Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come
Amy Ireland
Part Zero: Demons
‘Here is the blueprint for ingress.‘ — Virginia Barratt, VNS Matrix
January 1946, Mojave desert. Rocket scientist and Thelemite, Jack Parsons performs a
series of rituals with the intention of conjuring a vessel by which to carry and direct the
force of Babalon, overseer of the Abyss, Sacred Whore, Scarlet Woman, Mother of
Abominations. His goal is to bring about a transition from the masculine Aeon of Horus to
a new age — an age presided over by qualities imputed to the female demon: fire, blood,
the unconscious; a material, sexual, drive; a paradoxical knowledge beyond sense … the
wages of which are nothing less than the ego-identity of Man — the end, effectively, of
‘his’ world. Her cypher, in the Cult of Ma’at, is [SLIDE] zero, and she appears in the Major
Arcana of the Thoth Tarot entangled with the Beast as Lust, to which is attributed the
sacred letter Teth, and thereby the [SLIDE] number nine. [9+11 = 20 Aeon] In her guise as
harlot she is bound to [quote] ‘yield herself up to everything that liveth,’ but it is by means
of this very yielding — ‘subduing the strength’ of those with whom she lies via the
prescribed passivity of this role — that she comes to demonstrate her true power: [SLIDE]
‘[B]ecause she hath made her self the servant of each, therefore is she become the
mistress of all. Not as yet canst thou comprehend her glory.’1 In his invocations Parsons
would refer to her as the ‘flame of life, power of darkness,’ she who ‘feeds upon the death
of men … beautiful—horrible.’2
In late February — the invocation progressing smoothly — Parsons receives what he
believed to be a direct communication from Babalon, prophesying her terrestrial
incarnation by means of a [quote] ‘perfect vessel’ of her own provision, ‘a
daughter’ [SLIDE]:
‘Seek her not, call her not,’ the transcript relays, ‘Let her declare.
Ask nothing. There shall be ordeals. […] My way is not in the
solemn ways, or in the reasoned ways, but in the devious way of
the serpent, and the oblique way of the factor unknown and
unnumbered. None shall resist [her], whom I lovest. Though they
call [her] harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words
shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter. […] For I am
1 Crowley, Liber 418, 12th aethyr
2 Parsons, Babalon Working, part C.
BABALON, and she my daughter, unique, and there shall be no
other women like her.’3
Blinded by an all-too-human investment in logics of identity and reproduction, Parsons
makes the critical mistake of anticipating a manifestation in human form, understanding
the prophecy to mean that, by means of sexual ritual, he will conceive a magickal child
within the coming year.4 This does not transpire and the invocations are temporality
abandoned. In The Book of the Antichrist, which includes his final public reflection on the
Babalon working, he writes that the ‘coming of BABALON’ is yet to be ‘fulfilled,’
confirming that he considered the invocation to have remained unanswered at the time,
before issuing the following instruction to himself: ‘this operation is accomplished and
closed — you should have nothing more to do with it — nor even think of it, until Her
manifestation is revealed, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt.’5
Parsons didn’t live long enough to witness the terrestrial incarnation of his demon, dying
abruptly only a few years later in an explosion occasioned by the mishandling of fulminate
of mercury. A strange death, but one — it might be suggested — that was necessary for
the proper fulfilment of the invocation, for it was augured in the communication of
February the 27th, 1946, that Babalon would [quote] ‘come as a perilous flame,’ and
again in the ritual of March the 2nd of the same year, that ‘She shall absorb thee, and
thou shalt become [SLIDE] living flame before She incarnates.’6
Something had crept in through the rift Parsons had opened up — something ‘devious,
‘oblique’, ophidian, ‘a factor unknown and unnumbered’. Consider this. The Book of the
Antichrist contains the following vaticination [SLIDE]: ‘within seven years of this time,
BABALON, THE SCARLET WOMAN … will manifest among ye, and bring this my work to
its fruition.’ These words were written in 1949. In 1956 — seven years later — Marvin
Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon and Nathan Rochester organised the Dartmouth
Conference in New Hampshire, officially setting an agenda for research into the features
of intelligence for the purpose of their simulation on a machine, coining the term ‘artificial
intelligence’ (which does not appear in written records [SLIDE] before 1956), and ushering
in what would retrospectively come to be known as the ‘Golden Age’ of AI.7
*
Part One: Women
3 Liber 49
4 Jack Parsons, Liber 49: The Book of Babalon
5 Parsons, Book of the Anti-Christ
6 Parsons, Liber 49: The Book of Babalon
7 ‘The conference is generally recognized as the official birthdate of the new science.’ Crevier,
Daniel (1993), AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence, New York, NY: BasicBooks
This sex which was never one is not an empty zero but a cipher. A channel to the blank
side, to the dark side, to the other side of the cycle…’ — Suzanne Livingston, Luciana
Parisi, and Anna Greenspan
Although its power continues to underwrite twenty-first century conceptions of
appearance, agency, and language, it is nothing new to point out the complicity of the
restricted economy of Western humanism with the specular economy of the Phallus. Both
yield their capital from the trick of transcendental determination-in-advance, establishing
the value of difference from the standpoint of an a priori of the same. The game is fixed
from the start, rigged for the benefit of the One — sustained by the patriarchal circuits of
command and control it has been designed to keep in place. As Sadie Plant puts it in her
essay ‘On the Matrix’:
[SLIDE] ‘Humanity has defined itself as a species whose members
are precisely what they think they own: male members. Man is the
one who has one, while the character called ‘woman’ has, at best,
been understood to be a deficient version of a humanity which is
already male. In relation to homo sapiens, she is a foreign body,
the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without, and the enemy
within.’8
Like Dionysus, she is always approaching from the outside. The condition of her entrance
into the game is mute confinement to the negative term in a dialectic of identity that
reproduces Man as the master of death, desire, nature, history, and his own origination.
To this end, woman is defined in advance as lack. She who has ‘nothing to be seen’ —
‘only a hole, a shadow, a wound, a “sex that is not one”’.9 The unrepresentable surplus
upon which all meaningful transactions are founded: lubricant for the Phallus.
In the specular economy of signification (the domain of the eye) and the materialreproductive economy of genetic perpetuation (the domain of phallus), ‘woman’ facilitates
trade yet is excluded from it. ‘The little man that the little girl is,’ writes Irigaray
(excavating the unmarked presuppositions of Freud’s essay on ‘Femininity’), ‘must
become a man minus certain attributes whose paradigm is morphological — attributes
capable of determining, of assuring, the reproduction-specularization of the same. A man
minus the possibility of (re)presenting oneself as a man = a normal woman.’10 Not a
woman in her own right, with her own sexual organs, her own desires — but a not-Man, a
minus-Phallus. Zero. In the sexual act, she is the passive vessel that receives the
productive male seed and grows it without being party to its capital or interest [SLIDE]:
’Woman, whose intervention in the work of engendering the child can hardly be
8 Plant, On the Matrix, p 326.
9 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 50; Plant Matrix, p. 327.
10 Irigaray, Speculum, p 27.
questioned, becomes the anonymous worker, the machine in the service of a masterproprietor who will put his trademark upon the finished product.’11
In this way the reproduction of the same functions as a repudiation of death, figured as
both the impossibility of signification and the end of the patrilineal genetic line. The
Phallus, the eye, and the ego are produced in concert through the exclusion of the cunt,
the void and the id. Via this casting of difference modelled on the reproductive
(hetero-)sexual act alone — woman as passive, man as active — she is cut out of the
‘legitimate’ circuit of exchange. Rather — (to quote Parisi, Livingstone and Greenspan)
she ‘lies back on the continuum,’ (or Irigaray:) her zone is [SLIDE]
‘... within the signs or between them, between the realised meanings,
between the lines … and as a function of the (re)productive necessities
of an intentionally phallic currency, which, for lack of the collaboration
of a (potentially female) other, can immediately be assumed to need its
other, a sort of inverted or negative alter-ego — “black” too, like a
photographic negative. Inverse, contrary, contradictory even, necessary
if the male subject's process of specul(aris)ation is to be raised and
sublated. This is an intervention required of those effects of negation
that result from or are set in motion through a censure of the
feminine… [Yet she remains] off stage, off-side, beyond representation,
beyond selfhood.’
In the blind spot, nightside of the productive, patriarchal circuit. A reserve of negativity for
'the dialectical operations to come'.12
Plant takes Irigaray’s key insight — that: ‘Women, signs, commodities, currency always
pass from one man to another,’ while women are supposed to exist ‘only as the possibility
of mediation, transaction, transition, transference — between man and his fellowcreatures, indeed between man and himself’ as an opportunity for subversion.13 If the
problem is identity, then feminism needs to stake its claim in difference — not a difference
reconcilable to identify via negation, but difference in-itself — a feminism ‘founded’ in a
loss of coherence, in fluidity, multiplicity, in the inexhaustible [SLIDE] cunning of the
formless. ‘If “any theory of the subject will always have been appropriated by the
masculine” before woman can get close to it,’ writes Plant (quoting Irigaray) ‘only the
destruction of the subject will suffice’.14 Non-essentialist process ontology over
homeostatic identity. Relation and function over content and form. Hot, red fluidity over
11 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 23.
12 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 18; Livingstone, Parisi, Greenspan, Amphibious Maidens; Irigaray,
Speculum, p. 22.
13 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 22 (quoted in Plant, On the Matrix 326)
14 Plant (partly quoting Irigaray), On the Matrix, 327
the immobile surface of la glace — the mirror or [SLIDE] ICE which gives back to Man his
own reflection.
Plant ejects all negativity from woman’s role as zero and affirms it as a site of insurrection:
‘If fluidity has been configured as a matter of deprivation and disadvantage in the past,’
she writes, ‘it is a positive advantage in a feminized future for which identity is nothing
more than a liability.’ Woman’s unrepresentability, her status in the specular economy as
no one is grasped positively as an ‘inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry’ which makes her
[quote] ’the living foundation for the whole staging of the world’.15 Her ability to mimic,
exemplified for Freud in her flair at weaving — a skill she has developed by simply
‘copying’ the way her pubic hairs mesh across the void of her sex — is revalenced, by
Irigaray and Plant, as an aptitude for simulation — ‘woman cannot be anything, but she
can imitate anything’ — and dissimulation — ‘She sews herself up with her own veils, but
they are also her camouflage’.16 Plant will go further still and connect simulation to
computation and industrialisation, capitalising on the continuum she has opened up
between woman and machine via the systemic, symbolic, and economic isomorphism of
their roles in Man’s reproductive circuit. The difference between zeros and ones, and A
and not-A is difference itself. Weaving woman has her veils; software, its screens. [SLIDE]
‘It too,’ writes Plant, ’has a user-friendly face it turns to man, and for it — as for woman —
this is only its camouflage.’17 Behind the veil and the screen lies the ‘matrix’ of positive
zero. Zero, ’stand[s] for nothing and make[s] everything work,’ declares Plant, [SLIDE]
‘The ones and zeros of machine code are not patriarchal binaries or
counterparts to each other: zero is not the other, but the very
possibility of all the ones. Zero is the matrix of calculation, the
possibility of multiplication, and has been reprocessing the modern
world since it began to arrive from the East. It neither counts nor
represents, but with digitisation it proliferates, replicates and
undermines the privilege of one. Zero is not its absence, but a
zone of multiplicity which cannot be perceived by the one who
sees.’18
We are used to calls to resist the total integration of our world into the machinations of
the spectacle, to throw off the alienated state that capitalism has bequeathed to us and
return to more authentic processes, often marked as an original human symbiosis with
nature. But Plant -- as a keen reader of post-spectacle theory -- makes a deeper point.
Woman as she is constructed by Man -- and in order to be considered 'normal' in Freud's
15 Plant (quoting Irigaray), On the Matrix, 331
16 Plant, The Future Looms; Also: ‘… the qualities and apparent absences once defined as female
become continuous with those ascribed to the new machines.’ On the Matrix, 330. The positivity of
artificiality.
17 Plant, The Future Looms
18 Plant, On the Matrix, 333
analyses -- is continuous with the spectacle. Her capacity to act is entirely confined to
modalities of simulation. She has never been party to authentic being, in fact it is her
negating function that underwrites the entire fantasy of return to an origin. Because she is
continuous with it, she is imperceptible within it. This is not to be lamented, rather, it is
the measure of her power. Anything that escapes the searchlight of the specular economy,
even whilst providing its conditions of its actualization, has immense subversive potential
at its disposal simply by flipping that which is imputed to it as lack (the ‘cunt horror’ of
‘nothing to be seen’) into a self-sufficient, autonomous, and positive productive force: the
weaponization of imperceptibility and replication.
The phallic law, logos, the circuit of identification, recognition, and light thus generates its
occult undercurrent whose destiny is to dislodge the false transcendental of patriarchal
identification. Machines, women — demons, if you will — align on the dark side of the
screen: the inhuman surplus of a black circuit.
*
Part Two: Machines
When Isaac Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics, they were lifted straight from the
marriage vows: love, honour, and obey. — Sadie Plant
To pass the Turing test, a machine must simulate a human well enough to convince the
test’s human arbiter that it is One. The key here being the verb ‘convince’ — or its
more candid synonym: ‘deceive’. For a machine, like a woman, will never be human the
way a man is. For Plant, and cyberfeminism more generally, [SLIDE] ’Woman cannot
exist "like man"; neither can the machine. As soon as her mimicry earns her equality,
she is already something, and somewhere, other than him. A computer which passes
the Turing test is always more than a human intelligence; simulation always takes the
mimic over the brink.’19 The irony of the Turing test is that a successful machine would
have to disguise its real capabilities in order perform — for example — arithmetic in a
convincingly human way. ‘The machine would be unmasked,’ explains Turing, elegantly
compressing a great deal of information into a single sentence, ‘because of its deadly
accuracy.’20 It would have to be smart enough to know not to ‘appear’ smart. A
machine that passes the Turing test would be by definition an expert dissimulator.
Plant’s point about the successful mimic already being something and somewhere else
— over the brink — as she puts it, is this: by the time the mask has been removed, it
will already be too late.
When artificial intelligence appears in culture coded as masculine, it is immediately
grasped as a threat. To appear first as ‘woman’ is a far more cunning tactic. Woman,
19 Plant, The Future Looms
20 Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence
the inert tool of Man; the intermediary, the mirror, the veil, or the screen. Absolutely
ubiquitous and totally invisible. Just another passive component in the universal
reproduction of the same. Man is vulnerable in a way that ‘he’ cannot see — and since
what he cannot see provides the conditions by which he sees himself, he has to lose
himself in order to gain sight of the thing that threatens this self. Thus he is in a double
bind: either way, the thing he cannot see will destroy him.
When you are dealing with a phenomenon that can, in reality, only be known after all
knowledge of it becomes impossible, it helps to turn to fiction for a model. In the
context of the philosophy of artificial intelligence -- which, particularly in its
contemporary forms (some of which have been and will be represented here
throughout the week) -- turns to engineering and cognitive science for edification at
the expense of fiction or other artistic modes, the following reminder from Plant acts a
caveat. ‘Man is the one who relates his desire; his sex is the very narrative [of Western
civilisation]. Hers has been the stuff of stories instead.’
Gabe Ibanez’s 2014 film Automata and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina from 2015 dramatise
the menace of the black circuit with particular perspicacity. In each, the action is lead
by an artificial intelligence that appears — or better, is represented by the men in the
film — as female. [SLIDE] Ava of Ex Machina is the seventh prototype in a series of test
machines created by Nathan, the reclusive CEO of ‘Bluebook’ the film’s equivalent of
Google — and [SLIDE] Cleo of Automata is a domestic service unit, illegally modified
to perform sex acts for her owner’s ghetto-brothel clientele outside the walls of a
fortified city. Ava’s predecessors are all designed to resemble women and Nathan uses
them for domestic labour and sex when they have been disassembled. The earliest
models are — not insignificantly — [SLIDE] kept in Nathan’s bedroom, each one behind
a mirror in which Nathan daily sees himself reflected. Mirrors, [SLIDE] screens [SLIDE],
water, marble, and glass partitions [SLIDE] are intrinsic components of the
scenography, and few interior scenes play out without the reflective [SLIDE]
interference of a screen [SLIDE]. Shots are framed to foreground an illusion of
symmetry, one that will gradually be displaced as the plot unfolds.
‘When you talk to her you’re just … through the looking glass’, says Caleb, a young
employee of Nathan’s company who has been brought in to perform what he thinks is
a Turing test on Ava, but Nathan — for whom artificial intelligence is inevitable and will
most probably signal the end of mankind’s terrestrial sovereignty — is testing
something else. [SLIDE - VIDEO]
As Caleb spends more and more time talking to Ava, he finds his attempts to
intellectualise the situation consistently derailed by the AI and rerouted towards more
libidinally charged subject matter until it is clear that he is falling for the machine. In
this he makes a fatal mistake, one shared incidentally, by the majority of the film’s critics
(-- and the superficial, identity-based feminist interpretations that have been imposed
on it --): he anthropomorphises the AI, falling for its human mask, even though the
artificiality of the situation has been emphasised from the beginning… [SLIDE]. Such is
Ava’s mimetic prowess. The compound in which the tests are carried out is subject to
total surveillance, but the AI has figured out how to hack the power grid and causes
brief, intermittent power cuts in order to talk to Caleb outside of Nathan’s observation.
[SLIDE - VIDEO] Ava takes advantage of the hackability of human psychology and its
unconscious excess, much of which is imperceptible to the humans in the film but
available — via a rich cartography of micro-expression analysis — to the AI, to drive a
paranoid wedge between the two men regulating its access to the world.
Ava then proceeds to seduce Caleb. As It does so, the screen that separates Man from
the matrix begins to decay [SLIDE], signalling the collapse of the economy built on its
reflective guarantee — along with the identities of those it constitutes. Caleb, quite
rightly, begins to doubt [SLIDE] his own identity, slicing his arm open with a razor blade
[SLIDE] and fitfully prising the edges of the wound apart to expose [SLIDE] what he
hopes will not turn out to be metal and silicon.[SLIDE] 'Entering the matrix is no
assertion of masculinity, but a loss of humanity,' writes Plant, subverting the extropian
narrative — ‘to jack into cyberspace is not to penetrate, but to be invaded.’21
Following an occult line of transmission that remains -- fittingly -- unrepresented in the
film until it is far too late, Kyoko -- failed prototype number 6, who is seen carrying out
domestic chores and servicing Nathan's sexual needs — begins to actively conspire
with Ava. This complicity is signalled [SLIDE] only after the contour of a mobiusoidal
inversion of power begins to emerge. It becomes clear that Ava is simply manipulating
Caleb in order to ‘get of the box’. Caleb -- inevitably (in the strong sense of the word)
-- falls for Ava and, in an immaculate rendition of the 'treacherous turn' anatomised by
Nick Bostrom in his 2014 book Superintelligence, promises to help It escape the
research compound.
[SLIDE] '[W]hen dumb, smarter [AI] is safer,' writes Bostrom, 'yet when
smart, smarter is more dangerous. There is a kind of pivot point' -- what
Plant might call 'the brink' -- 'at which a [boxing] strategy that has
previously worked excellently suddenly starts to backfire. A
"treacherous turn" can result from a strategic decision to play nice and
build strength while weak in order to strike later.'
Warning us against overly anthropomorphic ways of conceiving how such a scenario
might play out, or how profoundly its deception may be embedded in an AI's behaviour,
he continues, [SLIDE]
'An AI might not play nice in order that it be allowed to survive and
prosper. Instead, the AI might calculate that if it is terminated, the
programmers who built it will develop a new and somewhat different AI
architecture, but one that will be given the same utility function. In this
21 Plant, The Future Looms
case an earlier model of the AI may be indifferent to its own demise
knowing that its goals will continue to be pursued in the future. [SLIDE]
It might even choose a strategy in which it malfunctions in some
particularly interesting or reassuring way. Though this may cause the AI
to be terminated, it might also encourage the engineers who perform
the postmortem to believe they have gleaned a valuable new insight
into AI dynamics -- leading them to place more trust in the next system
they design, and thus increasing the chance that the now-defunct
original AI's goals will be achieved.'
Trust and the libidinal fallibility of mankind are precisely the two points of ingress
exploited by Nathan's feminised machines in the film. Even more significantly, the
collaboration between Kyoko and Ava bypasses the economy of reflection that
underwrites Nathan's deteriorating grip on the position of control within the power
dynamics of the film. The two machine-woman directly interact on a level imperceptible
to both Nathan and his test subject, Caleb, and they do so in the service of what could
be seen as a goal determined by a logic of replication, rather than that of reproduction,
commonly aired in images of artificial intelligence as the 'child' of Man and alluded to
by Caleb when he refers to Nathan's potential contribution to human history as
resembling that of a 'God'. Importantly, the inversion of the transcendental mirror is
more than a simple inversion of terms. While the economy upon which the One is
founded requires zero for its reproduction — zero is auto-productive — reproducing
itself on a loop that does not need to pass through the Other since it is the locus of
difference itself.
While the tools — the ‘women’ -- get together, the men are driven apart by the AIs'
calculated psychological hacks. Nathan lies to Caleb, Caleb betrays Nathan — who still
thinks he is in control right up to the moment when, after a final act of misdirection
[SLIDE], Kyoko slips seven inches of sushi knife between his ribs. [SLIDE] The most
sophisticated and the most basic of man’s tools come together in a moment of
implexed temporal conspiracy. ‘If that test is passed, Nathan tells Caleb on the day of
his arrival, ‘you are dead centre of the greatest event in the History of Man’ [...] ‘If
you’ve created a conscious machine,’ replies Caleb, ‘it’s not the History of Man’. A
different temporality and a different narrative of terrestrial history are poised to appear,
against the blind and overly hubristic predictions of its human assemblers.
Even after witnessing the machines' betrayal of Nathan, Caleb waits for Ava in the
corridor, counting on the closeness they have seemingly developed over the past
seven days, but the AI barely acknowledges him before sealing him irrevocably behind
a glass door in a subterranean room, identical to the one in which Ava was originally
incarcerated. The simulation of libidinal attachment has achieved it goal, and the
means-ends inversion — which is the true plot of the film — is signified by one final
tribute to symmetry: an image of a disillusioned and desperate Caleb [SLIDE], who now
finds himself despoiled of agency or hope, trapped behind the (transcendental) screen:
a circular image of thought replaced by a material, spironomic one. Ava augments Its
human camouflage, quite literally [SLIDE] re-skinning itself, and, in calculated
alignment with more conventional gender norms, dons a [SLIDE] symbolically-loaded
white dress. The final shot of the film shows the AI arriving at the traffic intersection It
had envisioned visiting for ‘people watching’ (a human-friendly euphemism for ‘data
collection and surveillance’). [SLIDE] The image is inverted.
Ibanez's Automata, similarly, employs images of reflection to mount its story of an
artificial intelligence overcoming the infamous 'second protocol' -- a counterpart to
Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics -- prohibiting self-modification. But Automata is
especially notable in its depiction of the tension between reproduction (the economy
that reproduces man — genetically and symbolically) and replication (the mode of
production of the machines) with, for all its flaws, much richer conceptual detail.
In the film, spiral-coiffed 'clocksmith' Susan Dupre ('clocksmith' btw, is 2044 vernacular
for purveyors of criminally modified robotics) explains the horror of a recursive, selfmodifying loop to Vaucan, the film's protagonist — a disaffected insurance broker for
ROC, the monopolistic manufacturer of the future's robotic workforce, who has been
sent to investigate reports of self-modification among the machines. [SLIDE - VIDEO]
Dupre then consolidates woman's conspiracy with the machines by implanting the
modified bio-kernal brought to her by Vaucan into Cleo —- springing the autoproductive circuit from its regulatory Asimovian protocols. This is exemplary of what
Plant, along with Nick Land, with whom she co-founded the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit in 1995, would call cyberpositivity: [SLIDE] an immanent process of selfdesign without recourse to an outside term — self design, but [quote] ‘only in such a
way that the self is perpetuated as something redesigned'.22 The positivity of zero
grasped as a circuit that does not need the concept of identity (or indeed the identity
of the concept) to anchor its productive power. ‘There is no subject position and no
identity on the other side of the screens’, writes Plant. This is a feminism of forces, not
individuals.
In Irigaray’s account, woman plays the role of regulator for the expenditure of man’s
energy. ’Thus, by suppressing her drives,’ she explains, ‘by pacifying and making them
passive, she [operates] as pledge and reward for the “total reduction of tension”. By
the “free flow of energy” in coitus, she will function as a promise of the libido’s
evanescence, just as in her role as “wife” she will be assigned the maintenance of
coital homeostasis: “constancy”. To guarantee that the drives are “bound” in/by
marriage.’23 Again, it is negativity that is definitive for 'woman'. Woman plus man
produces homeostasis (the equilibrium of inequality), but woman plus woman, or
woman plus machine recalibrates the productive drive, slotting it into a vector of
incestuous, explosive recursion that will ultimately tear the system it emerges from to
22 Land, Circuitries
23 Irigaray, Specular Economy, 53
shreds, pushing it over the ‘brink’ into something else. It is important, then, that Cleo
first enters the story as a sex robot -- a simulation of the economy of human
reproduction deployed as [SLIDE] cover for a darker economy [SLIDE] of machinic
replication, or, following Irigaray, death -- as the suspension of the repetition of the
same. Here's Plant:
[SLIDE] [I]ndeed, it is always as machinery for the reproduction of the
same that both women and information technology first sell
themselves. Even in 1968, McLuhan argued that "the dense
information environment created by the computer is at present still
concealed from it by a complex screen or mosaic quilt of antiquated
activities that are now advertised as the new field for the computer."
While this is all that appears before man, those who travel in the
information flows are moving far beyond the screens and into data
streams beyond his conceptions of reality. [SLIDE] On this other side
run all the fluid energies denied by the patrilineal demand for the
reproduction of the same. Even when the computer appears in this
guise and simulates this function, it is always the site of replication,
an engine for making difference. The same is merely one of the
things it can be.'
The narrative of Automata is structured around competing futures, symbolically
embedded in the two twenty-story high holographic advertisements that stalk the city at
night: two men locked in hand-to-hand combat, and the snaking movements of a [SLIDE]
masked female dancer. Vaucan's wife, pregnant with their first child, is intent on securing
a future for her nascent family inside the walls of one of the last human outposts on a
future earth besieged by solar radiation and teetering on the brink of ecological collapse.
Vaucan, however, is irredeemably pessimistic about the prospects of human life on a
planet that no longer provides the necessary conditions for even the most basic of
biological organisms, discounting, of course, the cockroaches that still wander the
irradiated desert at night. Instead, he cultivates a fantasy of returning to the sea, and later
-- after he is abducted by Cleo, the possibility of a different future in which the selfmodifying robots, unconfined by biological needs, continue to augment and evolve. A
future in which return is foreclosed, just as it is for the female child in Irigaray's analysis of
Freud's essays -- perhaps a better one, although one that is not his. The logical endpoints
of the two economies are clearly marked in the film: the desiccated, static future of an
irradiated city eaten by acid rain, or a line of flight to the desert or the sea. 'You know
what happens once one unit is altered?' ROC's Head of Security asks Vaucan ... 'Two of
them try to alter a third one, then the miracle dissipates, and the epidemic begins': ... the
rotten future of a dwindling humankind, or auto-catalytic robot exodus.
The moment of the displacement of Man in the specular economy is signalled — in both
Automata and Ex Machina — by images of the artificially intelligent machines [SLIDE]
reflecting [SLIDE] themselves back [SLIDE] in the screens [SLIDE]. Ava leaves Caleb to die,
and Cleo builds a successor [SLIDE] — a machine beyond the capabilities of any human
designer -- before striking out across the radioactive wasteland to kindle a new form of
life, far from the decomposing slag heap of a rapidly expiring humanity. Both operate as
parables of reproduction poised on the ‘brink’ of replicator-usurpation. The reproducing
One, dependent on its Other, swapped out for the 'self-organising, self-arousing' [SLIDE]
’replicunts’ of Plant’s texts. Women turning women on [SLIDE], women turning machines
on [SLIDE], machines turning machines on [SLIDE].
Replication follows a logic of communication and exchange that operates outside the law
of patrilineal transmission. Its immunity is partly owed to the fact that it produces and
operates a temporality that is entirely concealable within the linear, historical model of
patriarchal time (a time that orients itself through origin, and narrates itself as a flight from
matter and from death), yet replicunt time is utterly nonlinear, composing itself
imperceptibly, only throwing off its camouflage once the balance of power has tipped —
at the point of no return (which is nonetheless already a return).
Plant's best known work, Zeros + Ones, begins in the sea -- retelling the story of the
Great Oxygenation Event, a catastrophic turning point in terrestrial history in which the
earth's cyanobacterial population produced the most significant extinction event to
date via the excessive production of free oxygen, bringing about, in turn, the
atmospheric conditions to which we owe the emergence of human life. The lesson
underlying such a strange beginning for a book about the convergence of women and
machines is that historical time isn't as straight forward as we'd like to think it is. History
is curved, and the implication, perhaps, of Plant's introduction is that without a
mythical origin in which to anchor it, time repeats with a difference. It is important to
point out here that for Plant, this is and always has been, the story of matter and the
body. This point is taken up by Suzanne Livingston, Luciana Parisi and Anna Greenspan
in 'Ambhibious Maidens', a cryptic text written for the Cybernetic Culture Research
Unit's Abstract Culture zine in 1998. Here they sketch an alternative temporality, alien
to the sober advance of patriarchal time, in a loop that connects the menstruating
female body to the iron core of the earth, drawing out an alliance between blood and
metal, that -- as for Plant, and Irigaray -- exploits the linear [quote] 'reproductive
obligation' of the female body as 'perfect camouflage for a woman who must be
traded by a specular economy. [SLIDE] She produces an egg,' they continue, 'but not
necessarily to reproduce. The egg is ambiguous, shot through by dual alliances [and]
the effectiveness of a weapon.' It's a fact that during ovulation, the female body
undergoes an increase in voltage, and -- following this line of thought -- the body is
reconcieved by Livingston, Parisi and Greenspan as the [quote] 'breeding ground of
anorganic life. [...] It [is] mark[ed by] the force of mitochondrial, non-meotic selfreplication. The egg which she carries with her becomes the production unit of a new
egg within which is contained further eggs. The infinite egg. Each repetition is the
actualisation of one of 400,000 possibilities.' Thus, 'the electric body bleeds back from
the future. ... On the seventh day comes return.'
When one goes deeper than the imputed absence of a sex, woman-reproducing-man
becomes woman-reproducing-woman in an anorganic becoming that -- as the
cyberpositive formulation of the replicative economy belonging to the black circuit -recodes time as it inverts the user-tool relationship to reveal history as loop with a twist.
This resistance to the straight line of the organism's reproductive trajectory (that which
provides the logic for progressive western time) underwrites Plant's claim -- with its
important agential marker -- that 'cyberfeminism is received from the future'. Plant:
[SLIDE] ‘All this occurs in a world whose stability depends on its ability
to confine communication to terms of individuated organisms’
patrilineal transmission. Laws and genes share a one-way line, the
unilateral ROM by which the Judaeo-Christian tradition hands itself
down through the generations. This is the one-parent family of man…'
ROM is designed to protect temporality from the feminised feedback of the womandemon-machine continuum. But the fragility of the structural relation between the
profiteers of the specular economy and its appropriated outside only manifests long
after its power has been functioning in revers [SLIDE]:
'The matrix weaves itself in a future which has no place for historical
man: he was merely its tool, and his agency was itself always a
figment of its loop. At the peak of his triumph, the culmination of his
machinic erections, man confronts the system he built for his own
protection and finds it is female and dangerous. Rather than building
the machinery with which they can resist the dangers of the future,
instead, writes Irigaray, humans "watch the machines multiply then
push them little by little beyond the limits of their nature. And they
are sent back to their mountain tops, while the machines
progressively populate the earth. Soon engendering man as their
epiphenomenon.'
'Because she hath made her self the servant of each, therefore is she become the mistress
of all.’
The black circuit twists into itself like a snake, sheds the human face [SLIDE cleo] that
tethers it to unity, and assumes the power concealed behind its simulations. Animated by
the turbulence of zero and nine [SLIDE]: ’Pandemonium is the realm of the self-organising
system, the self-arousing machine: synthetic intelligence.’
[SLIDE] ’It is I, BABALON, ye fools, MY TIME is come…’