Going Sibylline

Abstract

Throughout the sixth chapter of the Aeneid, Virgil conjugates the zigzagging temper of the Cumaean Sibyl as the probabilistic ambivalence of the cosmos itself rather than as its playful or inaccurate duplication. By wrapping “true things with uncertainty”, the Sibyl’s chants cultivate more sensibilities regarding the “paths of fortune” branching the cosmos, thus engaging with the given in multi-linear and inconclusive terms. This essay suggests that, by conceiving such a cosmic fortuity as a general form of subjectivity, the Sibyl’s oracular set-up might help us enliven more ways of engaging with Donna Haraway’s quest for elaborating notions of objectivity and subjectivity that constitute one another without abandoning their own purpose. I would like to contend that such a sibylline engagement is an invitation to deploy more feminist lines of flight when it comes to technology’s intertwining with nature. It might help us think of the technical and natural as always already enfleshed, yet not so much in keeping with the Promethean claim for “making the given” as in pursuit of enlivening unfamiliar forms of coexistence with the given’s probabilistic ambivalence – a conceptualization making room for thinking of technicality in terms of syntonization, the calibration of attunement processes involving both gymnastic training and cosmetic fashioning.