In what ways, then, can Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ help provide a better framework through which to conceive the problem that Latour & Callon are trying to describe as well as the problem that Graeber & Wengrow are trying to escape? In other words, can the cyborg save us from Leviathan’s revenge? If the cyborg can’t avenge Leviathan, can it mediate the debate in some way?
The student responses quoted below were informed by the following readings:
- Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and how Sociologists Help them to Do so” (1981)
- David Graeber and David Wengrow, “Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood: Or Why This is Not a Book about the Origins of Inequality” (2021)
- Donna Haraway, “Chapter 8: A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1991)
Graeber & Wengrow’s commentary on the need to abandon the Hobbesian and Rousseauian modes of thought and paradigms on human history seemed to resonate the most to me with Haraway’s goal with her “Cyborg Manifesto.” What Haraway seemed to be trying to accomplish through her ironic image of the cyborg is the vision of the ideal society, one that is not so defined by rigid boundaries, one that Haraway herself describes as post-gender. Haraway argues that the cyborg is the best image to use to convey this goal, as the cyborg is a representation of transgressing the human-animal, the human-machine, and the physical-nonphysical boundaries that she outlines. If this is the motivation behind the use of the cyborg imagery, Haraway is working conceptually towards the goal of Graeber & Wengrow in trying to combat Hobbesian thought. Hobbesian thought, as seen in the laundry lists of definitions and the pseudo-scientific methods of Leviathan, depends on rigid boundaries to function, boundaries between a state of nature and society, boundaries between man and beast, so heralding an image that promotes the destruction of such boundaries would be a step towards dismantling the Hobbesian influence on modern politics. This is especially mutualistic, considering how Graeber & Wengrow also argues that Hobbesian and Rousseauian thought work to oversimplify human history and the ways in which people have organized socially, which mirrors Haraway’s criticism of traditional feminism in her manifesto, which she argues simplifies intersectional experiences of womanhood. Latour & Callon, to an extent, even though they speak a bit more positively of Hobbes and Leviathan, also seem to work towards this destruction of boundaries, as they actually use Hobbes to argue that there is no actual or true difference in size or influence between micro-actors (families, individuals, etc.) and macro-actors (institutions, social classes, etc.) that shape reality, only a matter of differing amounts of relations and other factors trapped within “black boxes.”
– Aryan Ashraf
…A crucial tenet of Actor-Network Theory (the position that Latour is defending) is that actors are not simply humans: actors are anything that can sit in webs of translations and associations… ANYTHING can be an actor for Latour (or, as he also calls them, actants).
Latour and Callon look to Hobbes’s Leviathan as example of how these translations occur—as how the macro-scale actor can be of the same matter and form as the micro-scale ones…They simply take Hobbes’s paradox and extend it, looking at how this phenomenon occurs throughout all aspects of life.… Haraway wishes to move beyond the fixed identity categories that formerly constituted the base of political movements… the cyborg emerges from the interstitial spaces generated by these breakdowns, it cannot be grounded in past identities and pushes us towards a new ontology. In this way, Haraway aligns herself with Latour’s redefinition of actors to include the non-human, the overlooked, and the anodyne… However, I think Haraway would push beyond Latour’s definition of actor—she might claim that it too still represents a stable category that has been undone (how can we think of iron without considering steel’s use in medical implants?) and might push further.
Her reconceptualization allows her to evade the trap between Rousseau and Hobbes that Graeber and Wengrow pose. If Graeber wishes to reconceptualize politics by envisioning a different past for humans, Haraway renders this obsolete by pointing to the fact that we have already rendered humans obsolete: what man in hunter-gatherer societies did can no longer form the basis for political action. We must embrace a coalitional politics that finds value in dualism if we wish to properly confront the changing relations of domination (an informatics of domination as opposed to white capitalist patriarchy—for the latter is itself composed of categories rendered unstable by the world’s change). The cyborg changes the rules of the game for Leviathan, it requires us to come together in new associations like Latour describes, yes, but also to embrace a sort of fluidity that seems anathema to the great monster.
– J. Doe
Graeber and Wengrow argue for a rethinking the “general course of human history” (3) in a manner that first examines the innate human quality as good or evil, second questions if inequality itself is inherent to complex society or somehow formed after the “emergence of ‘the state,’” and third calls for a shift away from European Enlightenment thinkers and the ideology of a “state of nature” and “consider perspective that derive from those indigenous thinkers who ultimately inspired them” (24). Graebor and Wengrow compare Rousseau’s answer to the innate goodness or evil of human where “people once lived in a state of innocence, yet were tainted by original sin” (2) to Hobbes’s answer where humans in a state of nature were naturally selfish, competitive, and in a state of constant war. The article reveals how the notion that the rise of inequality as simultaneous with the Agricultural Revolution, the inception of private property, and thus the creation of a socio-economic hierarchy is not factually accurate but relies on anecdotal evidence. Thus, instead of theorizing how the human species lived in a state of equality long ago and has since fallen, Graeber and Wengrow ask the question, “how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?” (8). The theories attributed to Hobbes and Rousseau, once “profound,” now seem “just tired common sense” (20). We thus see the need for a new way of thinking of general human history and the relation between complex society and inequality—possibly provided by Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.”
Latour and Callon discuss the role of actor-network theory in defining human society, where “micro-actors successfully grow to macro-size” (277). They portray the “macro-order” of macro-actors who have “translated other actors’ wills into a single will” for the macro-actor alone to act on (277). Latour and Callon’s “macro-actor” is a reconceptualization of a Hobbesian sovereign, the Leviathan, who becomes an “authorized” actor once the contract to cede subject power to the sovereign has been carried out. The sovereign, a macro-actor, is thus “the people itself in another state – as we speak of a gaseous or solid state” and demonstrated as not more complex or larger than a micro-actor (278, 286). Callon and Latour also examine the “monkey-Levithan” of baboon society, the “monster-Leviathan” in that it is machine unable to be narrowed down into one category (“machine, market, code, body, and war”, 294), and the “sociologist-Leviathan” constructed as a cyborg (297).
Graeber and Wengrow, Latour and Callon, and Haraway all discuss what it means to be human in the context of complex, political, and highly technological society. Haraway reveals her construction of the cyborg to “suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (116). These dualisms – life / death, self / other, mind / body, civilized / primitive, and agent / resource for instance (113) – are the very mental trap that the theories of Graeber and Wengrow and Latour and Callon seek to escape. Haraway’s cyborg skips the state of nature (105), is the offspring of militarism, patriarchal capitalism, and state socialism (105), and creates a materialized challenge to the existing system of control. Her cyborg theory, upon greater analysis, may have the potential to avenge “Leviathan’s revenge.”
– Emily Lathers
This week is about attempting to address the new changes that have occurred within modern day society, including the innovation within technological fields, the increasing realization of the importance of other entities (such as plants and tech). Additionally, human culture has shifted beyond the need to devote all of its time and energy to survival and food, which has shifted the power dynamics considerably, and allowed the formation of higher skill tiers and larger entities such as corporations. These advancements are what the articles are attempting to address. While no one is actually attempting to anthropomorphize plants and resources, they are trying to work them into their role in the leviathan, almost as supporting parts, because it is certainly true that technology and natural resources are integral to the stability of the government now in a way they were not in Hobbesian times.
– Kip Rodes
To me, Haraway’s cyborg represents the de-humanification of the the Leviathan in a similar way to Shaw’s predator empire without getting bogged down in the physical means of technologization. The dissolving line between human and machine that serves as the precedent for the cyborg’s creation can be viewed under the lens of actor-network theory… Each human (say, each Facebook user) could be a micro-actor to create the macro-actor that is a certain technology or platform, that operates with the authority of each of its users.… I think this means that the cyborg isn’t necessarily a departure from the Leviathan.… It is not a representation of our will, however, but a representation of who we are—with or without our consent. I think that Graeber and Wengrow would take issue with this conceptualization of humanity, as they seem to be opposed to any collective representation of Humanity or human history—at least in a way that frames our development as a glorious rise from the state of nature towards a utopic society. Haraway does not frame our current society as utopic (she does call it utopian on page 105, but not in the way that describes a benevolent society). However, she doesn’t shy away from framing our strides towards the cyborg as a march of social progress. In my mind, Graeber and Wengrow would prefer we only see it as a history of events, or even a series of mistakes.
While I think that the Cyborg can help us take a newly critical and non-Hobbesian approach to social history, I don’t see it suiting the needs of Graeber and Winslow. I do, however, see the cyborg as a study of social interaction in the new age of technology that might give us a refreshing tool of analysis for our technology-imbued society. The notion of an opaque “black box” in Callon and Latour’s work seem to lend themselves readily to a way in which we obsure and modify ourselves to be better represented to eachother, and the way in which our representative platform allows us to sort our relations into individualized spheres. The ways in which our identities are modified and commodified can be understood within the context of the cyborgization of our society—maybe we can use Haraway to understand the world that has outgrown Hobbes’s theories.
– Walter Ben Rosin
All of this weeks authors ask us to question the basic presumptions we hold that shape the way we asses politics, history and the world around us. By Calloun and Latour, we are asked to question why we think of micro and macro actors differently. Graeber and Wengrow question foundational assumptions about history and how are ways of thinking about politics and society are shaped by them. Harroway addresses both of these works in her piece. First, in conversation with Graeber and Wengrow, she writes that cyborgs are not indebted to the original creation myths of humans, that the debate over a question of original innocence or wholeness is completely arbitrary and irrelevant to them. This might assuage Graeber and Wengrows claim that assumptions of human nature are wrong, generalizing and oversimplifying in a funny why by almost saying that we don’t need to have this discussion frame our understandings of politics societal structures anymore. The why, the cyborg, is where she starts to respond to Calloun and Latour, whos actor network theory is in close connection with Harroways idea of a cyborg, the melding of humans and machines. To Calloun and Latour, machines are actors and as non human actors they hold a critical role in establishing the macro systems of society. Calloun and Latour question the distinctions between micro actors and macro actors in a way that is similar and supportive to Harroways question of the distinction between humans and non humans.
– Kestrel Valdez
Callon and Latour imagine micro- and macro-actors within a world that assumes a certain equality among all actors. Their construction of the Hobbesian world is emphatically anti-individualist, referring constantly to the act of simplification through which an individual actor’s own unique desires are relinquished to serve the greater “good”.… They call for a rebellion against Rousseau’s optimistic fall narrative (which understands power structures as the source of inequality) and Hobbes’s pessimistic self-interest narrative (which insists that those same structures prevent greater inequality of a more brutal sort) in order to construct a new narrative centered on the interaction between holistic beings.
Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” carefully defines a cyborg as a liminal being, “a creature in a post-gender world” (Haraway 103) that exists outside the bounds of dualism and universalist theory. She constructs identity as an affinitive object rather than a self-interested one and, within this framework, the actor-network relationships described above must be further contextualized within the oppression narrative.
The micro- and macro-actors world constructs power as anti-individualist and community-serving, meaning that the cyborg, as a creature of unique individualism, must simplify themselves by conform to the existing systems or become a black box item. Graeber and Wengrow’s mechanic understanding of modern civilization as a not-quite-Rousseauian not-quite-Hobbesian force of colonial inequity would situate the cyborg as a site of expanded imagination outside binarly defined systems. Rather than toppling the monstrous Leviathan, however, I think the cyborg would become a Leviathan in its own right, assuming the cyclical nature of humanity described in the Graeber and Wengrow piece, albeit with a more radically imagined inclusivity and social awareness.
– Nina Zhuo