Week 3: How the nature gets made

Week 3: How the nature gets made

Seminar notes

Ryan Schram
ANTH 3608: Becoming cyborgs—Technology and society
August 22, 2025

Slides available at: https://anthrograph.rschram.org/cyborgs/2025/week-3/seminar

Who is Rosalind Franklin?

Small seminar activity

• Form a small group (a small “seminar,” or a micropublic).
• Appoint a note-taker and a spokesperson.
• Find out everything you can about Rosalind Franklin in 7 minutes. Record your sources. Note what they highlight as the most important conclusions.
• Read the passage about Watson and Crick on page 12 of Science in Action (Latour 1987).
• How would you tell this story? Why?

Bruno Latour came up with a class activity to go with his paper, so let’s use it

Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” Common Knowledge 3, no. 2 (1994): 29–64.

See pages 33, 35, 36–38.

Nb. Gestell is a “frame,” and is used in the sense given by Heidegger whne he conceptualizes the essence of technology.

Humans are sociotechnical apes

Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation,” Common Knowledge 3, no. 2 (1994): 29–64.

• Were scholarship as efficient as the art of film, I would have you progress as rapidly as Kubrick’s apes—from a band of primates linked only by social ties to an evolved species of sociotechnical humans who admit their inferior brethren, the nonhumans, to their social thinking. But to bring this about wouid be quite a miracle, since social theory is as devoid of artifacts as were Kubrick’s apes before the monolith arrived. (Latour 1994, 43)
• “In the newly emerging paradigm, we substitute collective—defined as an exchange of human and nonhuman properties inside a corporate body—for the tainted word society” (Latour 1994, 46).
• “The difference between an ancient or”primitive” collective and a modern or “advanced” one is … that the latter translates, crosses over,e nrolls, and mobilizes more elements” (Latour 1994, 47)