1999 - (anti)manifiesto: A Manifesto Against Manifestos - Caroline Bassett

Texto

„To Put on the Seductive and Dangerous Cybernetic Space

Like a Garment, is to Put on the Female.“

Allucquere Rosanne Stone, 1991; 90

„The Wearing of this Garment Does Not Enable You to Fly!“

Warning on a child’s SuperMan costume..

Origins and Orphans

In the 1980s, Donna Haraway, a socialist feminist, wrote a Cyborg Manifesto. A fairy-story about the future; a world beyond salvation myths, a future beyond gender. This impossible world, said Haraway, was nonetheless to be contested for. Haraway’s cyborg was famously unfaithful to her origins, breaking with her roots, in US military/technological machine. She did however, clearly produce offspring (cyberfeminism being one of her children).

Sadie Plant, sometime later, wrote a book called Zeroes and Ones, another manifesto, but this time, one in which the hero(ine), Woman, does not, in the end, break with the past (or not, at least, the distant past). What Plant created was not so much a fairy-story about a possible future, but a manifesto „all about origins...“

Influenced by accounts of evolutionary biology, Plant in Zeroes and Ones creates a new myth of Eve, this time an Eve born of a crisis of the organic soup which began the world, which destroys the web-like marine Eden, there at the beginning; constituted and containing slippery „strings of inseparable sisters“. Evolution, history; and Man as the Subject, of that history; all that followed, in other words, was a result of this mistake, this crisis. An error.

The re-emergence of this Eve, the re-ascension of the feminine principle through new information technologies, is what lies at the heart of Plant’s feminist philosophy, and at the heart, I think, of her politics. It is also at the heart of those aspects of her cyberfeminism which I find problematic.

Trajectories

This paper explores Plant’s work, as a starting point through which to examine cyberfeminism, and to express my concerns that it often fails to connect not only with the ‘real world’ (with real technologies, and real positions many women find themselves in). In addition, it also fails to articulate demands for, to re-write the possibilities for, a genuinely different future. This despite the evidence that these demands, these visions, are (still) necessary (still despite information technology) and need to be thought through. To do so would be to develop a different sense of what cyberfeminism(s) is/are, or could be. Sadie Plant’s work is an appropriate focus because it is forceful articulation of an influential current of cyberfeminist thought. In addition, Plant herself, and her writings, have tended to be identified with the term itself--in the UK at least.

This critique is pursued through a suggestion that what is required is the restitution of a Utopian consciousness in cyberfeminism, of a new sense of the ‘what could be possi- ble’, as opposed to the celebratory ‘what is’, if you like, which is currently evident in many cyberfeminist takes on technology. If this does not sound like a formula which pro- vides for an engaged politics (it might sound like a manife- sto against particular manifestos...), I will try to suggest how it does at least provide the space for the development of an active/activist feminism; for a kind of politics.

Perhaps this call is counter-intuitive. There are currently many writings assessing cyberculture which begin by re- cognizing that the technology is Utopia/is Dystopia debates have been futile in many ways. We have now, it is argued, moved beyond all this; there is a sense, in particular, that the celebrations are over, and the social science has begun. We are now in the territory of Cybersociety 2.0 (Jones, 1998). We are in the realm of AOL and GeoCities, and Monica sites. It has become apparent, (it always was apparent, actually) that much of the gender-twisting on the net, was defensive, or even normative, that you slipped out of one stereotype into another. It marked you, in de Lauretis terms, even when the performance was your own. In these and other ways, as Howard Rheingold, writing about early cyberspace feared, they metered us and sold us back to us.

All the more need, I think, in this context, for the restitution of Utopia of a particular kind; of the kind that says simply this, the present needs changing, the future could be different. This is not a position that triumphalist brands of cyberfeminism can consistently hold.

Going beyond Plant, I will try to suggest that this might not be a position that any brand of cyberfeminism based around essentialism can easily hold. This is why, in the final section of this paper, I briefly refer to the notion that instead of thinking technology and gender as essentially connected (or essentially dis-connected) we might think of both as performatively produced; linked by discourses which give them meaning, discourses which might be rewritten, or even, queered.

Re-Assembled Woman

What is cyberfeminism? For Plant, cyberfeminism is an absolutely post-human insurrection--the revolt of an emergent system which includes women and computers against the world-view and material reality of a patriarchy which still seeks to subdue them. This is an alliance of ‘the goods’ against their masters. This revolt is on a grand scale. Plant is discussing the overthrow ‘of two thousand years of patriarchal control’, In fact--sometimes--this revolt is already happening. „Tomorrow came“, she says.“ We are already downloaded.“

The question then, is how did this change come about? Here cutting across Plant’s rhetoric of transformation, is a fundamental ambiguity, and a (surprising) admission of uncertainty. First the ambiguity: Plant says it is cyberfeminism--and/or the complex systems and virtual worlds upon which it is based--which have the capacity to upturn patriarchy. Second, the uncertainty. Plant says she is talking about an „irresponsible feminism“. Which might not be a ‘feminism at all.'

Does cyberfeminism then, amount to a politics, or a technology? Is Plant talking about the possibility of a feminist response to the digital world? Or, is she documenting/predicting/ investigating a technologically-determined alteration in the condition of woman? An alteration women should embrace (after all, they are about to inherit the earth), but which they can do very little about?

To try and unpack these questions, it might be useful to look at where this kind of cyberfeminism finds it theoretical roots. Cyberfeminism--clearly--begins at the point when humanism is abandoned. Plant's analysis begins with the French philospher Luce Irigaray's contention that, for women a sense of identity, is impossible to achieve since women cannot escape the 'specular economy' of the male. This is an economy in which, through the controlling phallus and eye (the member and the gaze) woman is always understood as 'deficient'. Woman is always 'the sex which is not one', the sex which always lacks the equipment to have one. (Women is always Zero, not One.)

Given this analysis, those feminisms which demand for woman, her place as the subject of history, her share of human domination over nature, have simply got the wrong goals. Pursuing the 'masculine dream of „self-control, selfidentification, self-knowledge, and self-determination“ as Plant puts it, will always be futile, since 'any theory of the subject will always have been appropriated by the masculine' (Irigaray). For Irigaray, the only possible politics for the sex which is not one, and can never be one, is a politics which takes as its starting point the destruction of ‘the subject’.

The question, of course, is how this work of destruction might be carried out. Irigaray's answers to the questions she poses have always been tentative--for her the project is fraught with difficulty--Plant is not so diffident. She has an answer. And it is self-organizing technologies; the femaleness of the new species. Which is not a species but an machinic emergence. And which is dangerous to men.

Plant's contention is that self-organizing technology, „a dispersed and distributed emergence“ composed of links between women and computers can perform Irigaray's work of destruction, because they produce the space ‘apart’ for woman to assemble herself--with the assistance of machines. Cut loose from patriarchy, woman is 'turned on with the machines'. The way out of „the prison house of language“ (Irigaray’s prison) turns out to be through technology; the zeroes and ones of (binary) code!

For Plant then, new combinations of women and machines, are in themselves, a kind of ‘politics’, but also simply mark a changed state of affairs. There is, in other words, a technological fix (to use Carol Stabile’s term) for feminism. This fix might be highly desirable, but I do not think a convincing argument for it is made in Plant’s work. Below I want to briefly point to two sets of problems. First I’ll look at what I’d call the essential engendering of technology in Plant’s work. Second I’ll consider the question of how technology ‘itself’ is deployed.

The Nature of Technology

I have suggested that Plant’s analysis turns on a particular understanding of women and phallogocentrism. It also however turns on a particular reading of the ‘nature’ of technology. It is necessary to ask then, how machines, often understood to be ‘coded masculine’, get to ‘be’ feminine in this account.

Plant accounts for this shift in Zeroes and Ones and elsewhere in her writing, in two rather different ways. The first is this one. New technology is ‘orphan’ technology because it is emergent technology. „tools mutate into complex machines which think and act for themselves“. These machines, being emergent do not have origins to be faithful to. Extending this, we might say, They twist beyond (Irigaray’s) specular economy--and the twist they take, for cyberfeminism, is towards ‘the female’.

Plant’s own writing however, cuts across this account, since it is also her contention that there always have been (often invisible) interconnections between ‘fe-males’ and technologies of information. This inter-connection is symbolized by weaving which assumes huge importance in Plant’s writing. Not only is it a central metaphor, it is more than that; one could read Zeroes and Ones as a (cyberfeminist) genealogy of technology, an excavation based on a notion of technology as weaving. As Plant tells it in Zeroes and Ones; microbacterial mats wove the world, and still weave their way into women’s egg, and not into male sperm (there is/might be a Mitochondrial Eve). These ‘weavers’ become Freud’s ‘weaving women’--weaving women who make connections with machines, for instance in the industrial revolution, when male weaving is taken over by women. Slightly later, the inter-twined history of the Jaquard Loom, which used punch cards, and later electronic software coding, comes to stand ‘as proof’ of the importation of ‘the feminine’ into the supposedly sterile spaces of the machines. Which still leaves unanswered the ques-tion of what makes weaving, now ‘secreted’ within the digital, a female techology? Apart from the fact Freud certified it so?

Weaving, for Plant, is about technologies and practices which cannot be explained in terms of domination and control. Weaving--women working with information technologies--can then also be understood as in some sense subterranean weaving against; an inevitable conspiracy ‘in process’ not in consciousness, if you like.

To bring the accounts of technology and the theorization of the female together. It can be suggested that in Plant’s analysis the category of the female ‘itself’ is never up for grabs –although the bodywork may change (and extend). Woman remains essential in her essential (and originary) fluidity. It is clear also that this has implications for ways in which technology can be thought. As a fixed category, ‘the female’ sits uneasily as a descriptor of ‘new’ technologies, which are supposed to be (simultaneously argued to be) disturbing of 'the subject' and of human relations with nature. To simply switch the gender of machines belies--para- doxically--their complexity (their heterogeneous cultural inscription, their fluidity).

The fault-line between gender essentialism and technologically mediated transformation clear here, is a fault-line that runs through this kind of cyberfeminism. Plant is essentially essentialist. Which is why, despite the transformatory rhetoric, I think it is fair to suggest that cyberfeminism is not ambitious enough in defining a vision--a vision perhaps of a less 'mechanically' gendered future. Plant is saying that the nature of women and the nature of the machines converge. Perhaps we need to be asking ‘which nature?’, ‘which ‘women?’ and ‘whose machines?’, and ‘which technologies?’, and ‘for whose interest?’

Tomorrow, yesterday

The second important way in which Plant’s analysis is problematic is because it refuses history. Cyberfeminism is often incapable of an engaged politics because, although it talks of process, it refuses to consider or assess technology or technological practices, as practices embedded in particular spaces (geographies) and in particular times. Instead Plant’s cyberfeminism neglects/ collapses present, past and future. In her analysis, we are catapulted into the „coming future“, through the force of a mythical past (for which incidentally we are invited to be nostalgic) partly by way of abstracted out examples of technologies or technological possibilities. If we assent to this trajectory it is partly because the future Plant projects (based on information science) and the ‘past’ she writes for us (based on new biology) is also ‘authorized’ by these discourses, which she uses rhetorically, but also brings to bear as ‘facts’ which validate her discourse (a sleight of hand which is might be regarded as inconsis-tent with an approach which denies scientific rationality).

One consequence of the way in which this rhetoric is constructed is that disagreement becomes difficult. To disagree is to be accused of failing to understand the implications of new science, as well as to failing to fall in with the slippery sisterhood (woman). In this way I find Plant’s cyberfeminism, strangely tyrannizing (strangely because I think it is intended to be open).

Another consequence, I want to suggest, is that cyberfeminism, describing an actually existing world in which women are back in the ascendant, or back on the road to ascendancy, does not produce a space for a thinking about different possible future, or for finding a way to get there. Again then, in this different sense, cyberfeminism can be described as being peculiarly unambitious. Something in it is missing despite the scale of its claims.

’Somewhere in the Nowhere’--Utopias

In pursuit of this missing something. I turn briefly to the question of Utopia--to think about more about its location, and its purpose, both of which provide suggestive means by which to think through cyberfeminism. Utopia is traditionally a non-place (Hence the name, which is also associated with happiness; Utopia is the happy non place), its actual location as non-place, however, has shifted over the years--and in response to real geographies. Utopia was a term used first by Thomas More, the name he gave to an island in the South Seas, a non-place with a definite location, much like the later Erewhon (nowhere) was somewhere (somewhere, over the mountains). Later though, as the world shrank, and there were no more empty spaces left, Utopia already the non-space, „left space and entered time“ Dagmar Reichert lays out this trajectory, in Woman as Utopia (Reichert, 1994), an article which links intriguingly to Plant by way of Irigaray. More central to the argument here, however, Reichert asks where Utopia might move to from here, in our own century; and concludes that Utopia is transgressing again; into not space, but hyperspace, not into new times, but into simultaneity. (Reichert, 1994: 94).

Reichert herself links the non-place of Utopia with the nonplace, the zero of Irigaray’s woman. Women for Reichert becomes/is Utopia, and she ends with an appeal for a woman who does not subject herself to the territorial order, but who is not lost in formless chaos either. More than both subject and object. However, she also warns against the hope that utopia can be located, accommodated, instantiated: „Not even the space of possibility“, she says, „is capable of accommodating utopias. There is within every utopia, for example, the inherent contradiction that there is, even at the end of de-sire, still something to live towards.“ (Reichert, 1994, 93).

Elsewhere (and from a different tradition), a discussion between Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and Bloch „Something’s missing“, on the contradictions of Utopian ‘longing’ pre-iterates many of the same themes. But Something’s ‘missing links in a different way to the concerns of cyberfeminism, in that it considers the very specific sense of lack that emerges when Utopian dreams are ‘fulfilled’ by new communications and technologies; at the time of writing by things like television, ‘the possibility of travelling to other planets’, and the possibilities of ‘moving faster than sound’. As Adorno said of these inventions: „[I]nsofar as these dreams have been realized, they all operate as though the best thing about them had been forgotten--one is not happy abut them. As they have been realized the dreams have assumed a peculiar character of sobriety, of the spirit of positivism, and beyond that, of boredom. One sees oneself almost always deceived; the fulfilment of wishes takes something away from the substance of wishes.“ Adorno and Bloch make a distinction between the delivery of fragments of Utopia (deliverable dreams) which lose their value on arrival, and Utopia itself. In addition they claim that the fulfilment of specific Utopian wishes not only disappoint, they also depreciate Utopia itself, and in particular they depreciate the power of Utopia as a whole vision, leading to what Adorno called the ‘strange shrinking of Utopian consciousness’. It is thus only if Utopia stands essentially apart, they suggest, if it is essentially impossible to achieve, that it can operate as „a critique of what is present. (p.12)“

‘A critique of what is present’

How might this debate, which occurred as mass consumption was shoed in by old new technology, be read into new conditions of new technology and into new debates around feminism?’ Here I return briefly to Plant, and suggest that a critique of what is present might be precisely what her cyberfeminism doesn’t deliver.

I have attempted to argue by looking at what informs Plant’s work that while this kind of cyberfeminism looks extremely radical, as a politics to live by it comes closer to espousing a kind of triumphant fatalism, than an activism. Part of this argument is that the triumphant rhetoric of some kinds of cyberfeminism has hidden, its often tenuous connections with what is really going on in digital spaces, in the heres and in the nows in which we live our lives, and that it has done that precisely by confusing possible future technologies, with what is happening today. „Tomorrow Came“, said Plant, „We are Already Downloaded.“ There is a future and a past in that statement, apparently, but both also live in an instant present. This is why Zeros and Ones is a creation story, relived endlessly, not a manifesto for the future at all. It is actually fired by a kind of radical nostalgia for a past which is retroactively created.

The more you look at it, the more it is clear, that this is a story about how the future could not be different. In Zeroes and Ones, a certain kind of Utopia always was. We just couldn’t see it. New Technology made this ‘what always was’ (actually the Utopia of Women--to slip back to Reichert), this non-place of woman, visible. Which might be something of a contradiction in terms, if the terms are those of Irigaray.

Technology and Performance

Here let me briefly gesture towards a different approach. I have tried to demonstrate above that Plant’s cyberfeminism reinscribes gender and sex in essential ways. In ways which strip out from digital technology those possibilities of destabilization (even cyborgization) which Plant herself (and many others) have celebrated. But this possibility of destablization--surely--remains the point?

Bodies are being reconfigured through technology in ways that disturb assumptions about sex and gender. Humans do operate differently in remote communication or in virtual spaces. Information networks, in all these ways, challenges essentialism.

One way in which it is possible to think through the question of technology and the question of women rather differently is through Judith Butler’s notion of performativity. For Butler bodies are morphologized through performance; not through the free performance of an individual but through the performative discourses of society. These discourses conform bodies. In other words sexed bodies and genders are achieved and re-achieved iteratively; in a performance which repeats, but which may not repeat perfectly. There is space in this for a politics of re-signification; for writing against the grain. It is, of course, possible to think about technology ‘itself’ as performatively produced and reproduced; itself open to re-inscription; in other words, this analysis has implications for thinking technology, as well as for thinking women.

Conclusions

This paper began life as a Manifesto against Manifestos. It ends as a call for the restitution of the idea of Utopia in cyberfeminism. This is a restitution which might be achieved by means of re-thinking the location of Utopia. A feminist Utopia does not inhere in actually existing (virtual) spaces, because they are insubstantial, or instanta neous, because they can conceal, or disguise, or transform. Nor is it to be found in particular configurations of particular technologies; technologies which are somehow or other ‘female’.

Utopia, instead, needs to be relocated to the no-space, no time of the possible, the wished for, the desired, envisioned, and imagined. This shift would not place an engaged politics beyond the horizon. On the contrary, it would allow the reframing of demands for the now, not in the context of a revolution rather tawdrily achieved, and in part, in the sphere of technology alone, but in the context of far wider wished for futures, to be grasped by human actions in new contexts, not offered by machines. Against technology as destiny, a politics which is not one, could be set the notion of Utopia as possible worlds. These Possible Worlds, which engage with technologies, might spark new kinds of thinking about what could be beyond gender--and beyond gender inequality. They are possible worlds which could be used to highlight, and to critique the real conditions of women online; in the real here, and in the real (and virtual) now.

REFERENCES: Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter, Routledge, London Bloch, Ernst and Adorno Theodor (199), Something's Missing: A discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing, De Lauretis, Theresa (1987), Technologies of Gender, Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Indiana UP, Blomington Freud, Sigmund (1985), New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, Penguin, Harmondsworth, (p.167) Haraway, Donna (1991), 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century' in Simians Cyborgs, and Women, the Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, London Irigaray, Luce (1985), This sex that is not One, Cornell U.P, Ithaca, New York.

More, Thomas (1975), Utopia, Norton, London Jones, Steven G. (1998), Cybersociety 2.0, Revisiting Computer Mediated Communication, Sage, London Plant, Sadie (1998), Zeros + Ones, 4th Estate, London Plant, Sadie (1996), 'On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations' in (ed) RobShields Cultures of Internet, Sage, London Rheingold, Howard (1994), The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World, Secker and Warburg, London Reichert, Dagmar (1994), 'Woman as Utopia: Against Relations of Representation', in Gender, Place and Culture, Vol 1. No. 1 pp.90-99 Stone, Rosanne Allucquere (1991), The War of Desire and Technology, MIT, London Stabile, Carol (1994), Feminism and the Technological Fix, Manchester UP, Manchester.

Fuentes

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Enlaces

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