Do Cyborgs Dream of Transgenic Sheep?

Do Cyborgs Dream of Transgenic Sheep?
In the 1964 novel 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', Phillip K. Dick explored the boundaries between the categories 'synthetic' and 'natural'. The end of the story is complex and has evoked much debate (Patrick et al 2011), but Dick's overriding message appears to be that if something synthetic is a perfect replica of something natural, then the difference hardly matters - there is no essential difference between the two if they cannot be separated by observation alone (only the genesis of their creation could distinguish them) – therefore in Dick's version of the future, the division between humanity and technology had ceased to be meaningful or relevant. Similarly, in recent decades there has been much work from science and technology studies, and the social sciences, debunking that old structuralist staple: the nature/culture divide. This work has undoubtedly been important and informative, and has been vital in moving beyond populist medical ethics debates over whether humans should be allowed to intervene in natural processes, or whether being 'cyborgian' counts as therapy or enhancement. Truly, the death of the 'natural human' as a norm or standard has opened up many new avenues of research and helped to reconceptualise how anthropology represents 'the social'.
While it is undeniably important to move beyond many of the entrenched binaries that have been pervasive in functionalist and structuralist (and structural-functionalist) anthropology, this essay poses the following problems: Firstly, to what extent has contemporary anthropology drawn on wider societal changes in formulating post-structural theories; the silent revolution that has seen a shift from mechanistic and symbolic-linguistic metaphors to ones that are informatic or network based. Instrumental in unpacking this first problem are the questions: Have anthropological paradigm shifts occurred because the newer paradigms are better at explaining society and culture? Or have these changes occurred to keep pace with material and societal changes? Secondly, if anthropology theoretically merges culture (and its technological products) and nature, is there a danger of a conceptual slippage that facilitates the translation of cultural relativism into technological indifference? Pivotal to the second problem is the understanding that while humans may be 'plastic,' non-essential entities that have always modified their environment, material technology does not exist in a vacuum and is always co-productive with power. Accordingly it is vital to recognise that technology tends to be ordered along lines of politics, symbolism, and capital (Gammeltoft 2007).
Undoubtedly, this essay is somewhat limited in scope, but it is arguably as important to pose meaningful questions as it is to provide satisfying answers. It is the broad intention of this essay to turn some of the arch-analytical frameworks inwards, looping them back on themselves and hopefully 'making up' anthropologists (Hacking 1999).
Network Theories
In 'Reassembling the Social' (2007) Bruno Latour sets out his thesis for Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), and in formulating this theory he points to the importance of Emile Durkheim's influence on Sociology and Anthropology (the difference between the two disciplines isn't as pronounced in France as in Anglophone countries). According to Latour, when Durkheim created the functionalist tradition, where society was a separate discrete unit, he set the tone that would characterise the next one hundred years of social science (Latour 2007). Further to this point, Latour does much to champion the work of Gabrielle Tarde, who was a contemporary of Durkheim, but who failed to gain any real traction with his theory of society. It is this theory of society that Latour develops (ibid); the idea that society does not exist independently of people, rather it is emergent from the collective behaviour of people and it only makes sense to talk about 'the social' as a shorthand. Accordingly for Latour, and for Tarde, the social is not something that contains any explanatory power; rather it is something to be explained (ibid). 'The social' is constructed of mediators and intermediaries. In the ANT formulation, mediators absorb, replicate and transform ideas. This means that humans, animals, and certain technologies are mediators and exert autonomy on the social field, making them 'actants' in the ANT terminology (ibid). Whereas, intermediaries do not change information in any meaningful manner and hence, for the purposes of social studies, can effectively be 'collapsed' and ignored. Furthermore, for actants to be able to cognate certain bits of information they need to have a way of ordering it in line with the pre-existing absorbed concepts, these orderings are termed as 'plug-ins' (ibid). It is in the relationships (or network) between various actants that Latour's 'social' emerges.
Similarly, in 'Explaining Culture: A naturalistic approach' (1996) Dan Sperber points to the importance of Tarde's theorisation in developing his own 'Epidemiology of Representations'. This Epidemiology of Representations has more than a superficial resemblance to ANT ¹, as both theories are reliant on an atomisation of society and culture into the smallest possible units. Moreover, both claim ideas that emphasise fluidity and movement, accounting for change through the idea that information (representations, 'pellets' etc.) is absorbed and reproduced, but also fundamentally changed in transmission.
This 'tweaking' of structuralism (that concepts must be interpreted in terms of their relation to other concepts) to include ideas of transmission and change is not restricted to Latour and Sperber. For example, Bourdieu's flows of symbolic capital in relation to habitus (1990), Foucault's capillary power (1976), Derrida's iterability (1986), Deleuze and Guttari's Rhizomatic formations and 'molecular lines of flight' (2004), and Bloch's use of connectionism (1984). All of these theorists have quite different ontologies, but how they conceptualise representations and concepts, or how they 'meta-represent' (Sperber 1996), is reliant on the network or ideas commensurable with networks². I call these 'network-theories'.
Instrumental to this 'network-theory' understanding is the recognition that, like all canons of academia, anthropology does not exist in a vacuum. Latour is particularly conscious of this³, and it is the starting point for his revision of 'the social', but he stops short of saying exactly why Durkheim's ideas gained more traction than Tarde's at the turn of the Twentieth Century (Latour 2007). Going one step further, it is vital to look at the political economy of anthropology and asses exactly what type of 'regime of truth' anthropology is (Good 2001).
In 'The Biotechnical Embrace', Good (ibid) describes the interrelated medical imaginary, clinical narrative, and biotechnical embrace which create economies of hope, whereby the laity become enamoured with the curative promise of medicine. This essay does not intend to claim that the wider society is enamoured with anthropology, but then again, anthropology has no 'embrace' and rarely relays the narratives created. However, it is undeniable that there is a two-way traffic between anthropology and the wider society; anthropologists, after all, are 'in' society. It follows, then, that anthropologists should look further at what their colleagues may be drawing on outside of science, how enthusiasm for anthropology emerges through the production of ideas, and the ways in which research is funded through the production of the hope of explanation (ibid). In short, how anthropology perpetuates itself through narratives that simultaneously endorse professional power over lay knowledge, in ways that are consistent with the lay experience of material conditions (ibid). This is what Abi-Rached (2008), noted about 'new brain sciences' and this essay contests that the same is true of anthropology.
This is a grand claim for a short essay, but it seems highly unlikely that by coincidence Durkheimian mechanistic ideas took hold in the advent of industry and nation-statehood, that structuralist ideas took hold during the subversion of 'traditional' authoritarian society in the 1950's – 1970's, and finally, that what I have called 'network-theories' took hold around the rise of informatics. Particularly telling here is the work of Foucault, who first came to prominence as the arch-structuralist in the 1960's and eventually developed more network-like ideas of creative or 'capillary' power up to the time of his death in the 1984. Conversely, Latour is conscious of his reliance on informatic metaphors (Latour 2007:207), and one can't help but wonder, then, if other such 'network-theories' have been influenced by the increasing interconnectedness of humanity in the latter half of the Twentieth Century.
Technological Indifference
The uptakes of the post-structuralist theories outlined above (especially ANT) have been particularly useful in conceptualising the implications of humans actively modifying 'natural' processes. Much of the literature in this area seems to be in response to popular debates, which generally 'jump' from scientific advancements, to totalising utopian or dystopian futures (Parkhurst 2012). These perspectives have been especially prevalent with regards to human augmentation leading to dangerous cyborgs (ibid), as well as cloning and other reproductive technologies leading to eugenics and 'designer babies' (Franklin 2007). These public discourses have tended to centre around the idea that humans (and their culture/technology) are essentially separate from nature, and furthermore, that nature follows its own kind of logic; in this rubric, then, interfering with nature is tantamount to 'playing god', and should be avoided at all costs.
It is clearly important that in analysing biotechnology, academia moves beyond such polarising debates. In 'Procrastinating the Singularity: Becoming Cyborgian' (2012), Parkhurst points to how discourse on cyborgs often escalates quickly from the intricacies of human augmentation, to super humanity (ibid). Crucially, the cyborgian identity is seen as deterministic – as if the differentiation between technology as enhancement or as therapy is inherent in the technology (ibid). This view, that the properties of a tool are inherent in its design and not its use, arises out of the fitting of new and ambiguous technologies being included in pre-existing social categories (ibid). In debunking this, Parkhurst points to how there are no inherent properties of an instrument and outcomes of augmentation are not inherent in the technology itself (ibid). This argument closely mirrors Heidegger's 'being-in-the-world' where the character of tool use is imbued with meaning and determined ultimately through extending human autonomy (Heidegger 1962). Moreover, Parkhurst utilises Foucauldian subjectivity to describe how the human subject is never static. The human subject is, instead, 'elastic' and is constantly made and modified through technologies of the self; this self absorbs and releases as humans employ their tools (Parkhurst 2012). Using this analysis it is demonstrated how 'becoming cyborgian' actually involves a shift in perspective or a change in reference points, and because of this 'perspective shift' that will occur, it will become impossible to tell the difference between whether cyborgian identity is an extension of realisation of human capacity (ibid). In short, modifying humans with technology poses no great challenge, as the only essential character of humanity is the very lack of essential characteristics – human 'plasticity'.
In 'Dolly Mixtures: The remaking of genealogy' (2007), Franklin, in explaining why sheep were the first animals to be cloned by humans, produces an analysis not dissimilar to Parkhurst4 whereby she shows that intervening with sheep genealogy is not a new phenomena. Instead Franklin states how the cloning of sheep is the logical result of thousands of years of humanity intervening in the reproductive outcomes of livestock (ibid). According to Franklin, the cloning of a sheep captured the public imagination for a number of key reasons; the first of these were the familiar debates around intervening with nature and 'playing god'. More significant, however, are the ways in which sheep are symbolically constituted out of historical assemblages, and how sheep have been historically instrumental in forging nationhood (ibid). Franklin asserts that people's attitudes towards sheep are informed by the 'affective economies' that link sheep to blood, soil, and identity; out of these 'affective economies' sheep have come to symbolise human labour and "entire ways of life" (ibid). Sheep are significant, therefore, not simply because of their economic value but also because sheep represent a "conflation of animal, technological, and human agencies" (Franklin 2007:199). These understandings provide an explanatory framework for understanding the life and death of Dolly; whereby the 'artificial' creation of Dolly caused anxiety, as she represented not just the remaking of ovine genealogy, but the remaking of human labour and entire ways of life. At the same time, and away from the public perceptions of the cloning technique used to produce Dolly, there was nothing truly new about her. The techniques used to clone Dolly were not new to her, she wasn't a 'true' clone, and most importantly she was simply the next stage in a historical continuum of making and remaking sheep reproduction (ibid).
The arguments of Parkhurst and Franklin have some key features in common. Primarily, both arguments analyse the public discourse on the subject of biotechnological interventions on living processes, and reveal the logical fallacies at the heart of these debates. The paradoxes of biological control, and the escalation of such arguments to dystopian and utopian futures are especially important. Accordingly, both arguments go on to demonstrate how the respective technological developments aren't actually as new or threatening as the public discourse might suggest. Both arguments hinge on the idea that 'humans' and 'nature' are neither fixed nor inseparable, and have been co-productive with each other for millennia; therefore the production of Dolly, or becoming Cyborgian, are simply the next step and a 'logical conclusion'. To paraphrase Franklin, they are less about transformations and more about remixes (or assemblages) of pre-existing formations (Franklin 2007:22), remixes that lose significance on creation due to the shifting scales of perspective (Parkhurst 2012). As demonstrated on the preceding chapter on network theories, this move away from conceptualising nature and culture (or society) as separate domains has been vital for the understanding of science and other materialisms through the anthropological lens. However, it has also been demonstrated that these meta-narratives may be so prevalent because they are reacting to material changes, rather that providing greater explanatory power. Therefore, there are still issues to be explored in relation to the remixing and assembling nature/culture.
Parkhurst's use of later Foucault is interesting, because at the point of writing about technologies of the self, Foucault had moved beyond hegemonic understandings of power and had come to see power as creative (capillary power at least). While it seems likely that power is creative, only using later Foucault tends to downplay panopticism. However, it is vital to assess the ways in which surveillance is becoming progressively integrated into the 'quantified self'. Furthermore, Latour (2007) states that many technologies act as mediators, which change the substance of information by translating and re-translating concepts (or sensory information in the cyborg instance). In so doing, these technologies exert a kind of agency over human life. This, in turn, constitutes these technologies as actants, which ultimately comprise and transform 'the social' (ibid). For cyborgs and transgenic sheep, while it is theoretically useful to explore the ways in which these advancements are extensions of pre-existing human interventions. It is also crucial that the ways in which these developments indicate fundamental changes in the intensity (as opposed to the substance) of human interventions are explored. Technology is not neutral. Since the enlightenment it has been recognised that materiality and property have curbed human autonomy for better (Hobbes 2003), or for worse (Rousseau 2004). What is undeniable, however, is that new technologies force us to confront future decisions, and technological imperatives can become moral ones (Kaufman et al 2011). To paraphrase Hacking, it is important to see normality as having a moral quality, as it constitutes what ought to be (Hogle 2005). In sum, anthropology has long argued for cultural (and to a lesser extent, moral) relativism (Scheper-Hughes 1995), and when the culture/nature divide is dissolved, there is a danger of developing a technological-humanity relativism; a technological indifference. Therefore, it may be argued that in cloning sheep or in augmenting human bodies there is effectively no alteration to the substance of humanity's relationship (or non-relationship) to nature. However, it is pivotal that anthropology looks at the intensity of the various transactions between actants, the intensity of constant self-mastery and self-monitoring (Hogle 2005), and the consequential structuring of the exercise of agency. Certain technologies may have some form of agency, making them actants, but they are incapable of moral reflection (Hacking 1999). This essay contends that while cyborgs and transgenic sheep do not transform humanity, but remix and extend humanity, it is the extension of new agencies which lack moral capacity, that are causing the ambivalence and fear of dystopia cited in Parkhurst's and Franklin's works.
Conclusion – Ethical Caution and the Nature/Culture Divide
Stephen Hawking recently spoke out over his concerns of artificial intelligence being the single greatest threat to humanity (Cellan-Jones 2014); these comments were seized upon by the media, probably due to Hawking's intellectual standing and his prominence as a pop-culture figure. However, these comments of Hawking's may be more telling than initially assumed. As a person, Stephen Hawking has all of his communication and much of his 'living' mediated by technology; consequentially his phenomenological experience has been increasingly affected by actants as his life has progressed and his condition has worsened. Accordingly, in conceptualizing becoming cyborgian and other technological developments anthropologists must not lose their intellectual rigor when engaging with these practices; there is a very real danger in generalizations and it behoves theorists to always ask: which technology, in which ways, and to whom?
Similarly, at the end of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' the distinctions between culture and nature, between fake animals and real animals, and between androids and humans, were no longer meaningful (Dick 2010). Then again, Dick's world was an irradiated nightmare, where these distinctions no longer mattered partly due to technological advance, but also because the natural world was no longer existent. Whether it exists outside of fiction is up for debate; the separation between nature and culture may be artificial and Eurocentric, but in these newer tropes, the concept of artificiality has been undermined, and consequentially it cannot be levied as a critisim. Similarly, detractors may point out that this essay first deconstructs 'network-theories' and then employs them in critical analysis, thereby creating a self-defeating argument. However, any good Latourian will be able to tell you that all forms of knowledge are artificial, created, and susceptible to deconstruction, but this does not preclude them from being useful.











Notes
There is a major ontological difference between Latour and Sperber; namely that Sperber describes his Epidemiology as truly materialistic, as everything is material even representations must have a physical presence (Sperber 1996). Whereas Latour doesn't describe ANT as materialistic because it has ceased to make sense as a discrete category (Latour 2007).
Many, along with Latour and Sperber, also make reference to Gabrielle Tarde.
In actual fact, all of the theorists mentioned are conscious of the effect of society on the social sciences but only in relation to the past. Very rarely are they reflexive about their own contributions, with regards the wider zeitgeist.
The aim of Franklin is to show the 'thickness' of the relationship between sheep, humans, and reproductive technology (Franklin 2007), but this is not Parkhurst's aim. The similarity arises out of part of Franklin's 'thick description' but the arguments are not the same in totality.








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