I'd Actually Rather Be a Goddess Than a Cyborg

Craft, Power & the Politics of Myth-Making

Unfiltered original photo by Bill Gullo on Unsplash

I RECENTLY HEARD someone comment that—immersed in our addictive technology, laced with generative AI—we’re more cyborg than we’ve ever been. Contemplating the shifts in my work life, my psychic life, social life, political life, this claim felt true to me. So, naturally, I started thinking about Donna Haraway’s famous 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto”. I decided to revisit it.

The notorious last sentence of Haraway’s 1985 essay is this: I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. It’s a funny line but, forty years after the essay was first published, I’m not taking much pleasure in Haraway’s irony anymore. I can accept that I’m a cyborg, but I want the wisdom of a goddess—and some of her more than human powers.

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I FIRST READ “A Cyborg Manifesto” as a PhD student, maybe fifteen years ago. The essay was already pretty old by that time, but this didn’t make its effect on me less dramatic. I was working on a dissertation on creatureliness: that ancient theological condition distinguished only by its condition of having been made, or created. I saw the creature as a kind of bridge figure to connect humans with other animals. Distinct though we might be, we are also always fellow creatures.

I liked the idea of being an animal and sharing things (feelings, features, furriness) with other animals. A lot of feminist theorists were encouraging me to embrace that connection, long denied by centuries of men who didn’t like being animals. But I found myself resistant (as many other feminists were) to embracing the erosion of other subjective boundaries, like the one between human and machine. I didn’t want fellowship with machines or technology. It felt good to challenge organic boundaries but not synthetic ones, I suppose. Maybe I imagined that this helped me stay pure and natural.

Reading Haraway’s work changed my mind. I realized that my intellectual resistance didn’t really change anything about the world as it is. I may have liked to explore the fact of my own animality, but denying that I have machine-like dimensions and capacities didn’t make this fact of my being go away. Haraway helped me make some peace with that less appealing side of myself. Perhaps it’s because she argued that embracing the machine-like dimensions of ourselves didn’t necessarily represent a surrender to technocapitalism. Haraway showed me that the cyborg could, perhaps, resist it.

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“A CYBORG MANIFESTO” was initially published in 1985, in the Socialist Review. The purpose of the essay, as Haraway states in the opening lines, was to build what she called an “ironic political myth.” It was a feminist myth, rooted in socialist and Marxist principles. Politically, it was pitched against the rise of the new right.

The figure of the cyborg was a modern figure of myth, pulled from works of science fiction. A cyborg, as Haraway described it, is “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism.” In the late 20^th century—a time of myth no less than any other—she argued that through developments in technology and medicine we had already become “chimeras”: we were “fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.” Mostly this has happened in invisible ways, she noted. Modern machines are predominantly microelectronic, and largely undetectable. But they’ve changed the way we live, and move, and exist nevertheless.

Rather than resent this fact of life, as she knew that many of her fellow feminists did, Haraway encouarged people to take pleasure in this “confusion of boundaries.” She knew that many of those same feminists were celebrating the erosion of the boundary between human and animal. The cyborg, she wagered, “appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.” If you destabilize one boundary, you destabilize them both. Why not embrace this dissolution, or this becoming?

For the skeptics, Haraway argued that the figure of the cyborg had a number of unsung virtues. For one thing, the cyborg doesn’t play into fantasies of recovering some sort of (unrecoverable) “original unity” with nature. This meant that, among other things, the cyborg was a creature of a post-gender world. The cyborg couldn’t be reduced, through an essentialist move, to one side of the male/female binary sustained by heteropatriarchy. It had no essential gender. Because of this, the cyborg didn’t recreate dreams of community that were rooted in the model of the organic family.

As a figure of modern technoscientific myth, Haraway didn’t see the origin story of the cyborg as western in any essential way. For her this meant that the cyborg stood outside of the apocalyptic narratives, and the salvation history, that had so long structured the mythical shape of western civilization. The cyborg represented a new possibility. In the new world that was emerging, Haraway wanted to encourage feminists to recognize that communications technology, and biotech, were becoming “the crucial tools redrafting our bodies.” She wanted to encourage us to collaborate with these more than human forces, rather than let them passively work through us.

The biggest problem with the cyborg, she acknowledged, is that it was “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism.” But, she optimistically quipped, “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”

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SOME OF YOU may recognize this little aside, about the inessential nature of fathers, as a bit of theological critique. If the mythological figure sustaining heteropatriarchy is—as some feminists have put it—the sky daddy, then the act of celebrating the inessential nature of fathers is also a gesture at nullifying this comic patriarch.

This is only one bit of theology, in Haraway’s manifesto. As I read it, it’s cut through with theology. The text, as Haraway claims from the outset, is an act of myth-making. In order to do this, it’s trafficking in, and experimenting with, figures of more than human power. What could be more theological than more than human power? Of course, I suspect that Haraway would reject this categorization (it’s unfashionable, among other things). But she’s quite obviously fixated, in the essay, on divine figures. These types of figures tend to appear, by force of antigravity perhaps, in acts of myth-making.

One of the things that Haraway likes about the figure of the cyborg is that it is, as she puts it, an “upstart god.” It’s the sort of god who can shape an upstart myth. She was critical of the way that people (her American contemporaries above all, perhaps) had been colonized by the stories that undergird western culture. The cyborg, as an upstart god, is pitched against salvation history, and all of the historical and transhistorical acts that its patriarchal deity was said to enforce or encode. But this little upstart god was also pitched against the feminist mythologies that were culturally dominant around her, at that moment in the mid-1980s.

Haraway makes reference, in the manifesto, to the spiral dance. It’s something that the cyborg does, or at least is bound by, Haraway suggests. But those who know what the spiral dance is will recognize its appearance in the text as a reference to goddess theology.

The Spiral Dance was a 1979 book, published by the ecofeminist and pagan theologian Starhawk. She was only one of a significant number of feminists in the 1980s who—both inside and outside of academia—participated in a kind of revival movement that promoted goddess worship as a feminist practice. While the movement has had some lasting impacts, it also faced a lot of critique from fellow feminists, who debunked the historical claims (made by some goddess theologians) about ancient or primal matriarchies. This significantly dampened its popularity, especially in academic environments.

But in 1985 goddesses still had sway, and Haraway seemed to be speaking to these goddess feminists. This is why Haraway suggests, in her final paragraph of the manifesto, that both the goddess and the cyborg are bound together in a feminist’s spiral dance. She also notes that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

When I first read Haraway’s manifesto, I agreed with her. There was something rather essentialist about goddess theology, it seemed to me back then. I felt as if it were trying to drag me back into a particular way of thinking about women, and women’s bodies: as if women were more in touch with nature, and always somehow capable of accessing cosmic erotic powers and potencies. This felt a little reductive to me, like nothing more than a backlash against whatever patriarchy had cast as masculine. But when I read Haraway’s essay now, in what feels like a different world, the goddess seems more compelling than the startup god that is the cyborg.

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THE MYTH OF THE CYBORG was, as Haraway described it, an “ironic political myth”, designed to destabilize binaries and power structures—especially the power structures of the new right. And I can imagine that, in the middle of the 1980s (and into the 1990s, and the 2000s, and the 2010s) that irony felt politically satisfying. Irony allows you to be a little tongue in cheek. It gives you a little bit of critical distance from the thing you’re performing or presenting. It helps you hold, or maintain, a kind of tension.

Irony, as Haraway put it, “is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes.” It’s about “the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary or true.” As a political myth, the cyborg helped Haraway offer a vision beyond the contradictions that the nature/culture binary generated, it destabilized the structures that this binary had built. It was a way to think about organisms that were also, ironically, machines.

I’m not going to attack irony. It’s a crucial rhetorical device that will always have its uses. But what I don’t want, today, is an ironic political myth. We could argue that what we’re living under, in America today, is a political regime that soared to power on the wings of irony. The new right, today, has arguably used irony as a rhetorical political method.

Donald Trump is nothing like what Americans expected a presidential leader to look, or act like. And yet, ironically, he is (again) the president of the United States. He doesn’t make anything whole, he doesn’t resolve anything. He feeds on irresolvable contradictions. He is a godless man who, ironically, is beloved by the most ostensibly religious people in the country. And he’s all about using his ironic means and methods to destabilize old power structures—among them, the aging and fragile structure of democracy itself. He’s blurred the lines between acceptable and unacceptable uses of power, between right and left. I could go on, but I think you get the the point. It all just leaves me feeling as if ironic political myths aren’t worth much right now.

I have become, as the world around me has changed, more and more cyborg. I fuse with machines to work, to sustain myself, to navigate, to communicate. This isn’t a political myth, it’s just a fact of life. I can accept this at the same time as I nevertheless crave something—some mythical figure, or frame, that reminds me of what else I am, or can be. I don’t want this to be ironic, I want it to be clear, candid, and straightforward. I don’t want something destabilizing. I want something that feels solid.

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I’VE NEVER BEEN into goddesses. But I’ve been thinking about them more than ever. My daughter—who is nine—has become obsessed with mythology, especially (but not exclusively) the Greek sort. Part of this is just her interest in patterns, and her drive to collect stories. But, if you didn’t know, Greek mythology is hot among Gen A kids right now. My daughter was only one of two Medusas in her class on Halloween this past year. The costume options were everywhere; we bought ours at Target. Why this is happening is another topic that I’m not going to get into right now. I mention it only because it’s forced me to think about gods, and goddesses. And I’ve admittedly been finding them more interesting.

Goddesses interest me because they exist in a divine cosmology where power isn’t singular. They don’t exist in a patriarchal divine monoculture. The power of a goddess isn’t authoritarian or singular. Instead, she has a form of power that exists within a complex network of contested power. A goddess might perform divine acts of care, but she can also decentralize authority, in a cosmic sense. Her power is plural and relational, and part of a cosmic ecology of power.

Within this cosmic ecology, gods and goddesses also offer us an interesting way to explore relationships between the human and the more than human—without necessarily trafficking in posthumanism. Deities, in a cosmic ecology of power like this, can offer a glimpse at the way that divine or elemental forces are not separate from human experience, but resonate with it.

It may be beyond our power to create storms, of course. But the anger that can foment the storm feels recognizable. What if this sort of rage is just written into us, by the powers and textures of the earth that made us? A goddess, in this sort of reflection, isn’t a figure of worship so much as she is a figure to provoke questions: where do we end, and where does the more than human world begin? Or have we always, already, had access to its powers that seem beyond us? How might a goddess model, for us, a way to let those powers run through us? Or to feel them running through us?

When I used to generate mental pictures of goddesses, I suppose I would call to mind sensual figures who performed cosmic care work. I never thought about figures like Athena—a warrior goddess who does the political work of protecting civilization, but who also (wisely) protects the craft that human civilization rests upon. She has a host of powers that I wouldn’t mind getting in touch with right now. For instance, I’d rather be a crafter than a cyborg.

Crafting is a political act, perhaps now more than ever. I’m not simply talking about making what we—today—classify as crafts. I love crafting, don’t misunderstand me. I’m into sewing and needlework. But crafting is also something bigger: it’s the work of making, shaping, and building. It is, I think, a set of acts that can also be a counterpoint to our increasingly hyper-technological digital world. This isn’t to suggest that the work of crafting is always non-digital. But I think that the work of craft is something other than the easy solutions (“just ask ChatGPT”) that become more tempting, or even obligatory.

Crafting can emphasize the value of making and building, without falling into some sort of simplistic “bring back the manufacturing!” sort of messaging. It can also emphasize the value of doing the difficult work of writing, and thinking, which are forms of craft in themselves. Crafting is a more than human power that is also deeply human. In that sense, perhaps, it offers a small way to resist the slide into becoming cyborg.

Crafting is something that I do with my body. I might engage with digital tools, as I craft. But to actually craft something with those tools, I need my emotions, my senses, my intuitions. It brings me back to my body, and reminds me that I’m never simply a machine, but always something more.

Of course, crafting is also a feminist practice. I stay connected to the generations of women in my family through making, and crafting. I still have ceramics, and needle work, from my grandmother and great-grandmother. I have beautiful objects that they made, with their hands, and it’s moving to have these objects near me. It’s the source of little powers. And engaging with the work of my hands feels, to me, like a way of tapping into something collective and creative that they were also engaged with. This feels, to me, political and strategic. But it also feels like something more than human: it’s more than what I can do, or be, on my own.

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I DON’T KNOW that I actually want to be a goddess. Immortality sounds unappealing. But I will say that I find the figure of a goddess like Athena, more intriguing (and probably more resistant) than the figure of the cyborg these days. I suppose I’m looking for a different sense of futurity. The present already feels posthuman, I don’t need to erode the little flickers of humanity I can still see on the horizon with something even more unrecognizable. I want to remember that I am more than just a node in a network, and that I have a strong body that is itself a source of knowledge, memory, and power. What parts of you are waiting to be remembered, right now? What more than human powers are you ready to tap into, for the sake of your elemental sense of humanity?