In part two of Abigail Kluchin's essay "The Cyborg and the Golem," she explores the Jewish legend of the golem, an artificial human created through magic by medieval Jewish Kabbalists, in contrast with Donna Haraway's cyborg, the hybrid postmodern humans created through the mixing of nature and technology (see part 1/2 on Metanexus Views 2003.04.01). Kluchin uses Marge Piercy science fiction story of a twenty-first century golem in her novel, He, She, and It, as a counterpoint to Donna Haraway's postmodern cyborg.

"When [Haraway] declares our time a 'mythic time' and establishes the cyborg as a new mythic figure in its own right, [she] opens up the possibility to react harshly and dismissively against religion and its origin myths... Cyborg feminism is a bold new myth; it cannot afford to ignore the old..."

Abigail S. Kluchin, a former Metanexus Intern, is currently a Senior majoring in religious studies at Swarthmore College. This essay was written for a course on "Interpretation Theory: Mind, Body, Machine," taught by Scott F. Gilbert of the Biology Department at Swarthmore. For more information on Donna Haraway try googling her name (over 16,000 entries for this iconoclastic philosopher).

-- Editor

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= The Cyborg and the Golem, Part 2/2: Abigail S. Kluchin

The legend of the golem is the story, in miniature, of the creation of the world from dust and its return to the same. The golem is created in the image of man, it fulfills its duty - whether to serve its master, or the Jewish community, or so on - and then the kabbalist erases the aleph on its forehead and the golem returns to dust. The myth seems to bear, at first glance, all the marks of the origin story that the cyborg disdains. Far from the sense of fragmented, partial identity of the cyborg self, little is said in the talmudic sources or later legends about the golem's identity; it is but a lump of clay made animate, created to serve by venerable men of a patriarchal religious community. This is a linear story, from dust to life to dust. Further, far from being open to the sort of oppositional dialogue that Haraway would like to see cyborgs foster, it is a myth of an essentially closed community, a myth that has persisted for nearly two thousand years of Jewish history.

The most famous form of the golem legend is that of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague, known as the Maharal of Prague, who lived in the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Although Scholem claims that "this legend has no historical basis in the life of Loew or in the era close to his time,"[1] it has nonetheless persisted, and it is the story of the Maharal and the golem that he creates that Marge Piercy fictionalizes alongside the story of the twenty-first century cyborg Yod in her novel He, She, and It. Piercy alternates this story with that of Yod, a cyborg created in the free Jewish town of Tikva, a rare haven in a dystopian world in which multinational corporations quite literally control the world and most people live within the Glop, an area of festering urban sprawl ruled by constantly warring gangs that stretches - in the section of it in that used to be America - from what was Boston to what has been Atlanta. Through the character of Malkah, who is responsible for the emotional part of Yod's programming and who tells the tale to Yod, Piercy recounts the Maharal's creation and subsequent destruction of a golem whom he raises to patrol the Prague ghetto to protect the Jews from pogroms.

Piercy's pairing of the cyborg Yod and the golem Joseph reveals the difficulty of establishing a boundary between the natural and the artificial; she plays with these categories, suggesting the arbitrariness and the absurdity of trying to neatly delimit them. Joseph and Yod often appear much more human than the "real" humans in their respective stories; they are more sympathetic, more emotional, even more easily hurt. Each has been created to patrol a threatened territory, Joseph the Prague ghetto, Yod the online "Base" of Tikva, and each struggles mightily with the implications of being created as a moral and emotional man expected to function as a weapon. Indeed, both Joseph and Yod regard themselves not only as men, but as Jews; both consider suitable to be part of a minyan, the group of ten men required by Jewish law to be present in order for certain prayers to be said. Joseph, in addition, is physically incapable of eating traif, or non-kosher food. In Piercy's hands, the natural and the artificial melt seamlessly into each other, not only in the figures of the cyborg and the golem but also in the forms of humans so radically technologically altered that they set off weapons sensors by simply entering a building.

Foremost among these figures is Nili bat Marah Golinken. Tellingly, in her book Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets _OncoMouse(tm), it is the character of Nili that Haraway chooses from He, She, and It - the "technologically enhanced, genetically engineered, matrilineal warrior woman" - as an exemplar of the cyborg rather than Yod.[2] Piercy would most likely agree with Haraway's selection; at the end of the novel, she chronicles the Maharal's destruction of Joseph, and Yod self-destructs, taking his creator Avram with him to ensure that no more of his kind can be made. Those who survive him, including his human lover, agree that Nili, who has been genetically engineered as a warrior and assassin, equipped with sensors and hyper-fast reflexes, is the "right way" to blend human and machine, rather than engaging in the ultimate hubris of attempting to build a cyborg human.

Haraway's choice of Nili, rather than Yod or Joseph the Golem, as the prototype for her irreverent cyborg is unsurprising. Yet the passage that Haraway quotes as the epigraph to the first chapter of Modest_Witness reveals Nili's profound link to Judaism and Jewish mythology.

"'The ability to access information is power,' Nili said with her slight accent in her husky voice...."The ability to read and write belonged to the Church except for heretics and Jews. We are people of the book. We have always considered getting knowledge part of being human."[3]

Haraway pays insufficient attention to the religious import of what Nili states as her chosen task: to rebuild Yerushalaim, along with other members of her group, the survivors of a nuclear blast that leveled Israel and Palestine. "Cyborgs are not reverent," writes Haraway, "they do not re-member the cosmos." Nili is, however, reverent as a Jew just as she is reverent towards the hope of true freedom of information. And as one of the "people of the book," who have, in the phrase that Haraway gleefully quotes again and again, "always considered getting knowledge part of being human," the two are not separable for her. As for re-membering the cosmos, Nili and her people are engaged in a task embedded not simply in human history but in Biblical history. Far from having abandoned Judaism, the religion of their ancestors, they are engaged in rebuilding the holy city of that group of chosen people. Theirs is a vision of a shared utopian future, created by the descendents of a people who consider themselves to have sprung from a common origin.

I certainly applaud Haraway's choice of Nili and her reading of the character as the quintessential cyborg. As Haraway writes,

"Tunneling under the wreckage of a violent history with the other Israeli and Palestinian survivors, Nili belongs to these oppositional traditions of reading and writing, with their generative accounts of what can count as human, as knowledge, as history, as insider and outsider."[4]

But Nili can mean still more than what Haraway makes of her. Haraway speaks of Nili's project of rebuilding Yerushalaim as one of her "interrupted origin stories." [5] Yet Nili is wholly within the Jewish tradition; this rebuilding is an act of reverence, and being a Jew, for Nili, is more than being aware of what Haraway calls the "informatics of domination." [6] Nili is indeed a creature on the borders, a transgressor of boundaries, but she is also seeking, in this partial and fragmented way, to re-build, to re-make, to forge, out of destruction, a new whole.

What happens when we read the cyborg next to the golem? Are the dread spectres of unity and universalism that Haraway sees as integral to any origin story really so very bad, so necessarily totalizing? I would argue that the figure of the golem displays at least as much ambiguity as Haraway's cyborg. Any time that something is created, whether it be a book by a cyborg writer or Adam by God in Genesis, boundaries are transgressed and an immense ambiguity is suggested. Haraway's cyborg is never engaged in creation ex nihilo, as is the God of the Hebrew Bible. It is rather a rag picker of language and stories, its "self-consciously spliced" language never presuming autonomous identity but always revealing its situation as a node in a vast web of discursive objects. But there is much to plunder from these origin stories, which explode the boundary between the real and the unreal, between something and nothing, being and emptiness. There is dust, and suddenly there is man, and in between? Mystery; creation; and an immense power that remains untapped by Haraway's cyborg. Yet Nili shows the way here. She does not reject her ancestral religion or its stories; she and her people will rebuild Yerushalaim, and they will do it in a new way, in a cyborg feminist way that acknowledges the force of the old and uses it to forge ahead. Haraway would do well to consider the powerful ambiguities that attend the origin myth; it need not be rejected, but must rather be re-thought and re-used.

It is imperative for cyborg feminism to look at the partial and the fragmented and the artificial within what it takes to be holistic. Cyborg feminists must not be reactive; they must use what they can. Despite the dense patina of theory and extensive use of science fiction, Haraway is arguing for an eminently practical type of socialist-feminism, and she is aware that her cyborg feminism needs to avail itself of all the tools that it can grab with two hands. Again and again I return to her line about cyborg writing, claiming that it 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." [7] Few things have been such effective markers as the Torah or the Gospels of the New Testament. And it has not been limited to women and minority groups; we have all been so marked, since Cain and even before. These are the markers that cyborg feminism must grab and scrawl with.

When she declares our time a "mythic time" and establishes the cyborg as a new mythic figure in its own right, Haraway opens up the possibility to react harshly and dismissively against religion and its origin myths. "Though both are bound in the spiral dance," she ends her manifesto, "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." [8] For a writer who claims just lines earlier that "cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms," this is a particularly nasty binary to propose. Cyborg feminism is a bold new myth; it cannot afford to ignore the old. It must explore the partial within what it took to be whole, harnessing the ambiguities and the transgressive power of the creation from nothing of the origin myth rather than dismissing it on the basis of its universalizing tendencies. Those tendencies can be written out, or they can be played with and explored. Haraway's cyborg is "a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia." [9] It is a foot soldier in the border war in which the stakes are "the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. [10] Haraway's cyborg must not fail, in either its war or its dream, to avail itself of all the tools at its disposal. The cyborg cannot afford to be wholly irreverent.

[1] Ibid, p. 353. [2] Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets OncoMouse(tm), p. 1. [3] Ibid, citing Marge Piercy, He, She, and It. [4] Ibid, p. 2. [5] Ibid. [6] Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," p. 161. [7] Ibid, p. 175. [8] Ibid, p. 181. [9] Ibid. [10] Ibid, p. 150.

Bibliography

Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention Of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Haraway, Donna J. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan(c)_Meets_ OncoMouse(tm): Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Piercy, Marge. He, She, and It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Scholem, Gershom. Kabbalah. New York: Meridian, 1978.

Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985.

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Published   2003.04.08