Cyborg Citizenry: The Futility of Trust in a Post-Representational World

"Popular distrust of government has steadily increased. The undermining of the most fundamental of all democratic principles, the intimate connection between citizenry and its government, has encouraged alienation and disaffiliation." - Sheldon S. Wolin In 1721, Thomas Gordon defined our relation to government quite succinctly, “What is Government, but a Trust committed by All, or the Most, to One, or a Few, who are to attend upon the Affairs of All, that every one may, with the more Security, attend upon his own? A great and honourable Trust; but too seldom honourably executed.” Today, Western democracies find themselves in a crisis of political trust rivaling that of 17th century England, which suffered through the turmoil of civil war, revolution, and even the beheading of Charles 1. From the old scandal of “rotten boroughs” in Britain to the gerrymandering of political districts in the U.S., not to mention the selling of political influence in countless democracies, it appears that government continues to be a trust “too seldom honorably executed.” In his Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes famously describes Civil Society as being founded upon a “covenant,” or social contract. When government meets its obligations under the terms of this contract, says Hobbes, “[its] performance is called keeping of promise, or faith; and the failing of performance (if it be voluntary) violation of faith.” The political sentiments of Hobbes and his contemporaries would be formalized with the passage of the English Bill of Rights in1689. This document, inspired nominally by the Magna Carta of 1215 (itself based in part on the Charter of Liberties of 1100), would influence the American Constitution and indeed virtually every constitutional democracy in the modern world. What such documents insist upon above all from government is adequate representation, the failure of which constitutes a breach of faith or trust. In this paper, I will conduct a political genealogy of trust. We shall see that modern representative politics, while ostensibly justified by mutual trust, is ironically rooted in a soil of distrust. Can recovering 17th century notions of representation lead to a contemporary renewal of trust in government? Or, have the very conditions that necessitated representational government undergone such a profound historical change that political representation itself has become a principal mechanism of exploitation, misrepresentation and breach of faith? Or is trust in representative government futile. In fact, is representative government itself a living anachronism? “Popular distrust of government [and] disaffiliation is one of the marks that identify the state not only as postdemocratic but as postrepresentative.” Says Sheldon Wolin. Wolin describes the modern power regime as a kind of hybrid that combines the old institutions of government with the interests, mechanisms, and strategies of the transnational corporation. This “Superpower,” as he calls it, does not simply ignore democratic values, it coopts and redefines them in terms of its own interests, which include globalization and the corporatization of institutions previously considered public, such as education, health care and the penal system.regime make decisions that transcend or sidestep conventional organs of oversight, including the electoral process. Thus, the demos has little to say about those decisions — they are not the sort of issues that come up before popular vote. In fact, in this new order, asserts Wolin, “majority rule, democracy’s power-principle, is fictitious: majorities are artifacts manufactured by money, organizations, and the media” To make government more responsible, to restore our trust in it as an institution, we need to rethink the ideas of citizenship, of popular political participation, and of representation, as a start. To negotiate the world of post-representative politics, I consider the value of adopting Donna Haraway’s concept of “cyborg citizenship.” Haraway employs the idea of a cyborg identity to bypass the staid dualisms that structure gender relations. Perhaps the same idea can be deployed to deconstruct the polarizing dichotomy between governed and government. By exploring new means of political participation made possible through integration in the new informatics, technological immediacy, and social networking, will render the need for trust less perilous if not obsolete.