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Post-Cyberfeminism?
Nat Muller meets up with SADIE PLANT
by Dee
Sadie Plant has taught at Birmingham and Warwick University. She
is the author of Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New
Technoculture (1997), The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist
International in a Postmodern Age (1992), and of numerous articles
about technology and gender. Sadie has acquired the name of
cyberfeminist par excellence. I met sadie at the Kaai Theater in
Brussels, where she gave a talk on art and technology.
Nat Muller: You are the director of the "Cybernetic Culture Research
Unit" at Warwick University. What kind of research is it that you
engage in there? If academe is really losing its grip on the process of
conveying knowledge - as you put it in your paper "The Virtual
Complexity of Culture" in FutureNatural - then how does your
Graduate Research Unit differ? How does one practically go around
inserting a "connectionist/bottom-up" approach in an institution?
Sadie Plant: An interesting twist to your question is that I actually left
a year ago. Not really for negative reasons, or for the difficulties your
question implies, but these difficulties certainly are there. There can
be a high personal price to pay for trying to initiate the kinds of
institutional changes that are necessary to make any real rigorous
inter-disciplinary work happen. Often, in universities, which are so
structured in terms of subjects and departments and so on, you can
have lots and lots of multi-disciplinary centres, but the notion of a
new subject area in itself is very difficult to cultivate. And as you
rightly point out in your question, it is indeed difficult to do that
particular kind of work in an institution. I have spent 7 years enjoying
and trying to do this work in an institution, as long as it as to some
extent succeeding. But about a year ago, I decided that I would
concentrate on my own writing. But the "Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit" is still at Warwick, and the whole rational of it was
that it would be a bottom-up form of organisation. That has always
been the strength of it. I hope that the graduate students, who were
about a dozen at that time, will continue to run it.
All the students were working on their own projects, and they all had
some interest in new technologies, not necessarily new technology
as bits of machinery, but more in the cultural and philosophical
inclinations of it. To give an example: one student was working on
queer theory, but using models from complex dynamics, and trying to
get a new conception of culture and how you could explain the
distribution of a term like "queer". His work _ which is still continuing
_ is tending more towards a viral model, and he's looking at the kind
of post-AIDS queer phenomena. Not just taking "virus" in its obvious
sense, but using that as the occasion to examine viral contagion in a
broader context. So it is THAT kind of interaction between culture
and technology, rather than the standard influence of the one on the
other.
All of the students, whatever they were working on in very different
areas, were all very materialist-philosophical in mind. They would
mainly be reading Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault and so on. In
effect we were looking for new paradigms how to rethink culture,
rather than the traditional academic humanist sort of way to view
culture. It seems to me that technology can not only be used to talk
about human culture, but actually ANY sort of culture: from culture in
a petri-dish in a biological context, right through to the notion of
global culture. So that's the kind of _ certainly not anti-humanist _ but
more NOT-humanist ideas we were working with.
Now practically, in teaching it's of course really difficult to insert a
bottom-up approach, because the whole notion of teaching and
education is through and through top-down. Even in contexts like the
Research Unit, we're still incredibly primitive in how we actually
communicate information. I must admit that my own preference is
writing. That obviously has its own problems, but at least it removes
the sort of idea that you are somewhere on a stage with your
knowledge, dispensing it to the people in the classroom, people who
don't know. I do think that it is an urgent necessity to get beyond that
stage, especially when you're dealing with intelligent adults. I haven't
really followed the education theme that seriously, but I have written
a couple of pieces about education, and I think that the crisis in
education goes all the way down to school education. It will be really
interesting to see what happens to generations of young schoolgoing children, who are already familiar with computers and the
internet, and can thus access their own information. I think that the
interesting challenge teachers of many kinds are now faced with, is
what their role is. And if anything, I think it is a much more facilitating
role. My own approach on teaching has always been an emphasis on
basic skills and enthusiasm. I think that if you can give people the
resources to do their own work, the better it is they have to find their
own content.
You are a self-proclaimed cyberfeminist. What does that mean
to you?
Sadie: I have only used it as a descriptive term, and unfortunately I
have acquired it as label. I always wish that I hadn't proclaimed
myself a cyberfeminist!! What you get is publishers publicity gloss,
which is in itself an interesting syndrome to see the packaging in
operation. I think that a lot of people have read the work that is called
cyberfeminist, and these people aren't necessarily feminist at all.
They are looking at complex dynamics and so on, they are not
getting the "cyberfeminist" spin on it. You know, my book Zeros and
Ones certainly intervenes in a lot of feminist debates, but I don't see
it as a feminist book, and I think that a lot of the more intelligent
readers of it don't either. So there's an interesting discrepancy
between what's on the cover of the book and all the publicity
surrounding it, and what's actually in the book which is a bit of a
shame.
But having said all that, there is something interesting about this term
"cyberfeminism", which is why I mentioned it in the very first place. I
have no idea what it would mean to be a cyberfeminist, but there was
a moment a few years ago where people started talking about this
word "cyberfeminism". Amongst the things that first intrigued me
about it was that it seemed to pop up almost at the same time in lots
of different places, most notably Australia. I guess that people were
sort of seeing the limit of the crude old traditional notion that
technology is male, and any attempt to get beyond that got tagged
with the "cyberfeminist" label. But I see it as something much more
interesting than only that: one of its potential uses is - not considering
it as some kind of movement or anything - but as possible ways of
looking back on the history of feminism and of "women's lib", and try
to tell a much more materialist and non-linear story about how that
has happened.
There has been a tendency to either see feminism as a political
movement making certain changes happen, therefore claiming
responsibility in a positive sense or at the same time there's the
feeling that it failed to achieve certain things, and is therefore blaming
itself. But I think that a political movement is never entirely
responsible. That is, IT is not making anything happen the human
element is not the only element of issue; it's very much tied up with
really complex technical, economical and cultural changes. The
danger of moving in that direction is that you could easily slip in some
sort of crude economic sermonism, which is an equally bad mistake.
But I have tried to find a point where you can get between those two
positions. You basically deal with questions as "If any positive social
changes are simply a matter of political decisions and political
activity, then presumably one could have had feminism at any point
in the last 2500 years but WHY NOW? Why was it in the 20th
Century that it really happened?"
Obviously then it becomes inextricable from various material
changes. The technological ones are particularly interesting, NOT
because they are very determining or making anything happen, but
because they have a close relation to the infrastructure of how things
work in a culture, and they provide very stark examples of different
kinds of organisation. So, for example, the shift from the telephone
system to the internet really does parallel very similar cultural and
social shifts. In a sense I have been trying to get to a notion of a nonlinear history of feminism. I have never quite put it in those terms, but
there's certainly that side of cyberfeminism as well. From that point of
view, you can look back historically, and see that the Industrial
Revolution was like the first kind of significant shift in social relations
on a genderfront, and then obviously the World Wars were also a
major point. THAT was initially more the kind of cyberfeminism I was
interested in.
It's a very misleading term, because the prefix "cyber" sort of
invokes the internet, while you are referring to all different kinds
of technologies and their various impacts. Sometimes I ask
myself whether this type of feminism does not fall prey to (white
academic) cultural imperialism. What's in it for women who do
not have the economic/educational possibilities? Is their agenda
being addressed at all? What about those women in factories
soldering chips for example?
Sadie: Well, I think that this side of it is actually very interesting.
There's this whole historical genealogy of women interacting with
technology, but this is also geographically. Now obviously those
women in factories are at the bottom of the pile, there's no doubt
about that. But, one the one hand, an interesting observation to think
of is that you and I, and all those women are all using or making
computers in some capacity, albeit either at the top or the bottom of
that ladder. That in itself is an interesting link, given that we are
supposed to talk about a male dominated culture.
That's a very optimistic view you're taking there. If this is some
sort of female bonding, then men are still using these
technologies on the backs of these women.
Sadie: O yeah, absolutely. Exploitation is exploitation. But the
difference is that the women in those factories are - albeit hopefully
at a faster rate _ going through the same changes women went
through in the West during the Industrial Revolution, or in the wake of
the 2nd WW. We took a couple of 100 years to get through from
feudalism to having this conversation. I think that in a number of
countries in South East Asia the transition from being stuck in the
home, to actually running the factory is a relatively short step. It may
take a generation, but it's not going to take the 200 or 300 years it
took us. It's hardly a good situation, but by the same token I do think
that it has a dynamic to it it's not fixed like that. The roles that those
women are playing, and even the geographical location of these
factories is a passing phenomenon; it's not stuck there for all time
there is a dynamic there. that would be the positive side. So yeah,
they're stuck in the chip factory, but they're not as stuck as they were
in the home. And another thing, which is similar to women in the
West, a small amount of economic independence relative to none at
all goes a long way.
In an interview with RosieX you state that the whole
chaos/techno culture is a feminised culture, and that our culture
as a whole is becoming more feminine. The social constructivist
in me raises an eyebrow here. In short, what do you mean by
this?
Sadie: Well, again, I DO want to get away from a simple social
constructionist position, because I don't think it just comes down to
simple social construction. I mean, if it did then why don't we just
change it?! So, we know that's wrong. Likewise, we know that crude
biological determinism is wrong too, because you can change things.
So, we have to find a middle path between those two, where things
are both socially constructed, but where they also tend to accrete
and accumulate certain kind of characteristics both socially and
genetically/biologically. So that over centuries you do end up with a
set of characteristics that which DO tend to be called female/male or
masculine/feminine, but which are by no means fixed. I think that in
the days that we thought of biology as just "stuff" that was just sitting
there, and completely out of the picture, then these would be very
unhelpful things to say. But now that our ideas about biology are
being so quickly revised, and we realise that a particular shape of a
population _ even if it has been that way for centuries _ is not
necessarily fixed, and that along with cultural and social changes, do
come physical and bodily changes too. In addition to that, there's a
far more rigorous awareness now of the interaction of humans with
their environments, in all sort of contexts. So the human body, or for
that matter "to be a woman" is no longer this biologically fixed thing.
This comes back to the notion of culture at all levels: cultures in your
body, cultures in the city and they all have to change. I do think we
are witnessing a period wherein these changes ARE actually
happening.
But why a change towards "the feminine"?
Sadie: Well, rightly or wrongly (we both would probably like to say
wrongly), there are certain ways of doing things or certain attributes,
or qualities which have been considered "female" or "feminine" in the
past whether we like it or not. It does seem to me that the demands
of contemporary culture, such as adaptability, multi-tasking, flexibility
and so on, are all qualities that for no good reason _ obviously for the
worst of reasons _ women have had to exercise to simply survive. To
begin with, it was just an interesting observation that a culture that
seems so bent on standardisation, centralisation, hierarchies etc. the computer almost being the epitome of all of that _ should be
developing into a culture which seems to demand quite the opposite.
Suddenly, the skills which have been promoted so much in the past _
that is, a very straightforward and logical way of thinking, i.e. the
classic male thinking _ begins to become quite dysfunctional. You
only have to look at employment and demographic patterns to see
that there's such a big shift towards women's employment away from
male employment of course with all the problems of low wages, parttime work etc. etc. Nevertheless, it is really a big cultural shift. It
seems to me that this is very directly because these new
technologies demand new ways of working, and it just so happens
that portions of the population which seem best equipped for that are
women. If nothing else, there's a real interesting irony of history here:
the attempt to promote the specialised top-down way of doing things
has turned the tables to produce quite the contrary.
I am really interested to link up what you just said to Artificial
Intelligence and Artificial Life. This movement away from expert
systems, which depend on propositional/top-down knowledge,
to systems with more of a bottom-up approach, actually creates
a space where you can insert all kinds of different
epistemologies, such as skills-knowledge, bodily knowledge
and female epistemologies. You know, the sort of knowledge
that has always been devalued.
Sadie: Yes, "intuition" is a good example of that. Intuition is almost
becoming a technical term in the newer distributed systems of
Artificial Intelligence, where you can actually observe the connections
being made in a connectionist system. The only way of talking about
them is actually as flashes of intuition. And it's incredible that the
most denigrated kind of thinking (intuition) _ because associated with
the feminine _ is almost overtaking rigorous logic. If you really want a
machine to think, you allow it to be intuitive. What is so interesting
about this all, is that it wasn't feminism that came along and
demolished all that it demolished itself. That's the beauty of it all. I
also think that you can make very similar parallel historical
observation about the classic image of patriarchal social
organisation, that in trying to effect itself it has undone itself. The
more you DO aim at that kind of centralised control, the more you
endanger it flipping into its opposite. And we're living in a time now,
where both tendencies are equally prominent: on the one hand
there's the Microsoft centralisation tendency, and on the other hand
there's increasing - almost anarchic - street-level grassroots technoactivity. Each is feeding of the other, really. I think the most valuable
thing one can do, is undermine the whole paradigm of a top-down
approach.
I'd like your comment on this quote from VNS Matrix "Bitch
Mutant Manifesto" (see Fringecore #3): "The net's the parthenogenetic bitch-mutant feral child of big daddy mainframe. She's
out of control, Kevin, she's the socio-pathic emergent system.
Lock up your children, gaffer tape the cunt's mouth and shove a
rat up her arse."
Sadie: Gosh!! What can I say about this?!? OK, when I first saw VNS
Matrix' work, I was so impressed with it because it seemed to be as
far away from a kind of "victim feminism" as you could get. At that
time that attitude was so refreshing! You know, that sense of some
insidious, emergent, uncontrollable tendency which is of course by
no means a fiction of the VNS Matrix collective imagination it's a
broadly felt cultural fear. I think that VNS Matrix had a way of
articulating that, and become some kind of beacon for a lot of women
who just couldn't go on because they became associated with the
"victim role". The beauty of VNS Matrix is that you could obviously
read their claims as just metaphorical statements, but it's not just
artistic fantasy. I mean, the partheno-genetic quality of it as an
emergent organisation, the whole mutation and feral tendencies If it
would only be a metaphorical statement, then it still would be
powerful, but what's so impressive about it, is that it is talking about
actual developments as well. So, for all those reasons I'm a fan.