! ! I'm not a machine! I'm not a machine! All right, well as usual I've got too many pieces of paper and not enough time, so I'm going to go for the information density approach and throw lots of things out but as people know I will be here all weekend so I hope there'll be lots of time for discussion both after I've finished just now and also over the rest of the weekend. There's a couple of things which have
come up this morning which are themes and ideas that I want to sort of take issue with in this paper which is basically about the idea of getting out of the meat, a notion to which I'm indebted to Pat Cadigan amongst other cyberpunk writers. And the whole question of what the meat actually is in cyberpunk and, of course, in real life. The two ideas that have come up this morning that I was particularly noticed, first of all, this notion of cyberspace and the virtual being something of a metaphor or a symbolic zone or somehow some immaterial space. This is one idea that I really want to contest. The second is that there's some, the notion that it's somehow necessary from a woman's point of view to go in and somehow feminise cyberspace according to some usually pre-existing notion of the feminine.
And I want to suggest to you that the matrix, as I hope you'll see by the time I've finished, is already very much hostile to masculine identity and that there's no great need for us to rush in and somehow turn it into something female. But first of all, on this question of cyberspace itself being supposedly immaterial, a matter of symbolism, metaphor, and imaginary zone. This is really the tendency to make cyberspace, us to make many things into a matter of metaphor or representation, is really a matter of repeating the great idealist project which has characterised Western patriarchal culture, which has always been an attempt to somehow climb out of matter, to get into some immaterial zone,
a zone that would be both insubstantial and ineffectual, those two senses of the word immaterial. And we can see even with this with cyberpunk itself, that even after there's been so much said about the collapse of the distinction between social reality and science fiction, that people still want to make cyberpunk itself into simply a matter of fiction. Again, a metaphor somehow for our times. And this even after we've seen the real effect in the world, which cyberpunk has obviously already had. And even the body, finally, in this high-tech world, somehow it gets back onto the agenda, or perhaps onto the agenda for the first time. But again, it's a matter of metaphor. Even this session today is called the body as metaphor. metaphor for what is the question that I want to really be asking.
And this tendency to turn everything into immateriality is really, as I say, an old trick of Western patriarchy. And cyberspace can, of course, always be seen and will, has been seen largely as the fulfilment of this great dream, again, of getting out of the meat, getting out of matter. As I say, it's an ancient dream. It really goes back at least as far as to the sort of sources of Western philosophy with Socrates, who himself says, if ever we are to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. So Socrates, and consequently the whole history of Western culture, has really dreamt of some notion of the soul being separate and independent of the body. He says, it seems as long as we are alive, we will continue closest to knowledge
if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body, except when absolutely necessary. And instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it until God himself gives us deliverance. So there's very much this attempt to be purified, to escape from the body, to escape its contamination. As I say, it's inevitable that cyberspace would, of course, have been welcomed into this sort of culture as the ultimate chance to finally make this escape from the meat, or as I say, to become simply a symbolic zone, an immaterial zone. Finally, we get to the great dream of Western culture, the body as metaphor, finally removed from all of its visceral activity, its blood and guts and all the messy stuff that man would always rather have left behind.
And so cyberspace does really feed, obviously, this dream for total control, for autonomy, for the perfect end of the great Western patriarchal project, the great resolution of the masculine identity crisis, the point at which the soul would finally be united with itself. And of course all this has been encouraged in fiction and in film and so on by series like, for example, Oliver Stone's Wild Palms, by The Lawnmower Man. Again, all of these great dreams of immortality, of becoming God, of finally making it to a pure, insubstantial, omnipotent sense of identity. Now of course the whole notion of the virtual and of cyberspace is indeed a part and from the human perspective it has indeed been produced by this very desire for total control, for final autonomy, escape from the meat in that sense.
But it too has also been programming the human identity which has been seeking this. No one, it turns out, actually escapes from the meat. Instead, it's a matter of getting caught up with it. The body, it turns out, is never left behind. Instead, it's the body itself which begins to learn how to entangle itself from all Oedipalized constraints. Already we can see this in all the sort of cultural fallout from cyberspace and VR, drugs, cybersex, prosthetics, bondage, data suits there's a convergence of all these sort of outlaw channels on which the body, which Socrates was quite happy to dismiss as merely some sort of vehicle, some carrier for man's great dreams sort of the raw material for his own adventures the body begins now to return in a very different form
to this empty vacuous shell which was left behind in the past and now we can see this great dream as well of the whole of Western patriarchal culture really heading into crisis. Digitisation, it seems, is integral to a process of what is now actually quite overtly and quite frequently being named as feminisation. There are a number of processes which, again, are all converging, which now find man in his own words, and this is actually quoting Jeremy Paxman on a Newsnight programme quite recently, which now find man adjusting to irrelevance or to quote another recent paranoid response to this, the fact that man is becoming the disposable sex. It seems it takes an irresponsible feminism, which may indeed not be any sort of feminism at all,
to try and trace all of the paths on which, on the one hand, woman begins to assemble herself as a new and unprecedented force in contemporary culture, and also to track these processes whereby masculine identity and the figure of man in the abstract sense is finally being undermined. And what I want to suggest is that all of our notions, or most of feminism's previous notions, of what woman is and what woman may be, and consequently what woman's relation to technology may be, are really to be found wanting. The woman is neither man-made or somehow man's other. She's not biologically fixed from an essentialist point of view, nor is she sort of wholly absent and not there at all with the Lacanians and the deconstructionists.
Instead, she is actually in the process, in a process which has been going on for some time. This process of feminization is also the great clarion cry, which really seems to, again, be coming from an old sort of sense of masculine identity. It's summed up by, again, a guy who was on TV probably about a month ago on a program about men, who, again, with a great tone of paranoia, said, women and robots are taking our jobs. And it's that dual attack which clearly suggests that there is some connection made at least in the minds of this old power centre between women and intelligent machines. And indeed, you can look back over the whole history of feminism
and begin to see some sort of emergent pattern whereby the status of machinery in any sense, particularly in terms of means of communication, and also the status of women have actually developed concurrently and have developed together. It seems that there is therefore some process of feminisation happening which as I say we can trace back a long way. Though it's almost as though there are fractal scales of a history which begin to fold in on each other. So for example with the beginnings of modernity we have Mary Wollstonecraft writing about women as the first self-governing systems turn on and by By the first self-governing systems, I mean really Watts' steam engine and Adam Smith's market. Both of those steam into a modern age, which is already waiting for Mary Shelley, another crucial figure,
to dream our future, to dream a future marked by cyborg revenge. Then there's the second wave, in effect, with the burst of technical and economic activity generated by the Second World War. Norbert Wiener's systems hit a deuteroplane on which machines begin to learn how to learn, and Simone de Beauvoir writes The Second Sex. After that, there's a third phase where it gets far more complicated, just as, of course, we could expect an age of complexity to get more complicated. And it seems that it is with digitisation, with which all the gaps in the material, Freud is famous for calling women gaps in the material, all the gaps in the material begin to replicate themselves. By the time Lucy Rigorai, who's a French feminist writer, writes her classic text, Speculum of the Other Woman,
It seems that de Beauvoir's second sex has already begun to turn onto her own perspective, effectively scratching at the silver rings behind her glass, leaking in through the holes in her veils. This is a time of emergent self-organisation, the late 70s, the 80s, until the present time. It's a period in which all the substances of the world grow dangerous to those who wanted to claim it for themselves. Right across the board you can see this happening. happening. Machines begin to learn how to learn, systems begin to access their own controls and make contact with each other, they begin to hack into their own functioning and explore their own intelligence. This happens amongst women, it happens amongst machines. Viral infections creep out from the software plane, again stealing the future away from those who thought it was promised to them. Repeating patterns sweep across the once so simple screens
of the reality studio, fracturing the scenery and ripping up the plans. Systems begin to assemble themselves on trade routes and lines of communication which were never of course designed to do their own thing. We see complex emergencies exciting themselves in the banking systems, the weather systems of a global economy which now begins to tip into its own systemic activity. Even the commodities, the medicines, all of the go-betweens, all of those things once so well behaved as goods for the benefit of man which is in fact the dictionary definition of the commodity, Even those commodities themselves get smart. It seems that every patrilineal thread, every straight line of history, begins to run onto a non-linear plane. And it's hardly surprising, therefore, that a woman herself turns on.
She, too, has been a means of communication for man, and they all effectively turn on together. And now we find ourselves at a time, as I say, where masculine identity is, as a consequence of this long history, in serious crisis. There's a feeling that man is losing responsibility, authority, definition, resolution, memory, you name it, he feels he's losing it. Post-modernity, in fact, we could almost describe as being man's hysterical reaction to all these new lacks and privations, the wounds that he incurs as control apparently migrates. If we look at Baudrillard as obviously a classic example, finding himself suddenly, apparently, at the end of history, at the end of the history in which he himself had invested so much, suddenly seduced and abandoned.
But I want to suggest that, in fact, the Baudrillars of this world will wish it was indeed that simple. It would be very nice, I think, he'll end up thinking if he was, in fact, abandoned by all these processes. But in fact, man is not abandoned but hooked. It turns out that he too is a machine component of the processes which now threaten his identity collapse. seduction was not a pleasure, or not only a pleasure, but also a trap. And suddenly, after so many years of it being a woman who is one who is lacking and somehow missing something, suddenly its masculinity is that strong sense of identity which becomes a liability, which becomes a lack. But it would be a big mistake to want to simply turn the tables around and suggest that the past somehow belonged to man and now the future will belong to woman and we simply have a role reversal here.
Men too are moving on. Soon they'll have a few new wounds and a few new sockets in place and neurochemical programming, it seems, is already well underway. On this last point, of course, cyberpunk is a great place, again, where you do get this theme of neurochemical reprogramming. What Bruce Sterling has called the theme of mind invasion does, of course, run through every cyberpunk novel, again always as an attack and a corruption of a solid older sense of identity. Cyberpunk, he writes, crunches together neuro and physical chemistry, genetic biology, structural linguistics, cybernetics, biotechnology, cyborg engineering into a fantastic series of fictions. I'm sure most of the audience is familiar with the speed, the complexity, the intensity, the montage scenes, the cut-up realities that you tend to get across all cyberpunk novels.
Larry McCaffrey, another commentator on cyberpunk, picks out certain common themes between punk and its older form and today's cyberpunk. He says they share a variety of aesthetic impulses and influences that extend well beyond the benzidine rush of their rhythms and pacings of their fascination with the gross and perverse. He points to a fetidisation of paranoia, sexual and psychic violation and manipulation and what he defines as the desire to achieve transcendence through drugs, religion or the computer generated dance of data. And again here we have cyberpunk characterised again as this desire for transcendence, somehow to get out of matter, out of imminence and into some spiritual transcendent plane. Now it is indeed true that as another commentator has pointed out
the discourses of visual, sorry visionary virtual world builders is rife with images of imaginal bodies again freed from the constraints that flesh imposes It seems however that those seeking transcendence will probably be better off reading Mills and Boone but certainly be sorely disappointed in a future marked by the actualisation of images the materialisation of matter and indeed the emergence of a new and perhaps fatally constraining flesh. When drugs and sex and what Gibson calls the dance of biz begin to mutate across the cyberpunk stage, ecstasy is no longer the state of escaping matter, but instead a matter of escaping the state, be it of the art, the nation or the mind itself. The state is the obstacle to what becomes the question of getting out of order,
a flight away from the ideal, away from transcendence, a way out from the notion of identity and masculinity. This is never in cyberpunk novels, even though many cyberpunk commentators want to suggest this, it's never a transcendent exit from the body. Instead, it's a headlong acceleration into his substance. And I quote Gibson on this score, saying, saying, he knew he remembered as she poured him down to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and ferronome, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. Or again you can see this collision with materiality in Kadri's book Metrophage. He tore open one of the packs, slopping gin on the floor, and popped a purple capsule under his nose.
The cobra toxin came on like a slow-burning volcano, boiling along the surface of his brain, not enough to kill him or cause permanent damage, just enough to cop the killing euphoria from the cobra venom. His body was molten glass and treacle, no flesh, no bones, just a sizzling mass of plasma, fried eyes and melting genitals. Thirty seconds later, he popped the modified atropine, its molecular web constructed in the mirror image of the cobra toxin, and as the inside of his skull iced over, the room exploded into negative as white glacial light blazed behind his eyes and shot down his spinal column. This, it would seem, is why drugs are always considered to be so dangerous. They do, in fact, bring the body back close to home, too close to home, in fact, for the whole Western notion of identity to cope with.
Again, they effectively collapse the body onto what was conceived previously as the mind or the spirit or the soul of man and force its fluids into this soul. They're wraps of materiality, tabs of tactility, chilling reminders again of the blood and guts and all the visceral matter from which man sought to extract this pure and unadulterated soul which Socrates spoke of again. And so clearly this is not the body as metaphor. We're not dealing with here the body as some immaterial zone. It's true that Cadbury's character finds himself escaping flesh and bones, but what he encounters is this sizzling mass of plasma, fried eyes, melting genitals and so on. There's nothing immaterial about that. Likewise, this notion of the body as a sort of complex and melted-out system
that you get to in a lot of cyberpunk novels, especially via this line of thought and line of inquiry via neurochemical reprogramming, is precisely that which we meet on the other end vis-à-vis computers themselves. I just want to throw out a few quotes, first of all from Marshall McLuhan, who made this point many years, obviously, before it was widely taken up. Again, on the theme of drugs, particularly psychedelics, it is not, he says, uncommon for people on these trips, especially with new chemical drugs as opposed to organic ones, to develop the illusion that they are themselves computers. This, he says, is not so much a hallucination as a discovery. The point's been reinforced recently by Manuel de Lander,
who in an interview says, when you trip, you liquefy structures in your brain, linguistic structures, intentional structures. They acquire a less viscous consistency, and your brain becomes a supercomputer. Another quote from Snow Crash. That's a hypercard. I thought you said snow crash was a drug, Hero says, totally nonplussed. It is, the guy says, try it. Does it fuck up your brain, Hero says, or your computer? Both, neither. What's the difference? That's a mixture of fictional and so-called theoretical observations about this same point of a certain moment in which the notion of the body and the computer begin to collapse on each other. my own slight experience of LSD writes Bates and Gregory Bates and led me to believe that
Prospero was wrong when he said we are such stuff as dreams are made on it seemed to me that the pure dream was like pure purpose rather trivial it was not the stuff of which we are made but only bits and pieces of that stuff our conscious purposes again are only bits and pieces the systemic view is something else again so we have the systemic view of the organism which begins to emerge out of this old constraint of body and soul being separated from each other. And from here, the organism no longer understands itself to be some discrete, physically bounded, autonomous entity of historical progress and social security. But as Basin defines it, it becomes not a transcendent entity as self is commonly supposed to be. And what we understand as its ideas are imminent in a network of causal pathways,
which he says is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel. So here we have a very material notion of communication systems and of information systems of the body and the computer collapsing onto each other. Now it seems that this notion of a spread out sense of post self if you like, not bounded by the skin, but as Bateson says, taking into account all material pathways, is a notion of identity which has previously never been acceptable or even thinkable or conceivable to Western patriarchal culture. And it seems that woman has always been somehow in proximity to this now emerging notion of a dispersed, de-centred organism.
She has, after all, never had a unified role. This is the one thing which women have always been denied. She's been various things, of course, mirror, screen, commodity, means of communication, means of reproduction, carrier of water, weaver of the cloth, carer, whore, machine assemblage, in other words, in the service of the species, a sort of general purpose system of simulation and self-simulation. While she's always, of course, been forced to marry into the family of man and assume a so-called human identity, it seems that something of her outlaw status has always remained. She too has had to adhere to Asimov's laws, which we saw a moment ago up on the screen. The machines and the women, both of them together, have had to promise to honour and obey. And of course some have done so more happily than others.
But certainly again, if we look back over the history of modernity, we see a whole history of very unhappy fitting into this constraining notion of human identity. We can look at hysteria and say that that was effectively the 19th century's expression of women's protest against the confines of a humanism, which on the one hand always demanded their complicity, but on the other hand refused full membership of the species that they were supposedly serving. Hysteria, of course, literally is the wandering womb, the womb wandering, the machinery seeking an exit, looking for a way out of this organised one, hunting for the plane it becomes, what Deleuze and Gattari call the matrix whose colours are yet to come. And even if, like Simone de Beauvoir, woman has wanted nothing more than to lose this connection to this plane
and to become fully human, to become a full subject, it seems that she's always at least been beginning elsewhere. Even Simone de Beauvoir described woman's subordination not to man but to the species. Now it seems that we have now a number of options being presented through the work of Donna Haraway and many other women working in the area where women and technology come into close proximity with each other and the notion of the cyborg is of course one of the most, in the past I suppose, one of the most fruitful ideas about how this conjunction happens but the cyborg equally is always in danger of being brought back into the anthropomorphic tail again we just saw a few moments ago the way in which robots are always anthropomorphized
and the cyborg itself is anthropomorphized it's the notion of the organism itself which is the problem it's the organized member of the species which has really been the problem for women in the past there are suggestions again emerging in cyberpunk fiction and film especially that woman somehow already had some connection to the virtual. A little quote from Mona Lisa Overdrive from William Gibson. Her father, long ago in Arizona, had cautioned her against jacking in. You don't need it, he'd said. And she hadn't, because she dreamed cyberspace as though the neon grid lines of the Matrix waited for her behind her eyelids. If this was the case, if indeed woman does have some implicit prior connection to the Matrix, then it would be hardly surprising
that women are so quickly become such advanced and fearless practitioners of virtual engineering and it does seem indeed that most of the advanced and interesting work that's happening in this field is at the moment being done by women. It seems that all of the things which were once such a disadvantage to women in the past are now with this process of digitisation, this slow history of modernity but the accelerating process at the end of modernity are really now speeding up. And if fluidity, for example, and women's ability to wear many hats to fulfil many roles and never to have a strong sense of unified self has always been configured as a matter of deprivation and disadvantage in the past, it now becomes a positive advantage for a future
in which identity is nothing more than a liability. It's digitisation which is the process by which the feminine learns how to replicate itself and the masculine ends up finding itself out on a limb The process is concurrent across a number of zones Everywhere we can see structures being invaded by systems states being captured, governors being ignored and conditions being enthralled by their own strange and fatal attractions Woman's escape from masculine control has not turned out to be a consequence of her ability to somehow transcend her economic functions, transcend her reproductive functions, their mutation is also hers. The commodity is mutated into a smart commodity. Mechanical reproduction, be it as a species or the work of art,
has become a matter of replication, and lines of communication, again across the board, begin to organise themselves. The matrix that they become, or cyberspace, is simply matter turned on. the process and plane from which zero hacks the central controls and assembles itself. Across the time intensity scales, there's a self-replicating pattern beginning to emerge as all channels of communication converge on the cyberspacial plane. Commodities become self-guiding. Capital, it seems, is now leaving the western lands for the ocean with the edge, the Pacific, the Pacific attractor. And out in the west, here where they still set the clocks, the old world order is beginning to fall behind the times. Machine intelligence is converging with a thinking organism as both get drawn onto this chemical plane
on which intelligence discovers its own materiality. And communication now has visceral effect. Trans dancers learn to get in touch, hitting the plateau with tantric precision, evading the climax, picking up the news. Even the fake mutates into simulation and makes contact with its own arousing machines. Identity has become entranced and enchanted at the limit of the organism, fascinated and facsimile to the point at which the body tips over onto the plane. The entranced is the accessed, the possessed, the body ridden by its own network of potentialities. It's not just a matter of us going out from the meat but also the matrix entering the organism. So it's the history of cybernetics and this history of modernity
which has also supposedly been the great goal, the great final thrust, if you like, of the Western patriarchal project. It turns out, it seems it's also really been a story of the feminisation of man. And if the history of cybernetics is indeed this history of feminisation, then of course the great question is what happens to those, those women in other words, or all of those who were considered never quite the same as him in the first place. those who were always systems of communication, now finding themselves increasingly able to contact each other. Were they always somehow in advance? Were they always in touch with something that was somehow out of sight, that is now beginning to emerge for the first time as the virtual? Maybe de Beauvoir was right in the end. After the first, perhaps, does come the second sex,
not secondary, but second, as in after the first, post-human. I think in view of the time constraints, I'll just give you one last line, which is to say that women's emergence at the end of the millennium is man's emergency, that history was remembered, but the future, no one's in control, it's unmanned. Okay, thank you. If I could just try and chart the ebb and flow of our presentations this afternoon. It seemed to me that we started with a history of women's exclusion from technology and ended up with a claim that the history of cybernetics was in fact a history of feminisation.
and a marking out of a woman's affinity with the machine. And I wanted to perhaps throw down, not so much as kind of gauntlets, but certainly as kind of questions to the speakers, a series of paradoxes, which where we started out in Christine's presentation and in Helen's presentation, as noticing that here were two instances, two products if you like, of women working in programming and using fairly high-tech instances of fairly high-tech equipment and technology
which precisely spoke about and discussed women's historical exclusion from technology. And the second paradox is this. that in the notion of the constantly shifting identity, the decentred self and the differences in flux, if this is true, is it desirable? Because it seems to me that sometimes, with a breakdown of all difference, that it might mean that in the end there begins to be so much of everything that in the end there's nothing. And it almost sort of invites one to coin a new oxymoron
to take over from virtual reality, which might be a kind of a cornucopia of vacuity. And thirdly, the cyborg as a hybrid figure escaping the oppressions of history, escaping the oppressions of difference, of gender, of race, of class, offers us this prospect into which, by now, our very desperate utopianism kind of rushes to claim. And I just wanted to sign a sounder kind of warning about the desperation of that utopianism and what is it that we're claiming. So I wanted just simply to lay those paradoxes down.
But I know that people here will have a multitude of questions, and to be a little bit fair, the people upstairs, I'm sure, are bursting to join in. So I'll take a couple here to start with, and then we'll go straight into the people upstairs, so if they could have their questions ready. Is there a prospect that femininity, by what's being discussed this afternoon, could kind of merge into a kind of machine sort of meld and lose its humanitarianism? It just becomes a machine sort of focus and it loses its elegance and its beauty as femininity in itself. I mean surely
it would be rather pleasant to live in a world where men and women can be men and women and can enjoy being men and women for their own sakes to their own end and what you're proposing is that women can actually sort of hide away in cyberspace and become androgynes that don't actually sort of function in a human way but just become rather shallow and very very I must say very sad Thank you Alright if this is true then is it desirable? The reaction from the platform would indicate that yes, it is desirable. Tell us why, Sadia. Well, I think it depends where you're starting from. I mean, my point really is to say that women have precisely always been in that machine functional role for the male members of the species, quite literally, the members of the
species. You know, women have really been the servants for that species. And to say that women will be somehow losing their humanitarianism, I mean, it's that is precisely the extent to which women have really, on the one hand, been living out that machining sort of function, but on the other hand, been expected to be proper humans as well. But of course, caught in this double bind that you can never be fully human, and you can't quite be as good as the real humans, that is, you know, Euroman, if you like. You know, that's precisely the problem that we're about to, or that certainly, you know, I'm very keen to contest. Sorry, did you hear any of that at all? No, no. It's good. No, can we just give other people a chance? Okay. Could I say something about that for a minute?
I always got to get my two cents in. You know, it's like when I first heard about the feminization of cyberspace, I thought, well, what do they think we're going to do? It's like, do they think we're going to come in and say, you know, this place needs a few plants? pants. And then, you know, but see, like when I get up in the morning, I don't think, well, here I am, it's morning, and here I am, Pat Cadigan, woman. I'm getting up. You know? It's depending on how hungover I am. You know, it's like, when I'm in here, you know, it's like I'm just kind of going around doing all the stuff that you want to do, you know, or my version of the stuff that you want to do, you know. It's like, I don't feel that different from
you, you know. And see, I don't, since I don't, I can't see how beautiful I am from the outside, you know, most of the time I don't think about it unless I happen to pass reflective surface and realize I'm having a bad hair day. But do you see what I mean? It's like, it doesn't feel that way in here, we feel in here just like you do. Thanks. Yes, I'm glad to come in now because I'll try and be brief since I have a chance to speak tomorrow. But to come in on this debate that's happening at the moment I would want to, in a sense, sort of join up with Tana in asking that question as to what is so desirable or I would put it even differently, what is actually radical or different to the quite oppressive way that things have been about this sort of apparently liberating idea of femininity being linked with the robot machines and so on.
I'd like to just throw out to consider, I think very often the sort of fringe aspects of our culture, which seem to be somehow radical or different, are very close to the central bits that aren't on the fringe. And I would say that some of the ideas that Sadie was putting forward as liberating strike me is actually very similar but in a different guise to things that are quite oppressive. that we live in a culture where most women spend most of their time trying to remove themselves in some way, or remove bits or parts of their bodies, or make their bodies be smaller than they really are, or somehow not to sort of fully inhabit the space that they actually physically and reality occupy. We live, you know, in a world where there, I think, is very little actual material recognition. And this touches on something that Benjamin Woodley said at the very beginning, the idea of the material world.
The material recognition of, if you like, femininity, or I would just say women and what women do, when work was brought up as being a way of being like a robot, work is also physical, it's a sensual physical activity, it may be tiring or it may be exhilarating. I don't see how these things are in any way in actuality transcended by this kind of metaphorical, apparently liberating idea of the machine. And I find it incredibly similar to things which are present in the mainstream culture that it's apparently meant to be liberation from. Right, well, gosh, yes, I've loved lots of time. The point to come back to Judith Williamson's point, which was about this question of, well, the thing that I really picked up,
actually, without repeating your question, Judith, was that you kept saying this idea of us being like machines, or this metaphor of the machine, or this metaphor that there's anything happening at all. This is precisely my point, you know, it's not a matter of us being able to choose whether or not we are machinic or complex machinic systems. You know, if we are, we are. And there's no question about choosing or, again, whether it's desirable or whether we want this to happen, etc. If it's an emergent process, it's an emergent process. And what complicates that is that this very notion of having some sort of unified soul and some unified identity and this great quest for autonomy, which is really to be split off from matter, is precisely and has historically precisely
been so that man traditionally can in fact make those decisions, can say, is this desirable, do I want this? You know, what identity has wanted has been the sole criteria. The point now that's happening is that all of the, you know, all matter that has been really previously excluded from that notion of identity is itself effectively having a say, it's itself turning on. Self-organizing systems don't actually ask man for permission. They don't say, is it desirable, you know, for this to happen? That is precisely the point. That is really the contestation of this whole notion of identity, that suddenly it isn't up to identity to define and choose everything that happens on the planet. The point about the soul that was made, I mean, I entirely agree with you about shamanism. And I too see all
of these things is exactly convergent processes, but I do disagree with you about that therefore that means that the soul becomes important. I think the whole point about the shamanic again is that it is very much a materialist way of not only thinking as though again there was some sort of thinking soul but of actually acting and engineering effect that you don't again merely just go metaphorically to some spiritual zone. You do go there materially. Well, I think it's, I'm reminded of the Faustian pact, you know, and of Mephistoceles taking Faust up to this high place and saying, oh, I'll give you all of this. I mean, I think we have to be cautious about being too much technological determinationists. I mean, it's the technology
in and of itself isn't going to make anything happen. I mean, I think we have to remember that we invented the technology and it's through things like language and through envisioning the future. You know, not in a utopian sort of way, but I mean that is how things happen even though there are lots of materialistic constraints. Can I just say one thing about that? Because I mean, I take the point, but by the same token if you look at feminism say and the change that has in fact happened I've admitted it very very recently after two and a half thousand years suddenly in the late 20th century you do begin to get some source of change and we all know really that that is not because man the one with the power suddenly turned around and decided to be very benign and to make that choice to
say is it desirable that women are oppressed you know no okay let's do something about it that's not how that process happened but in fact it is you know very much bound up with and integral to the emergence again of a whole gambit of non-human intelligent activity you know machines commodities trade routes they all start to get their own activity and so do the women it's it's very much against you know what man would desire you know so I do think the technology is a real player Pat do you want to add anything? When I think about the soul, juxtaposed with sort of the cold hard machinery, I think about no matter how hard-headedly realistic we are, the soul demands to be appeased.
The soul demands its satisfaction. And the one thing that epitomizes this strange dualism in human nature to me is from a movie called The Right Stuff, in which Chuck Yeager is shown, and he's a test pilot and he's getting into this cold hard jet. And the success or failure, they hope not failure, but the success of this depends on the engineering and the integrity of the airplane and everything. But every time he gets into the plane, he has a little ritual that he does, where he has to borrow some gum from his assistant. And his assistant says, OK, and they say the same thing to each other. And this is a ritual that he needs to perform, not because this will absolutely guarantee
that the plane won't crash. It's because his soul demands that satisfaction. It demands for at least that little while, you know, an acknowledgement that there could be a supernatural. And if there is, this is the little ritual that I perform to, you know. And yet, this is a person who must be, you know, very hard-headed, very realistic, very, you know, in the world, in this moment, whatever moment he happens to be in. And when you think of it, sometimes I think the more technological we'll get, the more we will strain away from it in some part and reach for something that is the antithesis of technology. you know, that is, you know, that and and that to me is what you know yin-yang has always been, you know,
it's like the the white that contains a little seed of the dark and the dark that contains a little seed of the light. You know, it's like that's us, you know, it's like we're hard-headed realists on this side and we are, you know, worshipers of all the gods and whatever on the other side. So we'll be spiritual robots. I'm not going to die.