emergence from the realm of pure myth to that of political-social myth. It owes its escape to their dissolution. "The relation between organism and machine has been a border war," writes Haraway, and the cyborg's role is essentially that of a foot soldier. The cyborg takes pleasure in the blurring, transgression, and even breakdown of these boundaries. Rather than recoil in fear at the dissolution of the familiar, the cyborg revels in the admission of the fragmentation of what was never truly whole, the admission that the idea of oneness, wholeness, is a fallacy and a harmful deception, and that boundaries are arbitrary and need constantly to be troubled and destabilized. It takes pleasure in the proliferation of possibilities of identity through the transgression of boundaries rather than being frightened by the disintegration of seemingly discrete categories.

In this transgressive space, in this partialized universe, the cyborg questions "the dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized."[15] It is in this discursive space, laughing at the idea of the "natural," that the cyborg writes its own stories, creates its own mythos. For one should not forget that the cyborg is above all a purposeful figure for Haraway; it is "the centre of [her] ironic faith," her political myth, her contribution to "socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode."[16] It is a new myth forged to proliferate still more new mythologies. The cyborg eschews the language and the literary traditions that urge unification and universalization, the stories that speak of a shared origin and equally shared demise . It does not seek a common language, nor to establish common categories such as "woman." Rather, it recognizes those goals not only as truly mythical - in the sense, that is, of impossible - but also as necessarily detrimental to those who perpetuate them and to those whom such categories claim to describe.

The cyborg is a writer and a rewriter, a reshaper, an appropriator, a refigurer. Its language is "self-consciously spliced"; it does not lay claim to "an original language before violation." It is language on the boundaries, language about language, about "access to the power to signify."[17] Most importantly, for Haraway, "Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-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."[18]

Thus the cyborg objects above all to any type of origin story:

"This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. 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. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics - rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginary. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life."[19]

An origin story is always pre-diasporic. It is the Garden of Eden; it is in principio with the Verbum. It is lurking in the Logos, that fundamental masculine ordering principle that separates the world into discrete, tidy Aristotelian categories. It is read in churches and synagogues and studied in universities. It presupposes a common beginning for humanity, followed by the story of "individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy," and often implies a common end as well, a shared telos that we are all hurtling towards together, whether it be utopia or apocalypse.

The cyborg will not tolerate it.

Despite Haraway's insistence that the cyborg is a new myth, it is nonetheless reactive and contingent upon old ones. The reason that the cyborg is not simply a reactive figure is its possibility of re-writing, re-inscribing, and re-figuring old myths. The cyborg is always writing more. With the cyborg, Haraway shifts the temporal locus of myth from the distant past to the present and future. "By the late twentieth-century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras," she writes.[20] With this move, she opens the door to discarding the old mythologies to which the cyborg objects, for she proffers the cyborg itself as replacement. And in a new and newly mythologized age, it is tempting to simply move forward without looking back. Yet as a writer who is in fact keenly attuned to the power of religious and mythological language, she should be alert to the possibility - perhaps even the necessity - of appropriating and using such mythologies in cyborg writing, rather than turning her back on them.

In the light of the cyborg's distaste for origin myths, I would like to look at the cyborg next to the golem, a figure from Jewish legend and mystical tradition.

The golem, like the cyborg, is a post-diaspora myth, a story born out of a community in exile. Unlike the cyborg, however, the golem legend emerged from within an organized religion, albeit from the more mystical and esoteric threads within Judaism. "The golem is a creature," writes Gershom Scholem, the foundational scholar of the academic study of Jewish mysticism, "particularly a human being, made in an artificial way by virtue of a magic act, through the use of holy names."[21] The Hebrew word golem is used only once in the Hebrew Bible, in Psalm 139:16, from which, says Scholem, "originated the talmudic use of the term - something unformed and imperfect. In medieval philosophic usage it is matter without form. Adam is called golem, meaning body without soul, in a talmudic legend concerning the first 12 hours of his existence."[22]

Among the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the German Pietists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the creation of a golem, turning a creature of clay into a living man through prayer and incantation, became a mystical ritual associated with great power on the part of the kabbalist who raises it. In this ritual, the kabbalist would invoke the sacred name of God, the Tetragrammaton YHWH, chanting elaborate and systematic permutations of the letters of the name with other letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Scholem describes the creation of the golem in the context of such a mystical ritual, "connected here with ecstatic spiritual experience":

"Those who took part in the 'act of creation' took earth from virgin soil and made a golem out of it (or, according to another source, they buried that golem in the soil), and walked around the golem "as in a dance," combining the alphabetical letters and the secret Name of God in accordance with detailed sets of instructions (several of which have been preserved). As a result of this act of combination, the golem arose and lived, and when they walked in the opposite direction and said the same combination of letters in reverse order, the vitality of the golem was nullified and he sank or fell. According to other legends, the word emet ("truth"; "the seal of the Holy One," Shab. 55a, Sanh. 64b) was written on his forehead, and when the letter alef was erased there remained the word met ("dead")."[23]

The legend of the golem draws heavily on the concept, often apparent in kabbalistic texts, of theurgy, or man acting on God, the ability of the actions of man to bear on God. The raising of the golem is a creation story of man become God; it is also often the story of the failure of that presumption.

NOTES:

1 Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 151. 2 Ibid, p. 170. 3 Ibid, p. 157. 4 Ibid, p. 175. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid, p. 150. 7 Ibid, p. 175. 8 Ibid, p. 151. 9 Ibid, p. 151. 10 Ibid, p. 149-150. 11 Ibid, p. 152. 12 Ibid, p. 152. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid, p. 153. 15 Ibid, p. 163. 16 Ibid, p. 149-150. 17 Ibid, p. 175-176. 18 Ibid, p. 175. 19 Ibid. p. 177. 20 Ibid, p. 150. 21 Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, p. 351. 22 Ibid, citing Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 38b. 23 Ibid, p. 352.

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Published   2003.04.01