2
This essay is divided into two parts. Part I presents a picture of the way that technology,
especially innovations in information and bio-technology, has eroded the capacity of democratic
citizens to participate responsibly in public life. Part II presents a limited response to this
situation, what I have called elsewhere cultural re-enactment.
1
Cultural re-enactments bear some
resemblance to the simulations and cyborgs that epitomize today’s genetic engineering
technologies and that inure many citizens to the mass violence that occurs in their name.
However, they also create liminal public spaces in which critical and constructive democratic
discussion and compromise may take shape along more cosmopolitan lines.
I. The Erosion of Democratic Responsibility
We make our technologies, our objects, but then the objects of our lives shape us in turn.
Our new objects have scintillating, pulsating surfaces; they invite playful exploration;
they are dynamic, seductive, and elusive. They encourage us to move away from
reductive analysis as a model of understanding. It is not clear what we are becoming
when we look upon them – or that we yet know how to see through them.
– Sherry Turkle
2
How do modern bio-technologies and information technologies affect democratic
politics? Have state policies and social movements been shaped in the image of these
“seductive” cyborgs and “pulsating” simulations, or can citizens “see through” these proliferating
1
“Re-enacting Mass Violence,” Polity, Vol.XXXV, No.3, Summer 2003.
2
“Seeing Through Computers: Education in a Culture of Simulation,” The American
Prospect, Vol.8, No.31, March-April 1997.
Convention