7. Cyborg Anxiety: Part Two: We Are Not the Middle of Anything

Much of the unease surrounding the figure of the cyborg may stem from the religious and philosophic roots that underlie the dominant intellectual traditions in the West. These include the three Abrahamic religions and much of the Greco-Roman philosophic inheritance, as well as the notion of humanist individualism upon which modern Western democracy is largely premised. The religious and philosophic traditions of the East, however, tend to suggest an understanding of both time and identity much less apt to engender fear where the possibilities of fluid and composite selfhood arise.

So what is it about the Judeo-Christo-Islamic constellation of religions that makes people so edgy about the purity of their identities? Why do some people find cyborgs so damned scary? One possibility is that in all three of these world views, identity is singular. Each individual is responsible for his or her unique relationship with Yahweh-God-Allah. We are born at some point in linear time into a world that had a known beginning and is understood to be moving toward a prophesied end. In two of these faiths, moreover, it is only at the termination of linear time that the final disposition of all souls will be known. Necessarily, then, who we are matters a great deal. The stakes are high, and we need to get it right.

The religions originating in India, however, offer the basis for a different narrative. In both Hinduism and its offshoot Buddhism, time is not linear but cyclic. So rather than positing an origin some 6000 years before our present day (according to a literal reading of the Genesis myth), these thought systems envision an uncreated cosmos rolling through eternity in cycles within cycles, the largest of which dwarf the actual 13.72 billion year age of the known universe. Within these cycles, the cosmos arises and declines and arises again in perpetuity. And even within the current cycle, the scale and significance of which are both miniscule within the unfathomable chasm of the whole, there is no sense that humanity occupies a privileged position: we are neither the central nor the crowning gems.

It is not just the cosmos that runs in cycles; the circular understanding of time informs the understanding of personal identity as well. Both Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, posit reincarnation. From the assumption of multiple lives, it follows that any given life is not a zero-sum game. We exist on the wheel of Samsara—the wheel of rebirth—and our current incarnation is probably neither our first nor our last. This position alone allows for both a looser and a more subtle understanding of identity as is casts into doubt the notion that any given life, let alone any given moment in a life, might embody the definitive or pure essence of our “self.” Identity is spread over an unfixed and perhaps unimaginable expanse of time. The effect seems to be a stratified conception of selfhood with each spin around the wheel adding another layer: more experience, more knowledge, more understanding.

Yet even this more complex and more interesting notion of personal identity does not mark the limit of the difference between the East and the mainstream West as both Hinduism and Buddhism stress the illusory nature of the distinction between self and other, or even between self and world. In the Chandogya Upanishad, for instance, the notion of the self as a discrete entity is explicitly dispensed with. This upanishad addresses a wide array of related topics ranging from existence itself through the boundaries of personal identity and beyond. At one point, in a dialogue between a boy Svetateku and his father Uddalaka, the father asks his son to pass him the fruit of a banyan tree. The fruit is then broken open to reveal the seeds inside, one of which is broken open in turn. Uddalaka then asks Svetateku what he sees:

“Nothing, sir.”

“Dear boy,” he said to him, “that finest essence which you do not perceive, from this very essence, dear boy, that great fig tree arises. Believe me, dear boy, that which is the finest essence, the whole universe, has That [tat] as its soul. That [tat] is Reality. That [tat] is the Self, and That is you [tat tvam asi], Svetaketu!” (6.12.1-3)

In the Upanishads, the Sanskrit demonstrative tat (that) is used to refer to the ultimately unspeakable source of all being that permeates both sentient and non-sentient matter as well as space itself. That is the source of consciousness, the infinite source of our finite lives, and thus ultimately the source of anything that we might want to call a “self.” We have being and knowledge only through That, and in death it is to That that we return, at least temporarily. The notion of the isolated unitary self, therefore, is one of the greatest illusions that the initiate must overcome on the path to true understanding. What the boy Svetaketu must learn here is not merely to expand a sense of self rooted in his own time and place beyond its apparent boundaries but rather to both know and feel that his isolation in a single subjective perspective is an illusion. He must learn to decenter his notion of himself—to see himself in everything and everyone around him, and even in the space between things. Similarly, he must learn that other selves—in fact all other selves—are also present in him.

A similar situation exists in Buddhism. Here, I'll take the Diamond Sutra, one of the cornerstone texts of Mahayana Buddhism, as my representative work, but in this case as well as with the Chandogya Upanishad, numerous other options are available. In this brief sutra, cast as a dialogue between the Buddha and an advanced disciple named Subhuti, the speakers peel back layer after layer of social convention as the teacher leads the student toward a clearer understanding of reality. Nearing the half-way point in the conversation, Subhuti, his understanding now awakened, says of the enlightened people of the future that

“they will be free from the idea of an ego-entity, free from the idea of a personality, free from the idea of a being, and free from the idea of a separated individuality. And why? Because the distinguishing of an ego entity is erroneous. Likewise the distinguishing of a personality, or a being, or a separated individuality is erroneous. Consequently those who have left behind every phenomenal distinction are called Buddhas all.” (XIV)

Shortly thereafter, building on the same theme, the Buddha informs his student that “Bodhisattvas who are wholly devoid of any conception of separate selfhood are truthfully called Bodhisattvas” (XVIII). What emerges from the sutra as a whole is a sense of all categories, and thus all boundaries, as illusory products emerging from the inability of language to represent or express reality directly. Identity from this perspective is a product of discourse, not an actual thing in itself.

The Taoist writings of early China present a similar picture. Here as well, the notion of the stable self comes under question. Both the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu dwell upon the root unity of all things, and upon the insufficiency of language, or even reason itself, to adequately grasp that which it tries to grasp, be it the whole of existence or an individual identity. Of the many passages in the Tao Te Ching that might illustrate this tendency, I've settled on part 13, which begins “Honor is a contagion deep as fear / renown a calamity profound as self” (TTC 13). The notion of honour as a contagion is a little startling as most of us are probably accustomed to thinking of this attribute as a virtue, but even more startling is the implied relationship between honour and fear—a relationship made clear by the parallels in the next line in which “renown” takes the place of “honor” and “self” takes the place of “fear.” (Exact translations vary, but the structure is pretty consistent.) Implied is a connection between fear and self that gets at the root of Western cyborg anxiety. While the visceral response of immediate fear stems from the survival instinct we share with most other animals, fear as it arises from thought is only possible in the context of a differentiated self. That is, in order to be worried about our boundaries, either physical or psychological, being violated, we first need to have a pretty strong sense that those boundaries actually exist and that we know at least roughly where they are. If that sense of boundedness is let go, the basis for any unease over their transgression evaporates as well:

When all beneath heaven is your self in renown

you trust yourself to all beneath heaven,

and when all beneath heaven is yourself in love

you dwell throughout all beneath heaven.” (TTC 13)

Similarly, it is only without a sense of distinct selfhood that one can “Inhabit the furthest peripheries of emptiness / and abide in the tranquil center” (TTC 16), or in other words attain or return to that sense of primal unity that language and reason necessarily fracture.

Chuang Tzu is also skeptical about the notion of selfhood, as becomes apparent in numerous passages in the work attributed this most jovial of all Chinese philosophers. For the sake of brevity, I will limit my discussion to one:

“We invest each other with selves. But how can we know that what we call a self is really a self? We dream we're birds soaring through the heavens. We dream we're fish diving into the depths. So when teachers like me speak—how can we know if they're awake or if they're dreaming?

“A pilgrimage can't compare to a good laugh, and a good laugh can't compare to simply letting yourself go. Once you're at peace, letting yourself go and leaving change behind, then you enter the solitary mystery of heaven.” (CT VI 12)

Here, in the 4^th century B.C., the notion of the self as a social construct has one of its clearest articulations. Identity here is not merely an illusion arising from language: it is a project undertaken by communities. It is the means by which communities distinguish their members from one another, and in the absence of community, it makes no sense at all. But because identity is a social construct rather than an an integral state or quality, it is always unstable and thus can never be a source of certainty. Rather, it is a source of isolation by its very nature, and as such is best let go. The “solitary mystery of heaven,” then, is not solitary in the sense of a single self alone; it is solitary in the sense that the boundaries of the self have completely dissolved.

Of course, the underlying assumptions of most religions, Eastern or Western, differ from those involved in the cyborg approach to identity. The former are dualist while the latter either assumes a materialist understanding of the world and human nature, or at least does not make a dualist assumption. I highlight this difference to make clear that I am not asserting any supposed transcendental truth in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Taoism any more than I would do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. For my thesis to hold, though, it is not required that the assumptions underlying some Eastern religions or philosophies be true—it is merely required that they be believed in their own communities, and that they be more compatible with a cyborg approach to identity than the assumptions underlying the Abrahamic religions or the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophic traditions.

So I am not adopting a Buddhist, Taoist, or generalized and clichéd “Eastern” perspective. But even given the inversion of these worldviews' assumptions that a cyborg understanding of selfhood involves, there is enough common ground to account for the lower degree of cyborg anxiety, or even of a more general technological anxiety, in the East than in the West. From Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and cyborg points of view, identity even as immediately embodied is mutable. The boundaries that separate ME from NOT-ME are illusory—the products of assumptions and traditions that originate in the artifice of culture or in the necessarily limited perspective of my own apparent subjective position in the world. They are not absolute, and while I may knowingly or unknowingly allow them to define me, there is no transcendent necessity that they do so. From either point of view, my boundaries can expand, contract, or vanish.

In the thought-worlds of the East, therefore, identity is not the insular phenomenon that most of us in the West take it to be. Bound by neither time nor space, it is flexible in ways that many living in the shadow of either Western religion or the main stream of Greek philosophy might easily find unsettling. The individual—that fundamental construct of our intellectual inheritance—threatens to expand to the point of disappearing into its web of parts, perceptions, and relationships. Given the instability of the very notion of selfhood, it would make little sense for a person raised in these thought-worlds to be overly concerned about the intrusion of technology into social or physical spaces traditionally assumed to be the domains of flesh, blood, and mind. We are unstable and ever-changing hybrids by our very nature, and as such have no need to fear another element or two thrown into the mix.