Plant - Return to the Soft Machine (Review) (New Scientist 1996)Sadie Plant / text
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BOOKS & ARTS 24 February 1996
Return to the soft machine
SINCE the publication of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto in the late 1980s, interest in
prosthetic body parts, immersive VR suits and all other hybridisations of body and machine have
been indissoluble from debates about the fate of gender and sex.
There is much to recommend in Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women
(Duke University Press, £16.95, ISBN 0 8223 1698 6) which explores the interactions of women
and men with a range of fictional, future and technological developments. Anne Balsamo pays
some welcome attention to the clear contributions made by women to contemporary
cyberculture: Pat Cadigan’s work is more influential here than William Gibson’s brilliant, but
ubiquitous, trilogy. Balsamo’s ambivalence about current technical developments is also a
pleasing antidote to orthodox feminist tendencies to see technology as a male conspiracy
expressly designed to victimise women.
But the book does little to take the debate beyond Haraway’s opening position that cyborgs
present a range of new possibilities and dangers for everyone, women in particular. And although
this is a relatively new area of academic research, many of the arguments presented here are
already well rehearsed. For those with an existing interest in machines and their growing
interaction with the human species, its sexes and its organic integrity, the themes are also
predictable: pregnancy, body building, plastic surgery and representations of cyborgs in
contemporary film. Thus, a relatively limited conception of technology is brought to bear on a
female body that is less a feeling, bleeding organism, teeming with neurochemical activity and
microbial life – itself a complex, soft machine – than a cultural construction to be read, like a
book.
Nevertheless, while there are better things to do with – and as – cyborg women, this is an
excellent exercise in reading them.
By Sadie Plant
Magazine issue 2018 published 24 February 1996
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