The final chapter of Cyborg Selves is a briefly sketched foray into Christology, a sort of preliminary attempt to move out of the locus of theological anthropology into the systematic implications for Christology, focused on the notion of "cyborg Christ." As others have correctly pointed out in engaging with the text, this is the least developed chapter of the book. (It was however one of the most fun bits to write--I remember working on this chapter fondly, second only to the little section riff on cyborgs in the Garden. And for the record I super regret that I did not fight for the much better title Cyborgs in the Garden but I was much younger and unsure of myself and it was my first (to date, still only) book publication, and I had no idea what sort of things one could and could not advocate for. I was also busy with a preschooler and a 3 month old infant, so standing up for myself was basically last on every daily to-do list. Anyway, I digress, as is my right, here on this blog that is essentially just for me.)
So, anyhow: yes, this posthuman stuff has some systematic theological implications for Christology, and I have been aware of this all along, and participating in the recent Global Network for Digital Theology conference has had me thinking about this stuff again in between the advising meetings and orientation sessions and schedule-building that fill my summertime routine as academic advisor.
This morning, as I was sitting on my porch sitting with the cat in my lap drinking my first cup of coffee, I realized that the right way to get at what is so entirely wrong with the attempt at Christian Transhumanism has to be gotten at through Christology, and that what I ought to be doing is working through, carefully, why and how cyborg Christ is a different Christological construct than the transhuman Christ.
This is part of how that final chapter of Cyborg Selves deviates from the overall project of the book: what it does not do, at any point, is the work of contrasting a critical posthuman ctborg Christ with a transhumanist Christology. I suppose it didn't occur to me at the time, partly because, in my own mind, I was simply engaging in some constructive theological play, and also partly because there probably wasn't anything to engage with on this. The CTA did not yet exist as an organization, and transhumanism as a movement was basically profoundly uninterested in dialogue with religion and theologies of any sort. And, frankly, no one suggested it to me as a critical gap in the chapter. So--it's not there.
But now this gap is crucial.
So maybe this is the next project. Ideally, this is a book and certainly it feels as if Cyborg Selves has set this up as the natural next step. (I would still love, someday, to write the book on birthing and gender and sexuality and reproductive technologies and critical posthumanism that I've been dreaming about doing, and the current Christotechnofascist regime makes this feel more urgent all the time, alhtough when I start thinking about that I really think what I ought to be doing is birth doula work or start certifying as a midwife. But without some sort of reconfiguration of my professional circumstances to make space for this I truly do not see how to make any sort of scholarship happen. It might be as simple as getting the workload whittled back down to a level that doesn't have me burnt out to the point that I spent most Saturdays simply sleeping all day as a means of physical recovery and mental escape from feeling like every single waking moment I am on the hook to answer everyone's requests about literally everything. Again, I digress. As is my right.)
My basic intuition on this is that kenosis is the right concept for articulating the contrast. Transhumanism is, in my judgment, an articulation of a desire for the endless expansion of the self, and (truly unfortunately) I do not see this basic desire eliminated or transformed in Christian transhumanism. Rather, what Christian transhumanism does is take this desire and map it back on to Christianity, providing a kind of moral justification and even a theological mandate for this desire. But this is jarringly inconsistent if kenosis is at the center of Christology--and so, the depiction of Christ is not a kenotic one, but the glorified, ascended, triumphant Christ, and it is this Christ we are invited to pattern ourselves and our desires after. Ultimately this means we aspire to that same glorified, ascendant, triumphant embodied and exemplified in Christ that is also our destiny--Christ is forerunner, Christ is foretaste of our destined glory, Christ is our future perfection personified. This is the Christ who has returned to fullness, and we are not dwelling on Christ who did not find all of this worth grasping on to, but emptied himself to take on--yes, exactly, y'all--a merely human existence in solidarity, in identity-with, us.
But a cyborg Christology absolutely depends upon this moment, this decision, this identity-with. Otherwise there is nothing cyborg-y happening, at all. Or to put it a more theology-forward way, a kenotic Christology can be articulated through the cyborg figure.
This also connects back to Brent Waters' work on a theological notion of hospitality, as making room for the other. This is in direct tension with transhumanist desire for the endless expansion of self. And then is a great invitation to go back to his early work, of which I am highly critical in Cyborg Selves, and see what revisiting this might yield. I fully anticipate I still disagree with some of that articulation, but he has always been a fantastic interlocutor (and, in person, truly gracious and collegial).
Once again I'm back to my basic sense that the problem with Christian transhumanism is that transhumanism amplifies the worst Christian theological mistakes.
Anyhow, this is a serious project and certainly would mean a return to the world of real systematic theology and y'all, it feels like it's been awhile. Mostly I think about other things now, and those things are mostly boring, institutional things like, "why don't we ever have enough BUS 101 seats for incoming Business majors?" and my confidence is shot. And time, time, I need time.
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