Towards Xenofeminism (Session 4)

Excellent timing Tony. Thank you everyone for joining us on our concluding session for the Xeno Feminism seminar, towards Xeno Feminism. So today is in many ways an informal wrap up. We'll be going through some of our rough notes for the manifesto piece, which is still kind of unfolding and should be ready by the end of the month. And we also have Ben Woodard here with us today to kick off a conversation about the role of rationalism in feminism.

One of the points that brought many of us in Laboria Cubonics together at the outset was this concern with reason, with rationalism, and with the sort of persistent marginalization of rationalism within feminism, or more of a complacency with the marginalization of women from rationalism that we saw going on in a lot of contemporary, especially academic, feminism. The tendency that we'd seen for a long time seems to have been a kind of a, it would start with a well-placed and very cogent critique of the Enlightenment tradition.

One that would unveil these existing standards of the universal, of the rational and so on, and show that these weren't so much totally universal or impersonal positions, but ones that had been always surreptitiously identified with the male or the masculine. Man had always traditionally been identified as rational, whereas woman was irrational, intuitive, emotional, whatever. Man would mediate, woman would be either the medium of mediation or the tool of mediation or herself confined to a kind of animal immediacy and so on. you would see this sort of, everybody's pretty familiar with this old critique, the critique

of the Enlightenment as phallagic-centric or as male-centric in some very essential way, even when it pretends not to be talking about that. And I think there is a valuable moment here in taking a construction that was presumed to be universal and showing it to be, in fact, really just a kind of inflated particularism. A sort of particularism that has just kind of gotten bloated on a sort of...what's the word I'm looking for here? A particularism because it had been in a position of privilege

had gone unmarked, this unmarkedness had been confused with neutrality or generality or universality and had been sort of identified with the universal in a way that whatever was not this particular, the other particulars, would be seen as either deficient with respect to this particular or expected to make themselves more like this particular thing, more like a man, more like a white man, a white man, more like a European, more like a bourgeoisie, whatever. But the sort of strategy you started to see in academic feminism it seems from, you know, just after this critique was sort of embraced and kind of became part of the new progressive

feminist hegemony, like the late 70s, 80s, 90s and so on, would be a tendency to see any potential talk of rationality or reason as being just indelibly tainted with masculinity. Feminist scholars would try to reclaim embodiment instead, or forms of knowing that didn't claim any kind of universality, they would look for ways of being that shrunk away from abstraction and sort of celebrated the immediacy and particularity of feminine embodiment or whatever as their starting point. And all of us were getting increasingly frustrated with this trend.

saw it as a sort of abdication of the possibilities of universalism and rationalism that we had been fighting for all along, that we saw feminism as truly fighting for from the get-go, that these sort of lines of escape, these sort of powers of abstraction, were, the whole, the bite of this critique, by unveiling these established institutions as being, you know, surreptitiously masculine or whatever, the bite of these critiques was that, you know, this shouldn't be the case, that these things were not by rights masculine, they're not by rights male, and that somehow, that something was being denied to women when

women were excluded from these institutions. And so our task has always been to try and find ways to push these tendencies further in the direction of abstraction, further in the direction of universalism, to strip away sort of these bloated, unmarked particularities from the universal, to try and find a way of articulating a universalism that is, you know, more honestly and rigorously universal, more impersonal, more abstract. One that didn't just fall into these old traps. And this has always been one prong at least of our way of thinking. So that's all very rough and kind of off the top of my head here. I'm not sure how coherent that is. I'm slightly mortified

that is being recorded as an actual position now. But that's that. So I guess the question for us then is like well, you know, how do we do that then? This is all sort of nice to say but, you know, how do we try and take this, you know, non-reactionary orientation with respect to the, you know, we think is largely correct critique of, you know, the patriarchal enlightenment tradition. How do we avoid taking this reactionary retreat into this celebration of particularity or rootedness or embodiment or, you know, which comes down to kind of just, you know, the authenticity of like feminine intuition and

so on. And it just becomes a kind of, you know, it became something comparable to what, you know, like Negritude was in terms of the anti-colonial project where it sort of just in some way that was maybe aesthetically powerful and useful at a moment, there certainly wasn't a point you could stop at. You don't want to stay at the point where we can just, you know, like paint pictures of like vaginas and dance around maples and talk about, yay, feminine rootedness, embodiment, blah blah blah, fuck reason. Because we would really rather find ways of like, you know, like, well, how do we further unman abstraction? How do we further like, you know, emasculate reason in ways that like, sets it free of

these kind of stupid sexual tethers? You know, how do we find a way of reason that's... how do we find modes of rationality and reason, projects of enlightenment that are not tied to these kind of deeply entrenched sexual oppositions. Anyway, I've spoken far too long here, so that's just to kick it off. And then Ben does some stuff. Ben. OK, well, we've got, just before we kind of jump in, I'd just like introduce who we've got here as well. So instead of... Sorry, we've got an airplane coming over.

But instead of jumping in as five different, six different accounts in the room, we've got six of us kind of bundled here together in Ben's room. Seven. Seven, actually. It's a secret voice off to the side. But we're all here at my place in Australia. We've got Ben sitting on my right here, Patricia Reid, who's writing the Senna Feminist Manifesto with us, and those of you who've been watching the videos of the seminars so far we've been here with from the previous seminar. Lendal Basler, Ivan Nicolai, who you probably also know. Virginia Barrett, who also joined us for the Cyber Feminist seminar from BNS Matrix.

And Moe's just leaning over my shoulder there. So we've got a little bit of a kind of table for discussion here. And I guess I just wanted to say before we kind of start looking at the reading that we set for this week, which is Ben Woodard's, what's it called, From the Political Insufficiency of Ontology to the Great Engine of Tasks, Feminism Between Normativity, Embodiment and Pragmatism, which is a piece that, I think we had the draft piece, because Ben was still working on it for the upcoming into ALIA issue on Accelerate Feminism. But I guess just before we start looking at Ben's piece, I wanted to ask if anyone here had anything that they wanted to add to Luca's exposition of the history of reason and its relation to feminism.

Does any of you want to know? Okay, cool. So we've got this piece of Ben's, which is really interesting because he uses it to try and connect the feminist critique that Luca just outlined from the point of view of particularity, materiality, embodiment, that does seem to, as we've been kind of pointing out, have reached a sort of point of exhaustion insofar as its political efficacy is concerned, insofar as it only seems to act on a particular level. And it's not something that we want to acknowledge and kind of build into the feminist project that we're outlining rather than toss out.

But the problem is how to connect it to the project of rationality. And I think Ben does a really interesting job of tying these two things together in the article, which kind of starts off looking at the philosophy of Brandon and the idea of social construction of norms. And then sort of questions the groundlessness of this, like where do you ground this social discourse if you're going to throw out embodiment? And then brings in some of the new materialist, feminist new materialist philosophy to draw a line between norms and embodiment, to connect them to a sort of embodied space. So you get these kind of embodied norms going on.

I don't know, did you want to maybe kind of talk about, you begin with this really great section from the Leiden book where he uses a dialogue between, which Austen is it? It's from Pride and Prejudice. Yeah, to kind of point out this deficit in some of the posturing and reason. So do you want to maybe kind of explain that for the sake of people who maybe haven't read the article and are just watching this? Sure. All right, so Leiden's book, Reasoning and Social Picture, which Nagarstani references

in his Labour the Inhuman text, it's quite interesting because the preface sets up a takes a passage from Pride and Prejudice and sets up Lizzie Bennet as this rationalist hero. And what Layden tries to argue from Lizzie Bennet's response to Mr. Collins' dreadfully disgusting and awful marriage proposal is to say that the crux of the matter in the text in which it applies to how reason is viewed in philosophy in general, is that there's this refusal to acknowledge other beings as already capable of reason.

So his point is to say that whereas in Brandom's model and other models of reason, even when they assert a sort of social normative open space of play, that often built within that, there's an assumption that there's a reasoner and those that are being reasoned to. And that that very setup automatically fixes the game in such a way that things like gender difference or social differences or whatever they are, that those get pushed aside in not seeing the other person as reasonable. the sort of deficiency of reason is seen as only affecting the game

of trying to level out people assume to be reasonable but there's already an assumption that the other person is not reasonable because the reasoner sees themselves as a part from the game and the history of the space of reason that they're in if that makes any sense but one of the interesting things about the book especially in terms of feminism is that throughout, Leighton references many feminist writers and critiques of social models of reason but he doesn't really put it out there as a feminist critique, he just kind of says you know, if we want to talk about reason and be serious

this is just what we have to do, so it's sort of an interesting rhetorical approach in that he covers a lot of ground that continental thinkers, especially in reference to the other, cover but he does it in a purely functional in a sense it's purely about being a good reasoner in the game of reasons. It's not about having to reference any kind of ontological otherness, any kind of materiality that we need to be attuned to or do justice to in this Levinasian or Deridian way. It's just that we have to be able to, willing to ramble and have small talk and engage in a game of reason that's not obviously end-driven,

even though it has an augmentative goal, even if that goal seems to have disappeared. Yeah, so... There's this really great, I mean you sort of go through the problems of this position in the article and then kind of turn towards plant as a sort of possible node of unification of these two perspectives. And I think this is, I mean just because we've been talking about plants work a little bit in all the previous seminars, I think it's important to bring this strand out of her

work, that she's always moving between these two spaces, even though she gets accused of sometimes one or the other, of trying to completely transcend the body and disappear into the matrix, or being too obsessed with materiality and veering dangerous to the sort of essentialism that you see in Irigaray's project. But the picture that you paint of her is the one that we've been also kind of working with throughout Centrofeminism. In this quote that we've brought up several times about her telling Matthew Fuller in that interview from 1995 that it's not just a question of getting out of the meat, but seeing what this new assemblage

can do. So you kind of link them together. I'm just trying to find a good quote to read. Page 12 is where I talk the most about Plant, I think. Yeah, you're right. Well, one can certainly take Plant to task for her exuberance in claiming that cyber feminist appropriations of technology would lead to total cyber-Amazonian overthrow.

The great gesture of her work is to recuperate how seemingly disparate technologies had numerous unregistered material effects as well as how they are imbricated in the gender-sex nexus as productively and negatively constraining. So keeping in view the problem of material constraints and linking them up to their elaboration through the game of reasons, giving and asking for reasons. I don't know, did you want to kind of talk about this synthesis that you're making here? maybe how it ties into the critique of Reza's work, like in the labor of being human that you were talking about earlier this week? Yeah, I mean, to me, it seems like there's a symmetrical problem

or this issue when you look at the work of someone like Jane Bennett or Sonna Sharp, and there's just more and more push to cast aside epistemology and to say, you know, it's about materiality. It's about the vitality of the materiality. It's about the stubbornness of this material embodiment. But on the one hand, that materiality actually becomes more and more abstract. So it's just like materiality in such a generic way that it seems difficult to politically utilize it in the way that Bennett or Hassana Sharp or various other feminist new materialists want to. so they just critique epistemology

for being not attuned to this materiality to this matter but then their own position of that being important itself becomes an almost baseless assertion they say it's sort of self evident that this materiality is important but we can't talk about knowledge claims because knowledge claims are too reductive but then they sort of do their own reduction in just asserting you know, ontology, you know, this materiality is, and we have to be attuned to it. And it very much relates to Pete's comments in The Numinous New Clothes, where he says there's a weird return to metaphysics through ontology. These kinds of dogmatic statements become possible because it's supposed to be self-evident

that being is this kind of, you know, vital or productive yet unavoidable thing that can't be only described and not thought in any kind of sense. Whereas on the other hand, there's a kind of similar issue, I think, with Reza's use of random in that whereas the feminist new materialism has this, you know, non-epistemology because of ontological assertibility place from which they theorize, on the other hand, in Reza's use or random, you have more and more emphasis on, you know, reason and knowledge coming from the space, coming from, you know, a normative space, and that in order to talk about that

which really affects and augments reason, you have to talk about it in terms of reason alone, right? You have to talk about nature reconfigures and affects the normative space, the way in which we self-augment, yet the language shifting less and less from emphasis on the outside or the exterior, and more and more towards intelligibility, starts to obscure exactly how grounded the normative space is in a particular reason or a group of reasoners in relationship to what embodiment and materiality can shift or change. So in many ways it becomes the sort of ships passing each other in the night, and that there, you know, one is like slightly too epistemological and one is slightly too material.

And so what I try to do, and why I think Plante's work is interesting, is that she really tries to put these things together, which is why in her early work many people were shocked that she would try to talk about Haraway and Irigaray in the same text. Like, what are you doing? You know, like, how could you do this? But I think, you know, with different starting point but similar concerns, you know, plants' work is really about, you know, look, there's this materiality that we can't escape from, whether it's, you know, biologically, historically, whatever. but that doesn't mean that we should rely upon these genealogical critiques that undermine all attempts at self-augmentation, whether cybernetically or politically, whatever it is.

So it's just, you know, I think it's a slight emphasis on, you know, being attuned to materiality in a way that doesn't undermine physiological solidity, since you couldn't even attune to it unless you had these epistemological structures. in such a way that you can do things like science or cybernetics. And so, what it, and it also, I think it means that you have to look at embodiment in a very, in a very localized sense. And embodiment is about, you know, your own, your own epistemological and physical condition is about this, you know, long history of, of, you know, natural, social, physical constraints. but some of those are far more easily reconfigurable

because of epistemological advances that we make, whether it's in, you know, chemically modifying ourselves, hernetically modifying ourselves, you know, redrying our cognitive structures through reading Reza or whatever, or, you know, or plant or whatever it is. And so to kind of smash those distinctions, to flatten materiality as just the vitalness of embodiments that we can never figure out, and knowing as being about bettering knowing without paying attention to the small disruptions and the aspects of our own physicality and, you know, biology and whatever else that we can change that then affects things, you know,

that we can control more and more because of better epistemology, but that, you know, still have to be treated as, you know, worth conserving to at least manipulate them. Yeah, the manipulability hinges at least as much on our understanding of the way that they constrain us as it does the ways that we can manipulate them. I think you put this really well in the part where you're talking about Ada Lovelace. and Charles Babbage, also in relation to the series, I forget who made it, but Halt and Catch Fire, which kind of uses, like, stages this same problem. They stage this really well.

And so you kind of, you quote this journal entry of the aiders. I'll read it a lot. This is on page 12 of Ben's article too, if anyone wants to follow along. In one of her journal entries, Lovelace, the Queen of Engines, wrote, Those who view mathematical science not merely as a vast body of abstract and immutable truths, whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry, and logical completeness, when regarded in their connection together as a whole, entitle them to a prominent place in the interest of all profound and logical minds, but is possessing a yet deeper interest for the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the

great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously, to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst. Those who thus think on mathematical truth as the instrument through which the weak mind of man can most effectively read, effectually read his creator's works, will regard with a special interest all that contend to facilitate the translation of its principles into explicit, practical forms." And so, I mean, the project in Zeros and Ones, in Sadie Plante's Zeros and Ones, is kind of doing this as well, it's re-situating or reconnecting all of this scientific, this

history of scientific advancement back to the material moments that produced them through specifically nodes that involve women who are working in these areas. And you kind of, just after quoting this, kind of bring the point home in the fact that, I mean Ada Lovelace Lovelace is basically annotating a manuscript of an Italian mathematician that Babbage is kind of interested in. And famously, her notes are much more useful and interesting and advanced than the manuscript that she's actually annotating. And it's Babbage that goes on to build the difference engine and kind of gets all the credit for it, while Ada Lovelace is sort of elided from the history.

You write, the technology of Lovelace's time, Charles Babbage's failure to make the apparatus necessary to realize her software, taken with the above quote, does not emphasize the foolishness of her overly ideal desires or Lovelace's concept of the analytic engine, but demonstrates the difficult but traversable gradient between reason and embodiment, or in the pragmatic language above commitment and action. I wondered, Likru, if you wanted to kind of connect this up to the stuff that you were talking about last summer in the PAF seminar, when you were talking about these kind of technologies of 3D printing, like printing your own hormone gels, and like creating,

using these technologies, I think you're on mute, to actually feed back into the material problems that we're facing, specifically in terms of gender, and be able to not only develop them, make them useful, but distribute them in ways that currently short circuit the inequality of the distribution and access to these kind of pharmacological advancements that exist now. Did you want to kind of maybe mention something about that? Let me see. Alright, well this will be off the cuff again here, but, I mean first of all I think I just

wanted to take up something that Ben's getting at, or Ben said probably better than I did, or will, about this... A lot of the problem here seems to be this kind of very crude and undialectical opposition of two kind of monolithic and immediate notions. on the one hand you have a kind of like absolutely detached, unmediated reason. You have this sort of totally phantasmatic notion of objective truth, pure reason, what have you. And on

the other hand you have the immediacy of embodiment. And then this kind of misreading of this critique critique of the enlightenment showing that this highfalutin notion of pure reason was really just kind of, it never got past the immediacy of the male European experience, whatever, there was never anything past that. And everything really rests on... When I said that we need to push the commitment to reason and the enlightenment in the direction of further abstraction and so on, this didn't mean to push it in the direction of greater purity or to have it be less mediated by bodies or whatever.

The notion is to see it as, and this is probably getting itself far through general and abstract, it's that mediating process itself that we're in. That's where rationality takes place. I'm really saying this very poorly right now. I'm terrible at coming up with stuff on the spot here sometimes. I think I need a little moment to gather my thoughts before I can say anything elegantly. It's just not coming together right now.

That's cool. I'll pass the mic on it so I can say something sensible. I think Mo had something to... Listening to you, Luca, and to Ben, trying to consider how you connect these two seemingly disconnected strands of looking and reconfiguring on one side the ontologist materialist view And on the other side, this sort of like augmentative epistemological view. And from the example of art, maybe there's

like a way of looking at it, which is sort of like, this is how things were sort of like resolved in the context of art, right? which was sort of like the link between the two could be political in a way similar to how the institution behind the space of art will bracket out or provide a sufficient material space for what art can do in that particular space, knowing on the one hand that this bracketing is highly arbitrary. but at the same time it's a necessary sufficient material base for the artist to then come

into the white cube and do something and take that space and do something generative with it. So and then sort of like the limits that the politics of art puts on the sort of like physical institutional materiality of the space that then opens up for some kind of cognitive non-material generative activity that's sort of like definitely in a case of good art will definitely get out of that space and does more right but still it's confined to that sort of like political configuration of the institution curator artists who sort of agree to what gets bracketed out and what becomes the space of art the white cube you want to look at it like physically like like literally

painting it all white and keeping it as non-noisy as possible so then for art to does what it needs to do but all of that whiteness and and neutrality really is not neutral is just sort of like a form of bracketing out it's still you know what I mean an earthquake will shatter the gallery and everything will be destroyed right but while this configuration is set up that space open up for stuff that is like way beyond and over this limitedness of the space. I don't know if what I said relates but I think it kind of does. And I think this linking of the two is a job, is a political, social job itself. Yeah, but one that always has to take account of the materiality that it's coming out of

but needs to not slip back into over-anthologizing that materiality, which art is very... Guilty of. Yeah. ...operationalizing of this process of reason. Speak really loudly. Yeah, I'm thinking right away of Ranciere to an extent. So, you know, I would agree with the pragmatic sort of Brandomian sense, but then a good corrective is Ranciere, because in this, who then has the right to speak? So if we're going to create reasons for where we go, places, who will then be the one deciding that? And then who will carry it out? Who will be considered the experts? So yes, there is this political, which is the operational character to the reason I see this in the family. Did you want to add anything to that, Luca?

I think you're still on mute. There it is. It's just flickering. There we go. Okay. That's why I apologize for my brain being mush today. It just seems to be doing that. I think we're all a little bit mushy. I know. Embarrassing. Okay. That's your memory. It's just for an archive. Alright, so...

No, not coded yet. I'm gonna keep percolating. I mean, like, I don't know. I'm sorry, I'm freezing up here. Yeah? I guess what I can see from this discussion is we'll never manage to work out a perfectly feminist, egalitarian thing from a purely pure philosophical position. It's kind of in the application that the problems emerge, I guess. It's not in deciding on a sort of materialist or epistemological pragmatic. It's always kind of, I feel the devil is in the details of implementation either.

Yeah. Feminism in academia can be remarkably, from what I hear, can be remarkably sort of, yes, the female grad student who comes in has to kind of be a bit neurotic, have boy problems, to be accepted, a perfectly confident sexual being who's like, I just want to be treated with one of the boys, it's almost like, no, no, no, you need to be infantilized, you need to be told about your disadvantaged state, which is kind of like a catch with me too to an extent. And often this attitude is most by those sort of established tenured feminist professors who take these people under their wings, but then further infantilize them or make their

whole study about their disempowerment. But isn't it the politics that I'm talking about? It utilizes that limitation as a way of saying this is the way to do it. to first define your limit as a woman and then once you agree to this bracketed out limitation then you can do it. If you're not going to agree to this limit you're not going to even be able to give a chance to make an argument. Absolutely, when I say operational I mean like the political like everyday. There was a part I wanted to find in Ben's piece where you're kind of criticising the

over-ontologising of new materialism and you connect it to this sort of... like it going the opposite way into a kind of constant... like vortex of... I'm not sure what to call it. But like, rather than just operating its critique on the enlightenment, masculine, transcendent operation of reason as it works for the art of universalism, but it was to critique and just balancing it out by going the other way and over-ontologising other

difference, lack of privilege, and it becoming just as monstrous as the thing that it's kind of trying to critique. And this is something, like I'm mentioning at Liquor if you're still there, because I know you've talked about this quite a lot, this sort of cannibalizing call out culture that stops actually being productive and just becomes a game of generating moral, cultural capital. that that's this, it's kind of like the evidence of the critique of this masculine reason going just as bad as the thing that it's critiquing. There's a part where you write about it, but I can't quite find it. Yeah, I know what you're talking about, and it's towards the end, right?

But Luca, are you there? Because this is something we've talked about quite a bit. I don't know if she's there. Wait, are they frozen? No, Tony's there. I'm here. Okay, cool. Yeah, this is kind of one of the critiques that I suppose xenofeminism is trying to implement in order to turn it into a constructive. I think it's a tarp of 13. 13. That's why I talk about calling out and victimology and this kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. We can say that at the level of the normative,

these exchanges, which do not take into account feminism, given the masculinist history of the world, cannot be reasonable in the sense that Laden means. Part of this involves the injunction of pragmatic injunctions or put plainly calling people out when they make sexist or anti-feminist statements. This is particularly important for those not easily identified as embodying these positions to do, as it highlights that this is a claim to reason, and not the knee-jerk dismissal of a critic as a consequence of a particular victimology. And kind of saying the footnote to that, that calling people out needs to be appropriately scaled. That's the kind of problem, is it? It needs to stop just circulating in its own kind of, I suppose, what's the word? Yeah, like, cannibalistic space. And also I guess dissecting, how much of a claimant is doing and setting and making

commitments is influenced by an implicit sexual language or not. Right. And the scaling goes the other way too because I mean I've had, you know, instances where you're in a situation and, you know, especially philosophy and someone will make a sexist comment, and I remember someone made a sexist comment, someone called them out, and then a third person in the room says, oh, but, you know, yeah, they made a sexist comment, that was bad, but, you know, and then they start pulling out their Lacanian knowledge to say how there's a structure of sexism, da-da-da-da-da, and it's become, it's just as ridiculous, you know, it's like killing a, you know, it's like trying to kill a fly with a nuclear bomb or something, you're like, no, like, there's a totally different employment of scale there,

You could say sexism exists in certain problems which occur structurally. But to use that in this super small space to say, oh, don't be mean to that person. It's like, no, when you're in a closed social situation, to call someone out, especially when it's somebody who couldn't be accused of, oh, that other feminist is mad. If somebody in the space, what's considered the rational space, says, that's messed up, don't do that. it has a structural effect that this kind of weird defense from above totally annihilates on the one hand. On the other hand, on the other side, to expand and structuralize calling out

as some kind of, you know, I'm going to do this so I have academic credit, right? Yeah. Which they would only do on a larger scale. Yeah. torpedoes it from the other side. So it's like there's an appropriate, you know, whereas when you're in a classroom and you call out sexual statements, you know, that's going to change the structure of the classroom. Whereas if you go, you know, if you go low or too high, it gets erased. Yeah. I mean, I think we were trying to put some of this in the manifesto as well. For the calling out? Yeah. I don't recall so much of that. But we're still in the draft mode, so...

It was your part, Luka, like the kind of pull out critique of the culture. Right, it was sort of a critique I had been, you know, ruminating over to myself for a little while, or you know, out loud, obnoxiously on Facebook or whatever. But I think the idea here was so much, it was about the way in which this sort of rhetoric has taken on a life of its own. I think one of the things, I think you have a general maxim that we have to adopt. I think this is something that many of us share in the xenopharm discussions, but kind in this broader political orientation as well, is if we're looking at the way a certain kind

of rhetoric or a certain kind of meme flex operates, the question can't just be, and this is maybe almost like a truism, it can't just be, well, looking at it as if it was just sort of this transparent matter of reference to something that's out there and exists. So take the way the rhetoric of privilege operates for example, there's definitely persistent structural imbalances in the world, without question of course. And some of these imbalances can be picked out and tracked fairly well with this rhetoric of privilege. This isn't overly controversial either. But the way that the rhetoric of privilege, the meme privilege works itself, it isn't

just kind of this transparent indicator of injustices in the world. And it isn't just a kind of way of drawing awareness to injustices in the world in order to repair them. It kind of becomes this sort of self-driving abstract machine which, you know, it's not without precedent. It has this sort of broad historical shape that looks more than anything like the rhetoric of sin, for example. To be privileged, to be speaking from privilege is to be speaking as someone who is unclean, someone who is weighed down by sin. To be able to speak from a position of lesser privilege is to be able to claim the dignity and authority of someone

more holy. And so you see this kind of increasingly puritanical use of privilege talk in the way of puritanical use of privileged talk in the way it's actually deployed, where the actual end, the goals that this kind of rhetoric seems to mobilize itself towards, if you just looked at it and bracketed out what it was actually referring to, you did a sort of ideological reduction and just look at the way this rhetoric and this meme flex operates on its own, you see it working in this religious apparatus for disciplining souls, for choosing who is

dirty and who is clean, who is holy and who is sin. The kind of ritual excorciations to check your privilege are really cause to engage in this confessional practice. And if we see Either way, this is kind of like there it is operating with sin. I mean, this is something that really I think the left has been sort of slow to pick up on. And really, like to their credit, like it's been, you know, a lot of our right wing critics who have really caught on to this a little bit faster than I think the left has. Then the question is, oh, well, you know, like that's, it's not just a matter of pointing out some cute little analogy. Like, oh, look at this. This is like, for this talk, it looks a lot like sin talk. Like, okay, you know, whatever.

The question is like, what kind of subjects is this producing? What kind of political agents is this shaping? And it seems to be shaping political agents that look more and more like obsessive puritans, ones who are more concerned with their own moral hygiene in actually changing the world. And so it's actively making people after a certain mold. And so the question is, well this isn't itself a problem. I mean, all meanplexes make people after a certain mold. This is kind of what they do, this is how they propagate, right? They all are kind of this sort of like what Scott Alexander would call it, this kind of

semiotic toxoplasmosa that sort of like, you know, ripples through the population and kind of reshapes our behaviors in a way that's like, this can do something to its own spread. That's not a problem. I mean, you know, it's okay that we have semiotic parasites that kind of coordinate our politics. That's all right. So the question is like, well, you know, the question isn't like, how do we avoid becoming monsters? It's like, how do we become maybe better monsters. I find that it becomes a monster and I don't want to become a vicious little puritan. So the question is, on the one hand, we can't just throw away the question of representation and reference either. I'm not calling for a full out epike on all actual worldly problems at all. But I think this has to be a moment of our critique where we

do perform that kind of like and look at that bracketing out of reference and look at how the meme flag itself operates. And so the question is then how do we bounce this out, how do we find a way of on the one hand performing this straight up referential approach, picking out the modes of injustice in the world that we want to try and systematically change, but how do we find a rhetoric for doing this that actually creates more viable and more interesting political subject. Because the problem with the vicious puritans is not so much that they look like vicious puritans, that's not itself the problem. The problem is that it becomes a sort of increasingly

myopic approach to politics which becomes obsessed with, again, with matters of immediacy, with whatever is closest to hand. It shrinks the time scale of political action where all of this becomes about that sort of momentary flash of raising awareness of calling out privilege, of checking moral hygiene. And it becomes restricted to that immediate moment. This is really what I think Nick and Alex were getting at with their critique of folk politics. The problem with folk politics isn't that it's folksy or that it's like twee. The problem is that it's short sighted, that it's not scalable.

This mode of engaging in politics actively shrinks the scale of political action. makes us into agents that are, as far as our own kind of active conscious intentions stretch, they get shrunk into these little atomized bubbles of preserving our own moral hygiene and casting down those who have sinned. Worse, there's also a tendency that, and this is something that's thought out of Dandy's piece, because it's also plasmos of rage, I think right on the head, is that it pushes us in an increasingly cannibalistic or autophagic direction. Because there is more... If I for example just say, you know, George W. Bush

is problematic or whatever, right? Or like, George W. Bush needs to check his privilege, Nobody cares. I can't just attack the enemy. Nobody gives a shit. Hitler was a racist. Nobody cares. If this is going to be retweeted, if this is going to generate dissent and discussion and fighting and attention, if this is going to create the conditions under which the meme can reproduce and spread, I'd do much better to attack an ally. I'd do much better to call out Amy, for example. that she's problematic. Because then her defenders get in defending her and I sort of split the group from within, the attackers start attacking, things get personal, things get heated. And so this starts popping off its spores at a much more rapider rate.

And so through kind of a process of kind of mimetic selection, you have this particular rhetorical apparatus of privilege checking which seemed like at first a great idea. Yeah, we're going to point out the imbalances of the world and try to fix them. Who the fuck doesn't want that? I want that. But instead you have left ripping itself apart for points and retweets. And this is the way it will carry on. If you don't engage in this, fine. You will not get the same number of retweets. You will not spread at the same rapidness. You would not have the same kind of scale of effect. But the scale of the effect of this kind of apparatus is going in a direction that's totally orthogonal to the scale of its actually intended effect.

And so you have these kind of shrinkingly blind, vicious Puritans ripping themselves apart. This is contributing to a large global project, but not the one they thought they were doing. Something that was very different to what they thought they were after. How do we do that better? Can we find a way of orchestrating this and coordinating this better? Can we construct political agents in a way that's more useful? If we're going to be meaty meme puppets, can we at least be better ones? Like ones that are... And that's a real challenge. How do you predict how these things are going to operate? How do you predict in advance how they're going to operate? That's really not a trivial question at all.

That's a fairly huge question. But I think that's the kind of question that should be asked. I wanted to add a few words to this, and I think it's relevant. And that is, in the discussion of privilege, it has to be addressed at a level of what is privilege? And the problem is not that privilege is bad, the problem is you're always dealing with the distribution of privilege. The problem is at the distribution level. So it's not that you have privilege, you're bad, it's like you have too much privilege, the other side doesn't have enough, and how we can redistribute the privilege.

this point has to be made that, yeah, it's not about like you shouldn't feel guilty about your privilege, or no one should be guilty about it, but how you're going to use your privilege with your good intention to create another system of privilege distribution. And also this type of sort of calling out often is a camouflage of certain privileges that have not come to light. So by pointing your fingers at another type of privilege, you're asking the privilege that actually allows you to call somebody else's privilege to begin with. Which then, that other privilege is not going to get on the table and get discussed in terms

of its own redistribution. I mean, just like, the distribution of privilege is the main problem of capitalism, and that's That's why Marxists do not understand the accelerationist philosophy, because I think at the core of accelerationism, I mean, a program to, like a universal or general program for redistribution of privilege globally. Yeah. Right. But people who don't like it, they just don't like privilege, because they think privilege is just something nasty that has to be destroyed. We don't want to destroy privilege. We don't want to destroy wealth. We want to redistribute it. Well, this is where I think you have to look at the way the word actually, it's pragmatics, the way the word's actually operating, right? I mean, to say that you don't have to feel guilty about privilege, I agree on some level. At the same time, it's sort of like saying,

well, you don't feel guilty about sin. Well, at the moment you accept that, you're not talking about sin in the same sense anymore. And I think that, you know, I agree that we need to split those things apart again. We have to talk about, you know, material and systematic affordances of well-being in a way that isn't tied into the same kind of religious matrix. I think one way of kind of like seeing the way, showing how this notion operates nowadays, I think is maybe to compare it to one of its like recent predecessors, which would be like the notion of right and the vocabulary of rights, right? Which is dominant in a lot of the world. We're no longer driving a lot of popular political discussions

anymore. What's interesting is that most of us can still remember a time not that long ago when privilege and right formed a semiotic pair. Everyone remembers their parents telling them something like such and such is not a right, it's a privilege. And that's really not the way the word is used anymore. Usually when somebody says such and such is a privilege, the notion of whether or not it's a right isn't even on the horizon anymore. It's not even in question. I remember once being at a kind of support group. It was this sort of a general kind of like, you know, trans and like, you know, gender outlaw support group or discussion group or whatever. And I remember there was this one woman there,

this trans woman, who was like, you know, she has like 300 pounds, easily clockable as trans and so on. She was talking about her experience being like, you know, easily read as trans. But she said like, well, to my advantage there, you know, since I'm like 350 pounds, I don't have to worry about anyone beating me up, right? Like, that's great. And then somebody piped in, like, wow, that's a privilege. And I'm like, you know, in this sort of like this chiding, reminding sort of tone. And like, for fuck's sake, this one's talking about how difficult her life is, first of all. Second of all, since when did we think being beaten up was not a right? Like, you know, like, since when did this, and it was like the first time I noticed that the word has become a privilege had come unmoored from, you know, its old kind of pairing, like symbolic pairing with the notion of right.

And that was kind of interesting. So it's sort of interesting, that was kind of a mark, we've all seen that sort of thing happen. So it's sort of a mark of how these words become unanchored from its old ties to the notion of right. But then the question can be asked, well, we are also familiar with the mode of political discussion that is organized around the category of right. What kind of subject did this make us? What kind of subject does it make us, those who are concerned with rights? Again, it seems like a very good idea. It seems like, well, yeah, right. We all want rights. We all want protected freedoms to do such and such. Sounds good. Or to not be such and such. It's one of those things that sounds decent in the abstract. But then the critique that...

Badiou has a critique along these lines in his ethics book. The reason he's against human rights. Sometimes it sounds like he wants to be against human rights so they don't get in the way of some hardcore generic truth procedures that have to be pushed through. But that's not really the main point. The main point is that with the rhetoric of rights, the kind of subjects this makes us, the kind of agents this makes us, are petitioners. We are those who appeal to higher powers to be protected. The rights are those held by a citizen, along with their fellow citizens, in distinction to those who are not citizens. So it makes us into a kind of like, you know, anxious little siblings petitioning their fatherly states to protect them on their behalf. So

it's a very disempowering rhetoric. It cultivates a very fragile, vulnerable and state dependent on subjectivity it seems. But also pitting us against, say, the refugee for example, who cannot claim rights. And so, you know, these critiques were worked out, I think, fairly strongly in the 90s from various directions against the rhetoric of rights. And again, I think that's a good kind of question to be asking. Like, well, what does it, not just like what does it refer to, but what does it make of us? And I think, you know, one point that I think the accelerationists and xenofeminists all kind of agree on is this is this project of like, well, you know, we're all very, like, many of us have sort of been trained to kind of like identify, you know, like hegemonic patterns and like how to, you know, we all learned to sharpen our teeth and like, you know, critiquing them, like unmasking them, showing their like hidden dynamics, blah, blah, blah.

But what sort of set us apart from the more morose, transcendental, miserablest schools of our leftism were that we were also interested in actively trying to construct new hegemonic monsters. So like, well, you know, privilege and rights, if you don't... The fact that these were like, you know, asephalic, mimetic monsters puppeteering human lives to do their bidding isn't the problem. but like let's do it better so like what kind of yeah I mean and I don't know I don't know I'm back to where I started a moment ago so I'll shut up again but I think I just wanted to make it just Going back to calling out privilege, just a comment about the operationally, I'm talking

about in all kinds of contexts, so maybe specifically from queer and feminist communities, that the operationally the capacity to call out others based on privileges implies a certain kind of privilege around access and class also. That's how I see it functioning operationally, operationally, especially in something like the queer community where it becomes fragmented, fragmented, fragmented, fragmented, fragmented, fragmented, fragmented, fragmented, to this kind of iterative degree until you're talking about an asterisk

at the end of the word trans. And that somehow the way that it becomes counted is by calling in culture, which is so paternalistic and pejorative. And neither one of those functions are operationally useful, I find. There it is. Yeah, I had a professor that always called it the oppression Olympics. Just to be clear, we're also constructing a ceremony in Europe.

That's what's going on, yeah. Just like, keep moving to fine zones. While I'm also citing our explicitly positioned ideological enemies, I also do have to cite that what Airport called that on Twitter a while ago, which was Oppressal Mania. What it had descended to. So it was funny on the tweet. But funny. Hey, Kachina. But as to this oppression limit, sort of a term that's become kind of popular, I mean

I've heard it mostly in kind of, you know, the kind of reaction against contemporary queer activism, right? And again, you know, I mean I'm paying attention to our political enemies, because they do see our sum making asses of ourselves in kinds of ways that we kinds of ways that we should take a better attention to as well. And so this notion of oppression Olympics. What this shows up too, as soon as we identified privilege with sin and privilegedness as holiness, we repeated another kind of dangerous aspect of the Christian tradition, which is to fall in love a little bit too much with your own oppression, to become subjectively complacent

with it. And this is such an altruism that it's just cliché to say, but one of the... Might as well go all the way for cliché. That Christianity is the opium of the masses. The problem with it is that it was a way of training the underclass to feel a certain spiritual solace and rightness about their oppression. Like, well, I'm downtrodden, but that means that I'm better. I'm holier. I've got heaven to look forward to. it, it was just a way of placating those who were already oppressed. And privileged rhetoric and opprestlemania style debates are another mode of doing this. If you can always gain

this bit of moral authority for being oppressed, if I can say things that you guys can't because I'm trans and you're not, and like one in seven of us get murdered, damn it, or whatever. Like, you know, this is a way of kind of, you know, ingratiating myself to like the same like mechanisms that oppress me. It's a way of kind of, you know, reveling in it. It's a way of rolling in like the shit and filth of the means that oppress me. Turning them into sort of these moral badges. And that's bullshit. Like that's, you know, that makes, like, so what are going to be the long-term effects of that if I become on some level reluctant to give up my oppressed status, right? Because like, oh, it gives me this moral authority, you know? Whereas, of course, you can only

really say this when you're kind of just, you know, lumped in on this, like, this, you know, this, if you're kind of lumped in at kind of like the, you know, relatively sunny end of this oppressed demographic, right? It's not somebody who's like, you know, genuinely feeling the full brunt of oppression that's like, but I have the moral authority to think of this. It's the ones that kind of like, well, happen to share some demographic coordinates with that person. They're kind of like siphoning it off. And so you see this, you know, this it becomes a very exploitative, very dangerous way of kind of, I don't know, I worry that

it is leading to a certain kind of Stockholm-ish relation to the means of our oppression. What would trans liberation mean? It would mean I don't get to claim any moral authority authority for being a trans person. Right? That's what trans liberation would mean on some level. That I can't, you know, I don't have this spiritual dignity of being one of the oppressed. But that's still basically a good thing. I think we can agree in principle. We want to end these modes of oppression. Or at least mitigate them as far as possible. We want to break these down. So let's stop training ourselves to become so infatuated with weakness and marginality.

Let's go for the gold. We want to conquer and reform out the world in a way that is just and equal, not in a way that lets us take a piss on people who have more privilege. Like, come on, fuck that. Just un-muted, please. Oh, yeah, just back to that soul discussion of Reza. I was stalking Eka's profile because she said she couldn't make it. I was like, who is Eka? But anyways, she posted the torture concrete picture, and Reza has a really interesting comment on the difference between what's real and what's abstract. and it goes, the distinction between abstract and concrete is methodological, not metaphysical.

It is dubious to explain the real in real abstraction by resorting to a causal account, a causal efficacy, which is deeply tethered to a metaphysical dimension. Not to mention that if causal efficacy is the definition of real in real abstraction, then that's pretty weak, a weak characterization of what abstraction is. Principally, abstraction is compression of the transit between generality and particularity. It is neither fully disembodied nor essentially embodied. And it goes on. Which is kind of interesting about that materiality. Yeah. That last bit, abstraction, is the compression of the transit between particularity. Generality and particularity is neither disembodied nor essentially embodied.

Yeah. Well that's connected to the idea of scaling. That kind of kick started this whole little... Not a divigation but a discussion. Sorry, I'm really tired. How long have we got? We're up to two. Do you want to try and go through some of the manifesto, you guys? Yeah. Yeah. And then we... We can maybe read some bits out and comment maybe? Could we pass the iPad? I don't have a copy of it with me. Yeah, do you... Which bits do you think we should read, Luca?

She's muted. Oh, Luca, you're muted. Did you just say something? Yeah, I've got it open in another tab here, so I'm just taking a look at it. Oh wait, come on, cooperate. Cooperate Chrome. Chrome is not cooperating. Oh, now it is. OK. I suppose, I mean, the opening paragraphs would be pretty good to get started. Then, yeah, I mean, let's start from there. And then we can just kind of like, you know, I don't want to be reading at anyone. So we can just kind of start and then spin off tangentially from whatever.

Okay. I'll read the intro section. Okay. You guys. I'll read the intro section. Okay, great. Yeah. But it would be really great to have your feedback. So the first bit, 000000. We're figuring out how to number it actually. You did? In terms of de-engagement. We deploy the prefix Zeno to articulate a feminism fit throughout our era, an era that demands a politics of unprecedented cunning, ambition, We live in a rapidly dehumanizing present. Our daily lives are inextricable from processes marked by obstruction, virtuality and complexity.

We are all already alienated. Have we ever been otherwise? The force of this realization surges us to the cusp of a reactive bifurcation. One trajectory curls back, instructing us to pull the lever on the emergency brake, to slow down, scale down, and get rooted in local matters of touchable proportions. The other vector insists that remedies to our climate of extraterritorial globality, conditions of a post-West failing world, can only be faced with equally scaled strategies, organizational forms, ideas, and instruments if they are to harbor any true political effect. Xeno Feminism commandeers this bifurcation, asserting the latter. Xeno, the prefix, not

only indicates the alien nature of our human circumstance as biochemical beings embedded within feedbacks of constructed cultural environments, including behavioural norms, where there is no natural state of humanness to revert to, but the potency of affirming alienation is a capacity to engineer, host and enact alternative foreign human world interaction, driven by complicit commitments to new conceptual orientations driving procedures of adaptive reconstruction. Such a scheme of for alienation is not without risk, but it is, we claim, necessary in order to avoid the certain confiscation of the future by withdrawing from the ever-persistent velocities of abstraction rigged only to benefit the few. To succeed from or disavow those velocities

will not make them disappear. Putting on the brakes can only generate the certainty of a tragic future. The risk endemic to xenofeminism demands the establishment of thinking, doing, epistemic action continuance, namely ethics, not sheer critique, if it is to engender counter-effectiveness in the name of the many beyond enclaves of particular localization. That's the intro. Yeah. Do you guys have anything you want to ask? I mean, we kind of like things that are the same. the same history that we've, I suppose, discussed at the start of the seminar,

Lika, when you were kind of talking about reason and the critique of reason leading us to the question of possibility in this dissipation of the local... And then the asterisks and the endotrives is a version of this kind of fragmentation that just disintegrates and doesn't end up being able to be mobilized to go anywhere. It's a kind of like a vulcanization process. No, honestly, it's the kind of identity politics extreme where what was used in a geopolitical context, you could say, could be mapped on that process as well, exactly as you said.

I'm this more particular of this particular and it's like I'm a trip at all sort of thing. And yeah, I think in the end the argument with the accelerations line is like trying to build threads between, so I would say even the points of solidarity, I don't know if that's a term that's going to be used in their discourse, but that's what I would suggest, like that needs to be re-woven together rather than searching for more and more differences between us. Of course respecting that, like we're not trying to create a uniform situation where you obliterate difference, it's not the point of, like when Luca you say that yeah, the emancipatory trends would be that you couldn't claim some kind of moral high

ground because of this exceptional or whatever status but we're not trying to do away with difference. So I guess that's always the point to have to mitigate difference within a universalist trust because that's always going to be a point of negotiation. I think this is something that we shared a little time on in our very first seminar too. I'm not sure how many, it's a totally different crowd at this point except for the core. But, yeah, this idea that, I'm not going to try to say it again, you said it better than I was going to, but that it's not a matter of finding a kind of a uniformly applicable

mold of the universal that we want to impose on the world. We know that that's foolish. We know that that can only be a kind of macro particularity. And we know that imposing any kind of particular as a model and everything else is just going to be, you know, procrastinate and stupid and impressive. It is a matter of, like, you know, finding these threads and maps of translation between, like, you know, all the points. We want to make it possible to get anywhere from anywhere else to, like, have that kind of, you know, that freedom and that transit between, like, all particular, all, like, you know, all social particularities, all socioeconomic particularities. If you can have that freedom to move to any point, then you're good. You don't need to have a single

Roman road leading to the entire territory. That would probably be a bad idea. You need to have this possibility of transition to any point. you're making these gestures I'm immediately thinking of the yarn work project that you know this kind of stuff that Ben Singleton was addressing in the seminar in Berlin but sort of like more generally addressing this kind of like plot structures and almost the way that you could like reconstruct that map particular point. But so I guess the task of our project is to like fabulate these red

threads between these points. Yeah. ...to create those kind of things, materially and conceptually. Absolutely. I think that's why I'm just getting said about Zalamea in Berlin too, That's exactly the way Zalamea phrased it, it's not a matter of one axiomatic to rule them all, but it's also not a matter of a billion different systems, each of which incommensable into themselves. So you have modes of translating between any system and another. So this is why he's all keen on category theory, and why the accelerationists in Berlin were all keen on Zalamea. That's the model of universality we're after.

I guess the question I have, and maybe it's good to talk with you because you're kind of a... I know that I'm talking to you, you're a proof theory expert, but you know math and I... For me you're just generally really good in these things. I'm kind of a engineering expert. question is like maybe more specific but like because obviously this kind of general introduction that's been that a lot of us have been going through with this kind of category theory and this kind of like power of the functor if you want or that even the power of the adjunctor it's like I'm just concerned about and maybe you can address like addresses a little bit it's like I'm I'm very nervous about taking things from other fields that function in a very sort of like insular language of mathematics,

like this kind of self-referential language, and how that maps on to, you know, because obviously it's not a one-to-one translation. So is the relation that we're seeking, is it a metaphoric relation? What is the nature of that relation? because when I go to these seminars and try to absorb as much as I can in my simple brain what category 3 is and how it operates and what it can do, I also know that I can't just be like, oh, we've already solved that, we just map it onto politics. Oh, it's metaphorical. Yeah. I mean, by and large, it's metaphorical. But there's a lot of room for new ones there. And John Bova should type up at some point, because he is the real expert in these matters.

He's probably cringing. No, he's stoically calm. No, that's his avatar. Okay. But I would say, I mean, yeah, again, there's a lot of room for nuance between kind of, you know, mapping on the one hand and metaphor on the other. Usually when philosophers throw around this mathematical imagery for example, it's metaphorical until proven better. It's possible to have a much more concrete mapping, much more less metaphorical, more implementation specific mapping.

But then you're kind of also, you're usually not speaking in kind of a hand weighty philosophical mode. At that point you're usually doing something much more positive. Alright, John are you cringing at my use of metaphoricity or am I calling you an expert? Here we go. Do you want to say something? The latter, of course. Yeah, yeah. Who is it? John Boeber was just teaching mathematics and diagonalizations.

Oh, awesome. Can you tell us how that, can you show us the light? John Boeber. What? It's just the theory in general. Oh, okay. Maybe? Did you want to say anything, John, or are you just happy to kind of chill? It's so huge. I mean, I guess I should say just for the sake of honesty that I am actually growing increasingly concerned about the new metaphorical deployment of category theory in these contexts, just

because, and it may on my part be a failure to understand how deeply the reworking of the foundations is going here. It seems to me that it isn't or even a priori can't quite be as deep or as radical as some of us who are picking it up on the basis of these interpretive claims are supposing that it is or that it ought to be. It still, to me, seems to take place within a fundamental metamathematical or metological framework that talks about really fundamental a priori limits to what we can get in terms of systematicity. but so to me there's a kind of complementarity

between what those results say there isn't and what category theory using quite rightly a different, a more algebraic language says that there can be but I'm to be honest I'm getting increasingly concerned about the idea that this is just the formal tool that we need in order to move forward with our political projects in the way that we would like. But I should say a lot more about that, and Luca, who actually translated Zalamea's book, could probably speak with much more appropriate authority on these topics. Yeah, we're not really, we're not like sort of directly calling it category theory in the text,

so maybe this is going too off stream, but it's just a concern that was kind of coming up when we're speaking about these transits, and obviously, maybe we have maybe it's good to say that category theory provides laymen like myself a kind of diagram of how that could be in some particular world but obviously that diagram needs to be reconceived and redrawn for any sort of like pragmatic implementation, would that be a fair... So we're not just kind of fashionably tapping into a field and, you know, kind of like how when I'm thinking about early, when chaos theory came and all the urban planners were like pilfering posts with

basic ideas and being like, oh, cities are fractal, you know? And you're like, no, you can't just do that. There's got to be this like, massive translation process. Yeah. Um, so we don't want to, like, impede upon the holy ground of category. In an irresponsible way. Yeah. Or just one thing I thought of, I don't know if you know the work of Robert Batterman, who Reza's mentioned, because he has this book called The Devil and the Details. And one thing he talks about is property dragging. And he says it's not only that you have one theory and another theory, and there's some zone between them which is ill-defined. But it's not just that the zone between them is ill-defined, and when you move one concept to another, a change might occur.

But even there's this extra step of that you very well may need another theory to explain that zone. So it's not even like you're dragging something, you're moving it to another place and seeing what happens. It's that you don't even know, if you don't even know what the place is between the two. As we're doing mathematics to politics, there may or may be something you need to articulate between mathematics and politics, whether it's, you know, some kind of, you know, social theory or something that kind of, it's like you test out the amount of space between them by trying to apply it to another... You basically need to construct the subway stops between the hubs. Yeah, right. It's just you're trying to reduce the reduction.

Yeah. By saying, really think about what's the transit process, not just this field to this field, but what is that really specific motion? So this came out, I guess, this week with Aesthetics Unchecked Finitude when we were talking about how in mathematical reasoning there's a certain kind of level of formalization that allows for stabilization of a concept between kind of several actors or people or whatever you want to call them. Whereas when you kind of start shifting towards the social dimension and like towards more normative, I guess, spaces, it's a lot harder to have this kind of the same kind of stabilization because it seems like the formal aspect becomes less and less

or in some sense it's harder to find where you would find invariance or something like that or construct invariance within a social or more normative space and I mean like that I just had a kind of question where it like I'm wondering how in the manifesto you're articulating or disarticulating alienation and this kind of solidarity or these kinds of places of resonance, how are you kind of linking these things? They seem to be very integral. I'm just wondering where you're seeing the connection or the thread between those two things. What we get to, we do kind of address, I mean, the thing was structured so that we kind of

pair off and we had sort of like fixed areas of where we were going to write the themes we'd write on. And so one of them was specifically alienation artificiality. Another section was libidinal politics. Another one was like reason and rationality and the first one was what was it? Promethean feminism. Promethean feminism. Yeah, Promethean feminism. And what was very interesting is like even though we kind of cordoned each other off into like pairs, so many things ended up converging. So those distinctions that we had like initially set up to structure writing with six people kind of are, to me at least, need, or need now, they're collapsing.

Because we're referring to some very similar points along the way, so you can't, like, they need to be integrated. So I think that's going to be an editing challenge. Yeah. But to talk about your point more specifically, should we read the section on alienation? Yeah, do you want to? Sure. I think that's it. Just have a look and make sure it's the most updated version. Because I just put Google Docs on my iPad and then I'm not sure I can provide it. What was the question for you, though? First of all, what was that question? It was basically about the connection between alienation, perpetrator, and solidarity, and expensive points of contact. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah, because you're being like this kind of paradoxical way that...

Sure. It's very hard to, I find it very hard to think of those two things together, or at least there's a lot of different ways of thinking that articulation or that differentiation, if you're differentiating it. So I'm just kind of wondering. You could perhaps think about it as alienation towards a particular consolidation or something. In the way that... Anastrophic alienation. Yeah, but if you kind of, if you see it as using alienation to kind of propel yourself to a new level in a process of unfolding, I guess, betterment.

In a way, as you're reconstituting your ontological assumptions at each level, because this is one of the things that has to change each time you update your commitments. At the same time, you're alienating yourself from your previous ontological instantiation, but then you're consolidating that as your new ontological departure point, with the full knowledge that you're then going to have to jettison it and alienate yourself from it again. In a way, you can also see solidarity and consolidation as the result of an interim between two alienations. Alienation leads to consolidation, which then leads to alienation, which then leads to consolidation as part of this process of autological reconstitution.

I mean, that was a really good question, and that's the first time I've actually sat down and thought of it in those terms. That's my kind of just spontaneous answer to it. Another... Sorry. No, no, go ahead, please. Right. I think I... I mean, another I'm going to take on... Again, I think this is a great question to raise. Because my... You know, kind of like my immediate response is like, oh yeah, of course it's a relationship between solidarity and alienation, but actually hammering that out is definitely worthwhile. So, I mean, just to take without getting too abstract, what are the major obstacles to forming a political solidarity,

with a given struggle, with a given group, or whatever, right? From a position like, especially outside that group. And the first is that, you know, it's usually this combination of being kind of too rooted in your own, you know, like, parochial constraints, your own kind of like, you know, the worldview that kind of comes with being like, you know, who and what you are. And, you know, the ways of getting past this, first of all, is a kind of, as a bare minimum, a kind of exercise of estrangement to your own origins, right? I mean this is the sort of thing that revolutionary Marxists write about all of these things in terms of politics. And for good reason, because most revolutionary Marxists were like bourgeois kids, right?

Most of them were. Marx and Engels and Lenin and all these guys, Castro, they all grew up in positions of economic privilege privilege and so they all kind of like had at least some moment where they were kind of you know estranging themselves from you know from their like from their class roots right from this way of seeing kind of what had been kind of invisible and just commonsensical for that class position to see it as you know to sort of develop sort of like alienated relation to it to see it as something that doesn't that no longer just goes without saying becomes suddenly opaque, considered just transparent.

And so that seems to have a bare minimum requirement, not sufficient, but a certainly necessary requirement for performing any solidarity, say, the proletariat, is to at least alienate yourself from what kind of goes through saying when you're bourgeois. In terms of sexual politics, definitely, right? this, and this is one of the many reasons why so many, there's so much going on there, but why so many, for example, trans women become feminist very quickly, right? Either, whether they were before or not explicitly before, it's because they experience in a very kind of like visceral way, I mean they were always sort of alienated from the male position to some extent, they always had this sort of kind of like unease towards it, but to really

kind of like, you know, bring that alienation to fruition, you know, make, kind of like, trace the alienation out, you know, in flesh and blood and chemicals and pain and so on. As a part of this, everything that was kind of like politically transparent to the male position that becomes just startlingly opaque and estranged all of a sudden. You know, just the slightest things, right? Like the word he, like the pronoun he is no longer neutral in general, not just to apply to you. You know, you can, you just like, there's this moment of kind of like, of estranging or alienation happening there, which is, I think, especially

Because you are coming out of a position where, whether or not you identified with it, whether or not you felt comfortable with it, whether or not it was something that seemed to work for you at all, you're coming out of a male upbringing, for example. To have all of a sudden, to have that snap into estrangement to a degree that far exceeds your own private sphere of anguish, but all of a sudden it's co-extensive with the entire world. That is itself a very potentially politicizing moment. One that can catalyze a great deal of solidarity. And of course, it can also be kind of like, it by no means

necessitates it. Not every trans woman is a feminist. Not every transfeminist is a transfeminist in a way that I think is politically productive. We're all riddled with neuroses and so on as much as anyone else. But it definitely does have that political potential. It's a very, very dramatic experience of alienation. Part of transition is to experience your death as a male or death as a female. You are treated as like, oh, bye John, thanks, come back to you. Yeah, I mean, you are treated by everyone in your life for a while as if you had actually died. It is a very dramatically alienating experience. In a very colloquial sense. And

That's a good thing in a lot of ways. So politically speaking, it's very politically fruitful to undergo that. And I think that goes not just, I mean this is just one particular case. I think this goes in many cases of political coming to consciousness. I think this is probably true of what like, I don't know, like Guevara or Lenin or whatever experience in the sort of like transition from a bourgeoisie silver spoon boy to like I'm you've been got straight I mean this is something that I'm I'm

yeah I'm a large one stroke for a picture son yeah yeah so I'll be saying and I can't wait probably parcel lot in kind of my old on kitsch which using I'd decision of event and fidelity, right? So, yeah, the moment of alienation is, you know, evental, right? Like, the iron is hot, like it's ready to be tempered in some kind of political weapon. It might just turn into slop. But, so the actual tempering of that hot metal into an actual sword takes, you know, that's like painstaking fidelity, commitment,

vision, reheating, re-hammering and so on. But you wouldn't have had a moment to do that until you had the iron of your life being super heated by that moment of alienation. To have things glow with it before it was just dark, non-apparent iron. That one? I think Katrina's writing something up in the sidebar. Yeah, it's not just a riffing author. But she was speaking Ngaristanian and I was speaking NGTN. Did you want to read out what you wrote? Yeah, Katrina, let's hear you both. Katrina?

Katrina! Do you want me to read out? No, no, it's okay. I can read it. Sorry. You already wrote it. Yeah. I thought that was a really interesting question, Wendell. I was just concerned that there should be a distinction made between what would be considered solidification and what is considered solidarity. because I think solidarity comes from a commitment to a political project whose methodology is alienation, as opposed to solidification of some sort of ontological position.

And that's maybe more a play on words, actually. but I was just I had a question for Luca when you said alienation as a vental is this do you mean this in terms of it being an event where you you realize you're being ontologically reconstituted by by prescribing to this methodology or does it have to do with the navigation of a conceptual space? Ontological in the soft sense, yeah.

I'm not saying anything kind of, you know, I need to make any high metaphysical claim about what's really happening in the very stack of being, for example, for this to work. But, let's see, let's get the camera back on. Oh, no, it's fixed on you, but that's cool. Yeah, not like, I mean, ontological in the very loose sense, where I think it does become, you know, in terms of like a categorical, like, grid, right? Like, it is a reconfiguration of the sort of, you know, the pigeonhole system that formally made sense to the world. It is a kind of redistribution of what was transparent and what was opaque, what was sort of a transcendental rule and what was like an empirical contingency.

It is a reorganization of all those points. You are plunged into kind of a strange world. This is kind of what, it doesn't mean it's just spontaneous and just befalls you. I'm not really committed to that part of the event philosophy. because this can also be sort of the product of actual work. It can be precipitated, it can be provoked. This is what artists try to do sometimes in the practice. This is what anthropologists try to do in their research, right? To sort of produce that kind of moment of fertile epistemological estrangement. This is something that I think anthropology, you know, in principle, just gets right. This is a good idea in general. Yeah, I think that's something...

Oh, sorry, go on. Oh, yeah, I mean, I was just going to keep going off examples. It's what the logician tries to do, for example, with, you know, just like the transparent rules of thought to like, you know, harden them. It's what like, I think, you know, it's interesting in like the gesture in like Amy's, you know, poetics work. of just taking, you know, the kind of organization of phonemes that would lend themselves to sort of like clear and transparent communication into like just really exacerbating their like hard, twisted, obscure opacity that like, that, you know, there was a sort of texture there that was kind of not, that, you know, we were just kind of like lightly riding our like communicative intent on top of it, like it sort of, you know, showing its gnarled

surface to us. So, yeah, alienating. Good stuff. I wonder if it... The alienating methods, like how we can or how you are, how one can or whatever construct sort of the abstraction of alienation from, you know what I mean? That at least accounts for the differentiation? Because I wonder if it's, like I wonder if it is the same gesture exactly or like between all the different contexts you're mentioning? Oh yeah. Or if the kind of similarities add for like

very distinct kind of modes of traction or whatever you want to describe that. Because then, I mean like I really like the point of Katrina, this kind of solidarity within kind of alienated modes. You know, I think that that's super useful. But, like, without, I don't know, it's the same kind of dynamic of kind of flitting between the global and the local, where, like, each specific context will probably necessitate a specific mode of alienation, yet you don't want to discount there being some type of global form or style or whatever of alienation so that you can speak on that abstract level and get certain amounts of traction as you're doing it. It's more of a comment than anything else. Personally, I'm being very nominalist about it. It's a fact. Yeah, sorry. I can't

call it. I think that's a really good point, Lendl. I think that alienation is also this sort of insider position that I think Ben you you talked about in your paper and at one point I'd like to ask you about that because you brought up something that Zizek says that this could fall into like an ideological self-delusion and maybe this is where even the The alienation I would like to the other thing that to time what you just said, Landal, that

I think is really interesting is the notion of transits is one where you at least in sort of a social context to think through the metaphor as not just a metaphor of like as a form but as again a methodology for navigating social spaces wherein the transit comes into one's ability to utilize their intelligence so to speak to translate different languages, different

modes of thinking and this is exactly what the anthropologist does and they do this by you know constructing concepts but from the language of the other basically. So your alienation isn't an alienation where you're like... I want to say... ...the space of translation and the space of thinking is very sensitive to different ways of thinking, but it's also in this sort of like hypertension with possibly being delusional, but at the same time opening up new ways of thinking that weren't possible before.

So that's maybe why it's also like a tension space, and it's highly sensitive, it's highly volatile, it's highly unstable, in both the abstract sense, but also in its sort of like concrete manifestations. And Martin Holbrad, I just put this in the side comment, Martin Holbrod, he talked about this at Glass Speed, more in terms of the concept construction from the position of the other. Nevertheless, I think it really has more to do with translation, so that the alienation comes as being the translator, So you're trying to be as indifferent as possible so as not to impose too much of your own conceptual bias or whatever.

Sorry, I keep asking questions or whatever. But another thing I'm kind of wondering is, is it always functioning in terms of freedom from? context you kind of see the kind of aspects that you can bracket or in some ways and it's you know that get out of and that kind of is how the is functioning or if there's in some way some way of having some kind of alienation that's more mapped on freedom to where then it which would be somewhat weird because then you're kind of bracketing towards something. Yeah, if you form it that way.

Or, I'm not sure exactly how that catches out, but, like, wondering how those dynamic functions could... Yeah. It sounds like it's in the same kind of, or it's in a very analogous kind of conceptual space, so... Yeah, that's a good point to bring up. I mean, I think we're trying to alienation as something that connects the two. I mean, it's originally a freedom problem. A freedom problem. Yeah. But it's... Yeah, that directs you to a freedom to do things. Well, because then the kind of solidarity aspect can kind of go by, where you can kind

of have a solidarity of alienation from free, or within a freedom from something, like solidarity within yes, we want to alienate ourselves from this specific thing, then you can also have a solidarity that functions within freedom too, where like maybe the freedom froms are different, but from those specific alienations you kind of, you know, arrive at the same kind of freedom too, or similar freedom too, you know what I mean? Yeah. I suppose, as Katrina was pointing out, the semantic interplay between consolidation and solidarity can be unpicked, but I still think that they do work together, that there is not a major opposition between solidarity and alienation, that they're not opposing

And that maybe they operate in this conveyance from freedom to freedom to freedom, as we just kind of explained. I'm more wondering than explaining. No, but Lendl, I'm really happy that you break these points. Even if it's kind of in our own logic, it's maybe kind of understood, we need to make that... Yes. I hadn't thought of them in this kind of way, but I think they're really, really urgently necessary to state it. And not just be like, well of course we... You know, it's like, no. I think that's also a cop-out. And I think if we're also arguing away from not to refer, we prefer to infer, that we

We need to also follow up on that methodology. Like we need to have the ability to the terms of our engagement and the things that we're trying to do and not just say, well it's implicit, that it's like no, well, make it explicit. So it's super helpful to have these points brought up because we're kind of in our, at least I feel like I'm in the little world when we're writing and it's like I agree with you, like I don't see that point but it's, when you first state it, it does seem like a paradox that needs to be addressed. At least in a couple of times. That you're aware and how you're moving to it. Yeah. It can be articulated in so many different ways. So it leads to the question of how are you instructing that relationship?

And if those are the things right. Right. Maybe one way to kind of link together the freedom from, freedom to question with the question of alienation is, you know, what are we alienating ourselves from? Or what are we alienating ourselves with respect to? And one kind of name for it is, you know, a certain kind of political common sense, right? This is something that, you know, feminism has always been about. were bound by certain social rules and certain social norms that by and large went without saying. They were invisible. They were just sort of the way things were and it wasn't,

at least to the men of the time, those who were like, you know, with the actual hands on the reins of the large political institutions, a lot of these constraints seemed, you know, They weren't even raised for question, it was just the nature of things. This is a simplification, but you know, whatever. So, you know, there's a certain kind of constant battle that feminism has always waged against, a certain kind of political common sense. Alienation, at least is kind of, you know, in this sort of anthropological mode of estrangement that we kind of brought up, is sort of one of its modalities. is, you could look at it as sort of freeing yourself from the constraints of this common sense of what's possible, what's not.

But, I mean, this is not a separate gesture than opening up a certain freedom for other things. By making these constraints no longer just transparent but opaque, making them no longer just given, or taken for granted but felt as actively imposed, Constraints such as, you know, something like to experience gender, for example, as a constraint, as something that's tangibly there, not just kind of like, wow, of course it's there. Or like binary sexual difference, for example, or social roles, childcare responsibilities, what have you.

entitlements, being the object of certain sexual entitlements. All of these things are so... Part of what makes them such powerful and stubborn modes of oppression is that nobody feels like they're actually imposing them. Right? Like, very few people, unless they're just kind of being a kind of like manosphere contrarian, is saying things like, I like having a sexist society. Or, you know, we need a more sexist society. you know, this is like, apart from that bottom 5% of the nanosphere, nobody's actually saying that. People are sort of like blightly unaware to it, because this is transparent. So alienating is to make that scene sort of like striking and strange and bizarre, as if it was some

uncanny practice of some unfamiliar culture. To have that moment of unease and not at home this with respect to it. To kind of provoke that sort of sense. But this is also at the same time opening up other ways of living as possible. Other modes being something that we're free to try to live out or create. Of course it remains at this totally abstract level. Like, oh, another world is possible. And like, blah, that's it. It's totally abstract. It's like, you know, this sort of empty abstract other. And so maybe the distinction shouldn't be made so much between freedom from and freedom to, but, because I mean, they're always there. They're always kind of like two sides of the same coin.

But often one side of the coin is more concrete than the other. Often we're talking about a concrete freedom from, like actual performance of Russian we can point at and say, look, you're there. We can finally see them. We've made them like concretely visible for ourselves. We can see them. to another world, like, oh, full communism, and we don't know what we mean by that, but we want something. So it's a matter of sort of fleshing that out and trying to make the freedom for as concrete as what we want to be free from. But since what we want to be free for is the object of an actual free project, and what we want to be free from is kind of our factical situation into which we're thrown, like, go back to kind of an existential sort of lingo. You know, of course there's always going to be this imbalance.

What we're free for is always going to be more abstract than what we're free from. The project of making that concrete is not a matter of just shifting perspective. It's going to be the actual implementation of a project. You know, we're not free for anything that's concrete. We make it concrete by doing it. I'm yes so she she she she she I think it involves with you she yeah yeah I I mean just to I look hard

so well but I'm I know again the language that I guess Russ was using, I think the constraint I guess for me it does involve both freedom from and freedom to if we think of freedom from in terms of constraints and freedom to in terms of those enablements and that's just that like the, I'm just basically reiterating what I just wrote, that's just at the most basic level of this as a practice. That's all I want to say. But I mean, even then

the notion of an enabling constraint collapses those two possibilities as well. Freedom from and freedom to into one process. By a break. Oh, I need one of those two. How are we going with time, Tony? Because we started a little bit late. We started at 8.30, so we're at the point. We have some wrap-up time. I would be fine with you guys reading some more of it that you prepared. Sure. What section? Maybe we'll do one more section,

have a couple of comments on it, and then. Will that be OK with you? Yeah, that's fine. What section do you want to read? What section should you read? What did you guys talk about earlier that I missed? that maybe it could tie in with the whole section. We were talking a lot about Ben's text at the beginning. And we moved in. I think you were by the time we moved into the, let's see here. What would be an interesting section to read? Um... Huh? Hmm. Something that you've been wanting to... What about the...

That's not something that we've talked about. Yeah, where is that? That's at the bottom, I think. Bottom? Uh, not the very bottom. Yeah, where is that? That's at the bottom, I think. Bottom? Uh, not the very bottom. not the very bottom. No? Sorry for the chaoticness. Well, can I return from the formation of things? Because I think that's... I like the polemic stuff. Yeah. So this section is like zero... zero...

zero, zero, black, zero, one. 0, 0. On Propecie of Feminism. So, the first section is Generative Unwholeness. So, Xenofeminism is ectrofenetic, thriving on the sustenance of an artificial outside that advocates the synthetic constructability of nature's culture interfaces for nourishment. We feast on the result of the child's mothers, who refute our myths of originary unity. An origin depends on a consolidated plot out of which difference is produced by a perspective return to wholeness, a digital reintegration of that which has been divided. Xenofeminism knows that there is no possible rebirth into some originary state of organic

immediacy. For self-proclaimed beasts of reason, we have always already been expelled from the state of nature. For a zero than a one, xenofeminism seizes on this absence of origin as a generative force. Like Haraway's Cyborg, xenofeminism is activated by connection. She is a painstakingly engineered synthesis, makerless yet made. Having learned the lessons of modernity's wrong turns and the dead-end politics of postmodernism, auto-assembles the chaotic confection of remains from the hangover of 20th century exuberance, slotting together a hybrid body of techno-social potential for fine-tuning amidst the eerie

inertia of our century. She-he breaks... no, she-he jailbreaks the broken vision of modernist Prometheanism, hacks into its rationalist ambitions, and recalibrates them for eminent unfolding of potential existence. The second part of that section is embryogenetic propellants. We devour the abundant scraps from our ancestral lineage as pablum for speciation. It is true that our many mothers have been prone to familial disagreements, yet despite their quibbles, they converge under a hyphenated surname of naturalist ambivalence, techno-scientific preoccupation and unwavering insistence upon the material.

Our project compounds this already compounded surname. Our mothers recognize the importance of technical literacy whilst acknowledging that technoscience differentially disadvantages women, the gender non-conforming, and others of all stripes and persuasions. They are invested in seizing, shaping, and sharing knowledge, and repurposing existing technologies and technoscientific discourse in order to engender political-cultural change, and they are absorbed in intervening within the material conditions of embodied existence. Some refuse to inoculate themselves against the seductive force of the virtual, while others evince a bracing commitment to reason to a meticulously constructed epistemological project upon which an emancipatory project of politics might be built in the shadow of

Marxist humanism. The nutrients inform a xenofeministic speciation not to be conflated with the advocacy for a hybrid politics, which risks suggesting the prior existence of an unhybridized state, but a composite politics without the infection of purity. In digesting, expelling, and converting ingredients of our DNA, xenofeminism comes to understand itself as a technomaterialist trans-feminism geared towards a future grasped as a site for contingent recomposability. Its synthetic project is constructive, ambitious, and aims at counter-hegemonic engineering. From saving plans to that point at which technologies

geared towards regulation, containment, command, and control can turn out to be feeding into the collapse of everything they once supported. To Shulamith Firestone's pronouncement that technology has created real preconditions for overthrowing oppressive natural conditions. Our mothers have implanted fertile conditions through which we rethink the possible. So I'll just stop there. I think we gotta like slow down on the commas. If I may just like... You know when you read it out loud? I think actually stylists, this text should sound good when it's read aloud. And a lot of it's a bit like blah blah.

Like we're going to do this and this and this and this and that. And we do that a lot. So I think we need to get on point a little bit more. It's just like I've never read it out loud and I'm like whoa, whoa, whoa. It's going to send to non-academics to, like, look at all the big words we know. So, literally, this is all of them. It's also quite funny because when reading it out loud, you sometimes mishear. And I heard instead of indigesting DNA, I heard indigestion of DNA. Yeah, we gotta figure out the proper formative work to do it.

But I think the stylistic effect, me and my humble opinion, as one sixth of the pie, it needs to be something that we could really, you know, almost on a pre-chain. Yeah. I mean, we're still in editing mode, so it's... Yeah, we should do it. And, you know, loud. That'd be cool. And maybe when editing it, not to be performing it, in a sense. Totally. Yes. Like, just honestly, I'm used to a lot of, like, I mean, for sure it's just one section,

but does it sound too much like blah blah and less not substantiated in the yeah yeah I think it still does I think we need to um and that'll really help us get a whole lot shorter too we need to condense you know get it down to a hard like nugget When are we meeting next? Never mind. Yes, you can. Okay, cool. All right.

But yeah, if anybody has any comments, because I also understand that it's like difficult or it's like a big demand to like hear something for one time and then like, Okay, so, go. If you have any comments, we'd be really grateful to hear. Yeah, I mean... Yeah. I mean, I didn't hear the section, I don't know if you read it out of the room, that immediately follows the second section. Whoa! This is the second section, actually. This is, oh, it is, okay. Yeah, it's sequential. Oh, wow. Because it's not rhetorically, it was kind of interesting. In the first section, it's all about the Zeno, right? And I wonder if it might seem like too many concepts being thrown out if that effect comes off.

Partly because if you front load it so much with the Zeno, and then I don't know how you transition into the feminism part of it. I mean, it's probably a stylistic choice. if you want to switch back and forth in such a way that that cuts. Because I'm imagining, I don't know if that's true, that the xenoness might have more of the kind of fun terminology in terms of how it's very much different as opposed to readdressing the tradition of feminism. But even those switches can rhetorically contrast in a way that, you know, it's like speed up, slow down, speed up, slow down, or whatever. Not to have like this machine gun fire. Which, that's, like, I like that. I think that's definitely good, but I feel, you know, not that they have to, you know, correlate in that way,

but the idea that in terms of, you know, this is what we're doing, all these things, you know, you can cut it with taking up this particular historical trajectory or this particular, you know, the way it's done before this way. And obviously I haven't read the text, so I don't know if this makes any sense to say. But just that kind of alteration, where it still feels like a manifesto, but then you're also kind of, you know, it makes the kind of, when you do have the machine gun moments, you know, it's a little easier to go with it. Yeah, okay, because you've kind of done the substantiated stuff, at least. So to switch up the, like, to just kind of introduce a different rhythm as well, so it's not just, like, latent 7,000 words of, like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

But it's also like a little bit and then a little rest in the bunker. Kind of like talk with your mates. Yeah. Then get out and shoot again and then rest in the bunker. That was a brilliant moment. Yeah, the regrouping moments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And deploy and then they group and then deploy. Right, right, right. When you do, yeah, you like run out, you like duck down, have a little chat. Right. No, that's good to, it's good to be good. I really want to read it. Yeah, I think, Ben, we were actually deciding to put

trans-feminism at the start, after the introduction, followed by libidinal politics, just to give a little more contextualized, is contextualization. Just to answer. Do you want to rehearse the trans-fam chunk a bit? I'd like to have a feedback on that, too. So far, it's just a good rough note. Is that at the very end? Yeah. It's a, yeah. I mean, you know, if you could say it was a... Because in the document, I have a bit... Are we still in class mode? I don't know. Are we still in class mode? I don't know. We're still alive. We're still alive. You guys want to continue going, you know, and go offline.

I don't know how relevant it is. If anything, it will be archived for you all to go back and really know what you were talking about. That's true. Yeah, I did this interest in hearing it. Otherwise, I can read it. OK, so I'm happy to read it. I'm just on the Google Doc. I've got it here, too. You want to read it then, Luca? Yeah. Sure, I'll give you a break there. So yeah. Oh, dear, I'm living on water. I've got rum and coffee left, though, so I'm good. All right.

It's a delicate balance. Right, oh yeah, this is the one that was playing with the section titling convention of Helen had this great project idea once, just recently, of doing something like the 100 anti-pieces of cyberfeminism, kind of a recap on that, but with theses instead on xenofeminism. We were thinking of maybe just labeling a section with a kind of nice pithy gist of the piece of all the forms, Xenofeminism is an X. So this was Xenofeminism is a Transfeminism. Again, I'm not sure how this is going to read out loud. Probably appallingly bad. But no

is going to listen to three hours of us on archive, except for us ourselves, so we're good. At the intersecting thought lines of technology and sex, history and gender, few nodes flare brighter than the phenomenon of transsexuality, an event that split sex and its history in two in the middle of the last century, and whose aftershocks spiked countless efforts to silence them through violence and domestication are only growing stronger with time. Christine Jorgensen, whose sex change was the first to catalyze international media attention, compared herself and her change to the atom bomb, a metaphor that newspapers echoed across the world when they didn't hit on it themselves.

In the decade that followed those headlines, the formerly one-dimensional conceptual matrix of sex would itself be fissured. As clinicians and theoreticians charged with caring for the growing masses of sex changeling, as often newspaper and period called us, gradually unfolded the continuum of sex into the conceptual and clinical space with which we've now grown familiar, with this increasingly orthogonal axes of sex, gender, sexual orientation and so on. a space that, crucially, offered both room in which our existence might be recognized and in which we would expose new coordinates to practices of discipline and control. As the means of sex's transformation propagated across this newly mutable surface, so too

would new means for its domestication. What seldom without grimacing, the growing trans community came to call the gatekeeping apparatus scrambled to repair the damage done to the sexual order of things. Perhaps could now be changed, but this needn't rock the boat so long as something else, this deeply Christian soul of sex we call gender, remained stable. And it was towards stabilizing the spiritual element that so many disciplinary techniques were invented and brought to bear. Stolarian gender clinics began to dot the clinical landscape, throttling the transsexual torrent by carefully screening would-be transitioners for passability, for heterosexuality with respect to the new roles, for adherence to a crumbling feminine mystique. Trans men remained

for a long time marginalized to the point of invisibility, to the point that many experts in the field routinely doubt their existence, or at least their frequency. One needed to be robbed out most of all, as far as a strained adherence to the Hippocratic oath would allow, was the eruption of history into the very viscera of sex, this eruption of technology. As sex exposed its historicity, its Promethean potential to become artificial without any obvious essential remainder. The new technicians of gender struggle to etch gender roles back into nature, into this new spiritual nature that is gender identity. Wear dresses and makeup. Buck only men. Behave in a manner appropriate for a woman. Don't raise your voice. Busy yourself with beauty. Learn to be demure. Transition above all.

all must never leave a trace. As part of the gatekeeping process, transitioners were counseled and trained in the fabrication of a plausible history, a history in which their sex change never officially took place." And here Sandy Stone is definitely in the margins. With her fantastic essay, The Empire Strikes Back, which was rejoinder to Janice Raymond's transsexual empire screed. Feminism, too, felt the shock of these events as a reactionary undertow began to swirl around the hole through which the sex change had broken. In a 180 turn away from Firestone's Prometheanism, radical feminism more and more fell under the sway of a grotesque

theological eco-feminist goddess-cock, under a growing infatuation with the image of the sacred and natural woman. This phantasmatic apotheosis of our chains, this mock Mother nature whose apron strings we were taught to tighten. Deaf to contradiction, the reactionaries creeping out from under Mary Daly's wings continued to call themselves radical feminists, with all the sincerity of national socialists. Noisily squawking of men's ease in soil. The Prometheanism fission that burned in Firestone's text, and in Jorgensen's triumph, since triumph, was now, quote, the Frankenstein phenomenon, this is Mary Daly here, omnipresent

not only in a religious myth but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of the necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul, spirit, life-loving, principle with themselves, and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirits, substituting conglomerates of corpses. I think I just picked up on the necrophiliac reference in your text. I'm not sure if it was to this or not. This necrophiliac invasion, elimination, takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring, which invades the female world with substitutes. Male mother genetic engineering is an attempt to create without women. The projected manufacture by men of artificial wounds, of cyborgs which will be part flesh, part robot, of clones, are all manifestations of phallocratic boundary violation."

When the prisoner makes such a fuss about boundaries, we think she may have grown us a little too fond of herself. We cyborgs and robots, we exogenetic transsexuals, have no such reservations. We know that it's Pandora herself they want to put back in the box. Daily's student Janice Raymond forever soldered her name to this reactionary tide with her 1980 book, The Transsexual Empire. The real misfortune of this book, however, is that it mistakes the bird for the cage. The Transsexual Empire, the book's title, is first of all the very institution of gatekeepers with which transsexuals themselves attire the struggle. Transsexuals who, far cannier than these temple handmaidens, understood that something about After dirty history being important, biting the hand that feeds them, this is all bracketed

in. The quest for mythical purity is the path of reaction alone. That what is really at stake is not a matter of decontaminating women, but seizing, as women, the means of our production and transformation. You may as well pillory the pearls for the atrocities of the factory. But let these dialectically tone-deaf reactionaries have their goddess, we'd rather be silent for it. Today, the gatekeeping apparatus has all but trembled. Decades of struggle have won us unprecedented influence over the clinics and its working. Influence that has grown exponentially since the rise of the counter apparatus that is the internet. Not only did it weave the trans diaspora, the words not a ridiculous one to describe a crowd so absolutely without a homeland, even to the earth for strangers, into a highly interconnected community,

no longer atomized and serialized into secret and frightened lies. It also threw open the gates to a massively distributed and agile pharmaceutical black market and an inexhaustible archive of endocrinological know-how, galleons buoyed by the rising tide of cryptocurrency, reactionware printers and darknet marketplaces. The net has drowned the patriarchal fervor and reactionary sentimentalism of the gatekeepers in the icy waters of pharmaceutical traffic. We are far from out of the woods, the habit of erasing our history, our aspect of contingency, the ingredient of defiant willfulness that has shaped our lives and flesh, the realization that something, something new, something restlessly anticipated for eons but cut from the apron of nature is still less than a century ago.

This habit has been drilled deep into our lives. Even as we free ourselves from the curse of constructing plausible histories, of obligatory closeting and isolation. We stubbornly cling to the pre-formationist prejudices that demand our invisibility. We need less than a word to throw in relief. Consider the past participle. We're now, we're still, so afraid of our history, so afraid of what in our very flesh is historical, is in defiance to any puffed up illusion in nature, that in the last few years we have campaigned to scrub the ED from transgendered, a word that not long ago marked the triumphant escape hatch from the disciplinary apparatus that is encrusted on

transsexual. It's obvious enough that we often touted grammatical arguments against Narashehem, the distortion of anxiety unexperienced by the green eye and the brown hair. It makes us sound like something happened to us, we say, cringing. And in cringing we shrink away from the possibility that something worthy of Prometheus and Frankenstein might happen to us all. Xenofeminism refuses to relinquish this fragment of the historical, this trace of our power to make ourselves historical, but making ourselves artificial. We are unrepentant engineers. Sandy Stone's accelerationist battle cry continues to guide us in these days in which we finally seem poised to seize the reigns of the empire and seize upon, oh This is Sandy here. In quotes, seize upon the textual violence inscribed in the transsexual body and turn

it into a reconstructive force. That's some notes for the transsexual survive. Probably need to be tightened and shortened a bit. But, you know, draft one. They get it exclusive. I don't know if you had any comments in response to it then, because it was probably a pretty big chunk to digest. Yeah, it's a lot. I don't know, maybe we should kind of go out on that high note. Yeah.

And that's, I mean, yeah, in order to add something to it, we're obviously still kind of working through it and editing it and taking the commas out, turning them into full stops. But yeah, I mean, yeah, Tony. I can go off and then you guys can have a conversation about it. You look so sleepy, Tony. Hmm? You look so sleepy. I mean, it's 4.30 in the morning here, yeah. Oh, no. Good boy. That's why you're in the place I'm usually in. I'm in your place, exactly, yes. Yeah, you're the one in the minority hemisphere.

Well, I mean, I guess we just, I suppose, before you turn the recording off, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who's been following the seminar. We appreciate you kind of coming along for the ride. We're kind of beating this sort of concept into some kind of productive shape. And, yeah. Hopefully the fruit will be available. Yeah. I would say that the conversation doesn't have to end either. you guys can use the classroom for people that were like auditing the class and paying attention. Yeah. They can give you guys feedback.

Are there any out there? Hmm? Are there any out there? Is there any look at it? There are a few people watching, yeah. Ah! Damn you. That was... Yeah, yeah. I'm going to go off now. Hold on one second.