Berry - Vamping the Meta-Phooaaawwhhh (Cyberfeminism Special Mute 1997)Sadie Plant / text
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CYBERFEMINISM SPCL - VAMPING THE METAPHOOAAAWWHHH.....
By Josephine Berry , 10 September 1997
Featured in Mute Vol
1, No. 8 –
Cyberfeminism
Sadie Plant's writings have been instrumental in defining many of cyberfeminism's foundational concepts. Here,
Caroline Bassett takes one of her recent essays, On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations, as the point of
departure for a critical look at feminism's most recent progeny while Josephine Berry reports from the conference
Wired Women where some of cyberfeminism's more popular figurations were placed under the microscope.
At Portsmouth University's 'Wired Women: Virtual Worlds/Real Lives' conference this March, confusion reigned in
the land of the metaphor. In what turned out to be a standoff between an assortment of feminist 'figurations', the
only consensus that could be reached was the realisation that it's really hard to agree on exactly what a metaphor is
and how it behaves. In the arsenal of figurations, the historical figure of Ada Lovelace battled it out with Victorian
vampires and the shadow of Haraway's cyborg in a multilateral race to claim the role of most apt figuration for our
new, networked reality. Diverting as this Night of the Long Femmes was, one was left wondering about the link
between metaphors for our times and the female human or posthuman body. Are their contours able to contain the
complexity of our techpresent? And if that line of enquiry is completely missing the point, and finding appropriate
metaphors has nothing to do with their capacity for describing the world around us, then how potent can they be in
the quest for resistance and transformation?
Sadie Plant set the debate rolling by elegantly linking Ada Lovelace's hysteric condition with Freud's diagnosis of
hysteria and the model of connectivity. According to Freud's diagnosis, hysteria a feminine condition results from
an abundance of perceptual sensitivity. This hyper awareness which sensitises the sufferer, Kasper Hauser fashion,
to an excess of phenomena has a destabilising effect. In Plant's terms the hysteric is akin to a network in that the
condition forges perceptual links between points which would otherwise remain isolated. This characteristic
perceptual acuteness is then the Faustian price of hysterical connectivity. Plant obliquely suggested that Lovelace's
hysteria had some sort of causal relationship to her role in the development of the Analytical Engine. The
suggestion was that Lovelace's contribution to the world's first software, the forefather of that which facilitates
today's super connectedness, was in some way determined by her hysteric condition. As is often the case, the
seeming simplicity of this argument is instrumental to reinforcing its underlying message: the naturalness of
connectivity. This trajectory reaching from the womb (prerequisite of hysteria) to the network is hard to reconcile
with Plant's espousal of a transgendered model of connectionism. Indeed its coupling of nonlinearity with the
feminine would, surprisingly, seem to reaffirm familiar masculinist rhetoric. Lovelace's intellectual achievement is
accounted for more by means of physiology than scientific rational. Was Plant trying to pay her an obscure
compliment?
The theme of sickness was extended by Sarah Kember's resurrection of the figure of the vampire which she used to
combat Plant's connectionist disavowal of difference. Kember's libidinous bloodsucker works both as a metaphor for
the flow and exchange of information, with its resonances of contagion, and as a ploy for relocating desire within the
gendered body of "the monstrous desiring (feminine) self". This recentering of desire within a coherent self serves
to readmit agency to the philosophical play pen. Kember argued that the connectionist advocacy of selforganising
systems, which work on a superindividual level, refuses a sense of individual agency and is consequently de
historicising and depoliticising. Kember's vampire is a bid to reassert difference in the face of the metastasis
implied by Haraway's cyborg.
Kember's figuration challenges a fundamental pillar of traditional feminist resistance tactics by virtue of its
boundedness. Verena Conley's summary of traditional feminism's strategy for situating the self in the world sheds