Towards Xenofeminism (Session 3)

Well, good morning, good evening everybody and welcome to session 3 of our reading group seminar series on towards geno- sorry, towards xenofeminism, gender technology and reason in the 21st century. Today's session is on cyberfeminism, on looking at cyberfeminism specifically in order to extract or continue the lines that were being pursued that might still be relevant to our 21st century technological environment. We've got quite a few guests today, which I'll introduce in a second.

But I thought because we've got a lot of people in the Hangout and at least one of our guests has to go a little bit early, it would be really good to just kind of... I'll do a little bit of an intro, flag some of the kind of major concepts or the concepts that I think are important and then maybe some of the issues that these might raise for a xenofeminist project and then we can just get straight into looking at the readings and talking to our excellent, wonderful guests so if everyone's okay with that kind of format I'll introduce I'll introduce our guests so that everyone knows who's who, starting with Patricia Reid,

who's a member of Laborio Cubonics, and who you may see at the new centre next semester, in a similar capacity to us. So Patricia Reid is an artist, writer, and theorist based in Berlin. who's contributed to various publications, not least the recent Accelerate Reader with a really amazing piece called Reorientate, Eccentricate, Speculate, Fictionalise, Geometricise, Commonise, Abstractify, Seven Prescriptions for Accelerationism. Member of the Boreo Equibonics and is on the board for the new centre.

So, that's Patricia. and I think Patricia is just going to kind of join in on the conversation. So we've got Virginia back. Can you hear us? Yeah. Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah. I might sound really echoey. I'm in this room at a cafe, and people will probably come in and out. But, yeah, I just had to kind of grab network where I could. The more noise that we have, the better. We're going to complacify, right? So, Virginia Barrett... Sorry.

I've lost you guys. Okay. So, Virginia Barrett lives in the heart of hippieland, northern rivers of New South Wales in Australia, and chases syntactical chaos as a pastime lifestyle vice and rather wistfully aspires to live permanently in a beautiful generative mess of creative production. She's just completed her honours in creative writing, looking at self-harm and remediating that practice from the deadening weight of institutional and interventionist narratives, disciplines, sorry, narratives slash disciplines, and is publishing those outcomes shortly. A work of performative writing called Slice. Her PhD is on panic and its potentials for transformation and agency through dissolution. She was a founding member of VNS Matrix and is always beholden to the powers of the slime.

She does performance, dancing and the abject, sorry, dancing the abject body, hanging around inversely from high beams in her skin. She also runs and writes about running. And we've also got Linda DeMette in the Hangout. Hi. Linda has been exhibiting since the early 80s, working in photography, writing, film and digital art, and she currently practices and lives in Sydney, Australia. Her work's been exhibited internationally and locally in galleries and festivals, including at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Ars Electronica in Austria, the International Symposium of Electronic Art in Sydney. She's won the National Digital Art Award twice and

was awarded a New Media Arts Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts Best CD ROM at the 9th Stuttgarter Film Winter Festival in Germany and Honourable Mentions by New Voices, New Visions, Palo Alto, California and Ars Electronica, Australia. That's Linda. And I felt like you, I mean, obviously we're doing a couple of readings today that were, that Virginia was heavily involved in, the VNS Matrix readings, Bitch Mutant Manifesto, and the text from, or the text kind of version of All New Gen. And I've also, for those of you who've been looking at the classroom, posted an interview that Linda and Sadie did back in 97, I think it was, on cyberfeminism.

So if you haven't looked at that interview, it's in the classroom. So, as Sadie Blant says in her introduction to the 1995 Virtual Futures panel, replicants, the future of cyberfeminism. It's a good idea not to get too caught up in questions of what the term cyberfeminism means, or questions of terminology in general. An attitude that's echoed in the European Cyberfeminist Collective, the Old Boys Network's act of negative definition, the 100 antitheses on cyberfeminism, and recapitulated by Jessie Daniels in her more recent survey of the term, where she writes,

cyberfeminism is neither a single theory nor a feminist movement with a clearly articulated political agenda. Cyberfeminism only exists in plural. So this notion of unrepresentability as a kind of empowerment in what Plante via Irigaray sees as the specular economy is, I think central, along with the idea of multiplicity as a kind of smokescreen. Degradation of notions of origin and authenticity that also escape definition by this endlessly proliferating idea of simulation, which confounds the real with its virtual twin, perplexing reality and identity to the point of irrelevance, which is a quote from Plante.

So obviously, key questions of identity, technology and the body. How does technology gender? Does the internet escape discrimination through gender anonymity? Can technology help us overcome systems of domination? And this notion of the impossibility of the movement's definition has both its advantages and its disadvantages, which is something I think that we really need to address in this session today, whether or not in the age of ultimate liquidity, in a sense, this tactic is still an effective one. So there's also questions surrounding the idea of embodiment.

Does cyberfeminism push this idea of escape into the virtual room over the material one, which is a side of contention in a lot of the critical work. I know that there are a lot of accusations leveled at cyberfeminism for trying to dissipate problems in the material, physical, embodied world by this simple idea of anonymity on the net, which I think is something that the work that we're looking at today clearly evades. but again another thing that I think we need to open up to discussion I'm just scrolling through my hectic

word document here so the question as well of the level of subversion of the internet that, which Jesse Daniels helpfully qualifies as needing to be followed by the question for whom. I think this kind of wholesale idea of net-based liberation obviously needs to be delved into. The idea of sex and sex positivity, which leads back to this material virtual divide. I think, as Plant puts it towards the end of her article, the idea of carnal

passions versus self-control and control in general, to this material possibility to go awry or to do its own thing. And then the whole kind of spectrum of post-human sexuality that this material might incarnate as well. The strange fluidities of the material, I think, as Plan puts it. The problem of enlightenment, or the reading of the enlightenment that cyberfeminism makes, which is a very... 90s cyberfeminism makes this very kind of typical, most structuralist critique of the enlightenment as this masculine drive towards progress, opening nature, and, sorry, receiving text messages here.

Okay, Virginia's on her way back. So is this critique still something that is relevant? This is the way that Plant puts it. This is a quote from On the Matrix. Tempted to still go onwards and upwards by the promise of immortality, total control and autonomy, the hapless unity called man finds himself hooked up to the screen and plugged into a global web of hard, soft and wetware systems. The great flight from nature he calls history comes to an end as he becomes a cyborg component of self-organizing processes beyond either his perception or control. Again, this notion of perception equaling control, which

is certainly questionable when you consider the return of the scopic regime to today's internet, the proliferation of photographs of people, video interaction, the material the material physical body is constantly foregrounded. So the kind of free space of text-based BVS's and moods is something that is no longer being used by a lot of the people who find their subjectivities informed by their interactions on the internet. So there's this really interesting idea of the emancipation of in the quote that I think has been making its rounds up a bit on Facebook.

It comes in at the end of Sadie Plante's piece on the Matrix, and which I think is really important to hold up against these critiques of her work as relying too heavily on this binary between the zero of woman and the one of the man. and which also troubles the essentialism that's inherent in this gesture and I think can perhaps be understood as a kind of a move, an essentialist move that is made in order to disessentialise. So I'm going to read this beautiful quote that brings this concept of

alienation as emancipation, early into view. There is no authentic or essential woman up ahead, no self to be reclaimed from some long-lost past, not even a potential subjectivity to be constructed in the present day, nor is there only an absence or lack. Instead, there is a virtual reality, an emergent process for which identity is not the goal but the enemy, precisely what has kept at bay the matrix of potentialities from which women have always downloaded their roles. The replicants write programs, paint viral images, fabricate weapons systems, infiltrate the arts and the industry. They are hackers, perverting the codes, corrupting the transmissions, multiplying zeros and teasing open new holes in the world.

They are the edge of the new edge, unashamedly opportunists, entirely irresponsible and committed only to the infiltration and corruption of a world which already rused the day they left home. So there's this great, and this is something maybe that we can talk, well I wanted to ask you guys, Linda and Virginia, about this kind of battlefield sort of rhetoric that's very prevalent in both of your work. this language of infiltration and insurgency and violence which is really kind of part of the libidinal drive of what you guys are doing this notion of going beyond the academy

so Daniels kind of writes that Plante is perhaps the leading figure in popularising the ideas of cyber feminism beyond the academy. And she kind of has this great moment of admonition at the end towards the scholar activists who wish to challenge the status quo of racial and gender domination, but who have also been slow to seize the opportunity of engaged public discourse offered by the internet. Curiously, most academic sociologists, this is Daniels, do not have an internet presence be on their college or university sponsored faculty webpage. They do not create content for the internet. They do not participate in online communities or social networks.

So I echo Michelle Wright's call for scholar activists to engage with the internet beyond email. It's critically important for those of us who hope that our work can and should speak to audiences beyond the academy to follow the lead of critical cyberfeminists and holler back by engaging in the internet as a discursive space and a site for political struggle. This is a really, really important issue as well, this tendency for these kind of discourses to sort of endlessly circulate within academic spaces and never actually have any real impact. So I think I'll stop talking for the moment and I'll bring up some of the, maybe the more

problematic issues a little bit later on. But I might perhaps, I don't know what we should do, perhaps we should start talking about some of the VNS texts, unless anyone wanted to sort of bust in now and bring a couple of things up. Do you have anything to add, Luca or Helen? No, other than to kind of just echo your sentiment of how pleased we are to have all of our guests with us today, I think it's a really wonderful opportunity to think about how, from what

the Feminism has evolved, the direction that we might be going in and how we can learn from existing strands of techno-feminist and cyber-feminist thought. So thank you to all of our guests for coming and for contributing today. It's really exciting to have you here. I'm thrilled that you can be here. And thank you for Amy. She's done so much work in organizing and bringing us all together. So I'm really looking forward to it. Well, Linda and Virginia, maybe I might ask you guys a couple of questions and we can sort of talk a little bit about the work that you guys were doing around cyberfeminism in the 90s and then perhaps can sort of draw some lines out of that

so what you're doing now and what sort of lines can we continue from that 90s work. Is that cool with you guys? Yep. Sounds good to me. I don't know if you want to give us a little bit of a sort of just to put things in context. a little bit of a kind of description of what you guys were doing, what the cultural space that you were intervening in was like back then, the kind of codifications, gender codifications that were surrounding early computer technology, access to it, and how this kind of work came

about. Do you guys want to kind of give us some sort of intro? Okay. So first of all, thanks for finding us, Amy, and being amazing. so totally gratified to see people continuing on with this work and taking it outside of its original frames looking at how it can be useful now, if it is useful now and what critiques we can draw from it that are interesting

now, looking at that back at what we did then. And, of course, reading the Daniels and so on and acknowledging a lot of the critiques that exist in that text, especially around race. So I wanted to make a comment about existing outside the academy first. This is kind of what you're doing right now. I'm totally outside the academy with banana bread. So we very specifically did not arise from the academy.

I certainly didn't. And in fact, Josie and Julianne were studying at that point. They were studying feminist theory in Adelaide. And Francesca and I were engaged in the Australian Network for Art and Technology. But interestingly, the starting point for even the manifesto, which was really everything kind of unfurled, I suppose, from the manifesto itself, which was this very kind of condensed version of this writing

that we had done, which started out as pornography. So our starting point was an active pleasure, a queered place of pleasure for female sexuality. And out of the kind of blasphemous and kind of... pornographic text, we kind of distilled what became the sub-feminist map of the 30th century. So, yeah, the starting point really was a place of pleasure and a place of pleasure outside of the academy.

and Francesca and I were both working. Josephine was doing photography. Julianne was studying. Julianne was also involved with the Australian Network for Art and Technology. The Australian Network for Art and Technology used to run these tools to connect artists with machines and then to see what they would do with them. And I went randomly to the very first of these. So we were working on PCs running 3D CAD software, doing kind of X, Y, Z, you know, axis points in space, green lines on black screens, kind of trying to map something.

I'm not even sure what it was that we were trying to map. It was quite linear and not very, not many arcs of flight in there. But, yes, so, but what came out of that was simply this idea, I think, initially that, you know, we were using the machines against their grain. I'm supposed to use a bit of a writing thing. Using the technology against its intended purpose. taking it outside of its, outside of the hallowed walls of kind of commerce and the institution and using those machines for purposes

which were kind of unthinkable and that is just pure research or play. There was no intended outcome for that. There weren't no outcomes. We were just fucking around to see it happen. and, yeah, there was certainly no commercially viable kind of outcomes of that play. In the process, then, you become aware of all the strategies and the constructs around that, who's running the machines, what are the outcomes of the machines, who are the overlords, how do you get to use the machines, how do you get unfettered access.

can I just play with this and if it breaks, does it matter and can I learn how to fix that myself or not fix it or use it against its purpose? How can I do that stuff without being mediated through the kind of overwork of the technology as a woman in particular? So now starting was just to try and overthrow the you know the gatekeepers I suppose as the line says you know remap cyberspace with a feminist bent hijacking it from the cowboys I mean I don't even know

beyond kind of x y z if we even had a concept of cyberspace really very much at that time but certainly space of some kind that was a parallel space. And in the readings, of course, there's also these ideas of space that you're inhabiting space as opposed to using tools. And I think for me there was a really strong libidinal and also a very embodied drive to inhabit a parallel space.

But anyway, I guess I'm kind of moving forward into the ideas of embodiment. But maybe does that give a bit of a starting point? It's quite complex, I think, but maybe that gives a little bit of an idea about starting points. Yeah. Did you want to add anything, Linda, about your experiences and what kind of tech you were using when you were creating Typhoid Mary and Tab of the Flesh Girl Monster and how you accessed it and how you had to fight to get it? I think also maybe my background was even more outside of the academy.

It's sort of a background of the very abusive society towards girls and women. shocking. So there was a whole huge rage that had built up in me over the years of growing up that sort of was let loose in being a young punk and taking drugs and committing crimes and that kind of life that without even thinking about it was all about being a bit of a parasite in society and just taking in a very optimistic way whatever was what we wanted. and having a huge range against normal society

in the ways that particularly women were treated in that. So it was that impulse more than anything to do with really thinking about technology that we were using that kind of got me to there. And I almost started using technology accidentally. I had to write a thing in the typewriting equation and the only thing that I could use was a technician at the uni at that time, I actually had a real job. So it was incredibly basic stuff. But I think a lot like Virginia said, something about using that very early technology and realising that it was a space that had such possibility and that it was, in my mind, a space that would become very important,

And the repository of knowledge and authority and the very things that we had missed out on in the last 2,000 years, here was an opportunity to put information into that while it was still developing that was rebellious and bloody and angry and bodily and feminine and that kind of stuff. And it was an incredible window because Virginia would have seen this too. We would end up at these really glossy corporate high-tech places because they had all this technology and nobody had really made anything with it yet. So I'd be in there with something

that's about lesbian necrophilia and something. And you'd be sitting beside people who were was concerned with selling computers. And work ended up in very interesting places and venues in those early days, just if you made some. It was a really interesting sort of . Did you find that, Virginia? Like VNS would be at SIGGRA and trade shows. That's amazing. You're muted, Virginia. Go turn your mic on. I lost you. Jason, can you unmute Virginia?

Yes. Let's be here. Actually, Virginia is not muted. Weird. I'm back. Can you hear me now? Yes. Sorry about that. I don't know what happened. The machine is intelligent. Yes, Linda. I just said, yeah. you ended up in these places with these dudes who, you know, you would not necessarily even be invited into those spaces or looked at. And I suppose there was some kind of strange fetishisation also perhaps

of us and the work we were doing. And perhaps that work would normally be repudiated. And yet, you know, here we were on these, as Linda said, these kind of corporate panels at these, you know, high-end kind of expos and conferences talking about slime and, you know, DNA slots and replenishing your slime and, you know, very kind of certainly in our installation work, you know, it was softcore porn, I suppose, in some aspects.

And talking about these kind of libidinal relationships with and through the machines as well, Personally, I had a very strong, hot relationship with my machines and in spaces, especially around virtual textuality. But, yeah, intervening in those kind of corporate spaces and being incredibly blasphemous. or what would be blasphemous to capitalism and the patriarch. So, yeah, I agree to end that. Did you guys, do you agree with the kind of point

that the plant advances in zeros and ones and a lot of her, like, shorter pieces, that there's this intrinsic connection between feminine understanding, like economic kind of positioning in history as this intermediary object that's always, you know, passing between sort of masculine systems of exchange. Because of that, there's some kind of special aptitude or special link between the way that women are and the, I suppose, advent of cyberspace and technology. Do you think that there is some kind of fundamental, how does she put it, that this kind of opportunity

is creating something that's going to start giving women the upper hand because there is a complex nonlinear way that women think, the way that they think by association in in her example that she gives by Freud, rather than these kind of very linear, symbolic AI constructs. I mean, were you guys kind of thinking about this, and do you agree with it now? Do you think there is a special relationship between the way that women interact with technology compared to the way that men do? Or that there is even a difference? I think this is an interesting part of Plants work and yeah, like I said in the kind of intro, it comes under a lot of scrutiny by critics.

I just find the essentialism difficult, but that depends on the day. Sometimes I don't like to touch it in a way. Because I think, and I noticed, as you see it, that women use the machinery differently. I mean, the sorts of ways that she thinks about it's more multiple and less controlling and less top down and that sort of project. But it is a big generalizer. Yeah, I weigh that in that. Now Virginia's got a mouthful, because she cannot say that it's clean. I can still speak.

Yeah, I mean, I have to kind of... Because maybe I think slightly differently now, and I also have problems with essentialisms being inherently kind of queered in every way. but yeah I think that idea of topping from the bottom you know is really fundamental to this idea that women used slash used the machines differently and that operating from outside of the symbolic order of that

you know, that kind of technological economy of the time meant that you really had to be fluid and find those interstitial spaces, which is why it was really important to be slim, because you really needed to kind of navigate through little kind of back doors and, you know, go around the protocols of the academy and the institutions and mess with people's minds a bit, especially like computer technicians and the people who, as I said,

were the gatekeepers of the technology. You had to use their language a bit as well, so you have to kind of take on this kind of fluid approach to a performative kind of persona, I suppose, in order to actually gain access and stuff like that. So I've totally forgotten what the question was, but that was a comment. I think it's always been one of the ways anyone who is obsessed if there is a

the expression of the world and how you are. The ways that the navigator is contained is underhanded and multiple and subversive. So is it, so is it seen as characteristic female, then well so be it. I think a lot of it is about power structure. Can I just ask you, Virginia When you're not talking You're getting a lot of background noise from the cafe Sorry, I had to Sorry, sorry, sorry

Do that now No, no, no, that's okay Yeah, I had to turn my speaker up Actually Yeah, just turn it back on when you want to talk to. I've got another couple of questions, but I should open it up to everyone else if someone wants to ask. I mean, I know Christina just typed into the chat bar. I don't know if you guys can see the chat bar. I don't think Virginia can because she's talking to us on a tablet. but Christina just asked how did ANAT function in this context did VNS Matrix or the cyber feminists find it

curious if it was an alternative access yeah Linda's got it did you guys did either of you guys go ahead Virginia go you've got to turn your sound on there if you want to talk yeah yeah I just did oh wow Annat yeah I suppose Annat was really functionary in a way I mean there were some great kind of projects that were spawned from through Annat and it was the only kind of it was the peak body of its time but there was this whole rhetoric around

in Australia at the time around the clever country. So people were trying to spawn kind of relationships between artists and scientists, artists and technology institutes, you know, all kinds of things. So there was a lot of really, I mean, they did provide some really great funding and enabled a project for a lot of really amazing people who are still doing amazing work now. Not limited to Linda Demand and people like Isabel Del Mott

who was doing work with visualisation around seizures. Oh, so many, so many projects. So, and they provided funding for the NS Matrix, I believe, at some point after I was no longer involved. But, yeah, it was really, it was bound by these kind of protocols around in order to continue receiving its funding that it had to, you know, which had these key performance indicators around connecting artists with scientists. And some of that, again, there were some really interesting outcomes of that

that weren't necessarily commercially driven. So I'd say, I mean, Anna isn't really kind of acknowledged back then as having a key role in furthering, for example, cyber feminism but simply access for all I suppose the early workshops they did were fantastic and a lot of people came out of that like Shilpa Gupta the Indian artist and Shulie was there for one of them was very active

the workshops in particular were really inspiring and and energizing. Sorry, you got your name? Were you involved in the same, Christina? Were you working? No? No, no, not directly. Are you talking to me? I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, well, no, I just that, um... I got interested in and also in the cyber feminists from working with Linda Rackham, who was an artist and scholar who I started to work with somewhat in the early 2000s.

So there was a very recent legacy of this kind of, this is a history that I actually don't know from earlier in the 90s. So I came in in 2002 and was interacting with some of the people in Australia. That's why my interest is in, was there an adversarial relationship between cyberfeminism and Anat, for example, or did it become that? That kind of politics interests me from a period prior to when I became involved. I guess that's my interest. Sorry, just turning on my mic. Certainly not adversarial.

I wouldn't say adversarial at all. In fact, Francesca had been the director of ANAT prior to me and then I was the director of ANAT when we first formed VNAS Matrix. And, yeah, as Linda pointed out, The early summer school spawned a lot of this early cyber feminist work, supported a lot of it. So while in some ways I guess it was really instrumental, but also we were kind of operating outside. But adversarial, I would say no.

Linda? No, no, no. Not adversarial at all. Quite supportive. Yeah, that was totally my, that was my impression, you know. But then, tell us, can you tell us a little bit about what, how things shifted in the 2000s for you guys? Can just start talking about, like, as we approach Web 2.0, let's say in the period 2000 to 2007, let's say. Can you talk about some of your projects, or how do you think the ground shifted during that period? Was there, in terms of even the sexual politics

and the libidinal space economy, and this is an extremely broad question, but I was wondering about your perceptions of that period prior to what we're in now. I think that's around sort of late 90s is when that sort of window of opportunity that was so exciting was kind of closing and especially with the internet it's just so corporate and surveilled and not new. Yeah, possibly less interesting for me. Yeah, as that happened. Yeah, so I kind of jettisoned from the VNS mothership in 96 and it kind of wound up in 97.

And I was talking to Amy about this yesterday. I feel like I've just totally lost the thread of what I was going to say. Anyway, I'll go off on another tangent. Am I being... Can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay. I think I've got this huge lag going on. Yeah, so, as I said, I kind of jettisoned from the VNS mothership in 1996,

and it kind of wrapped up in 1997. That's what I was saying. And, yeah, I was talking to you, Amy, about how... because lots of people have been asking me just in the last month, what happened to cyberfeminism? Why did it die out? What, you know, where did you guys go? Why did Viennese fall apart? And I guess I think by the time, I mean, we had cracks, you know, and fault lines and, you know, as a collective, like there's nothing special about Venus Matrix

over and above every other collective just because we were a cyber feminist collective and we had kind of special paths of kind of bonding or anything. Well, apart from our special all-new gen bonding practices. But, you know, we had fault lines and cracks and also, you know, we were gaining more kind of literacy, knowledges, kind of skills with the machinery and so we were also kind of starting to develop in our own directions and so something about cyber feminism had worked for us, I suppose.

And we had dismantled something and managed to colonize something and then from that space of colonization, which was a more powerful position, though outside I feel is always very powerful, and I don't think that we ever got truly inside and I still don't feel like I operate from inside anything despite my kind of late arrival to the academy so I feel that we we then kind of moved up into our own kind of areas and I'm very nostalgic for text-based

spaces. I think I've been telling a lot of stories about them in the last month or so and I'm very nostalgic for those kinds of spaces. I'm very, I feel dumbed down by current kind of social networking spaces. I feel, I believe that that that's where I learned to write and so my interest kind of went off into a more textual off on a more textual kind of arc and so on and then Francesca through the academy and so on

so yeah I think that was a necessary period of kind of decompression and and taking some distance from cyber feminism. And I think I certainly kind of repudiated it for a moment, you know, perhaps also because it had become to feel like a privileged base and because of some of the aspects that Daniels talks about around intersectionality and race and so on. Yeah, so I'm kind of talking, you know, from my head then and my head now. Yeah. Does anyone else have a question?

I know you're not the only one who's nostalgic for tech space, online spaces, Virginia. I think Luca's been putting plans together for Zeno Feminism BBS, which seems to be coming along quite well here, Luca. Well, no one's going to ask a question. I had a quick question. It was just around, you mentioned elusively to sort of your bondage practices and the like and I'm just curious as what was the theory or the behind looking for new, because

I was reading the one on the Venus Matrix book written by Sadie Plante, the cyber erotics one. I just was interested in more the theory behind that and your objectives in finding new modes of sexuality and discovery, yeah. And where that fit into the more cyber aspects as well. I think, for me, there's something about the incredibly dreaded sexism in those arenas

especially back when we were starting, that was aimed at us as women and as sexual beings. Women were sexual and they shouldn't be in the computer room and whatever. And it was something about taking that sexuality and just making it really big and really excessive and angry and bloody and bringing it into the technology for me, that it was an important thing to call into those very antibody spaces. Not antibody like, you know, immune system. Just turning on my microphone.

Yeah, I agree. and Linda's work in particular, I think, dealt with this, and Francesca's, I have to say, yeah, Linda's work dealt with this, well, and mine. Come on, we're all perverts. So, yeah, Linda's surfaces were particularly, disturbing, visceral, moving, very moving, angry, frightening, alienating.

and those practices around whatever kink, BDSM, bondage and so on, which I'm still really interested in to this day, were around also exploring limits, putting some guts into the machine. Francesca's text scapes were particularly potent.

the mistress of detestable pleasure and all her and the puppet mistress and all her all her spaces on lambda mu were deeply embodied and engaging and I suppose these kinds of practices around testing the limits of the body in a libidinal way, and parallel to our assertion that we wanted to create a deeply embodied space as cyber feminists, create some agency

as sexual entities. and for me also I did a lot of stuff that was this is later a little bit later, not too much later, actually I started that before I was doing stuff with VNX Matrix, I would do a lot of inversion performances so self bondage and then inverted from a beam or a church kind of cathedral roof or whatever, which were really talking about me as an invert, trying to create a language around, which I didn't really have at that time,

around queerness and outsider practices around sexuality and gender and pushing that through a kind of high metaphor and blasphemous kind of text, which I would kind of, I don't know, I called it something like a, I can't remember what I called it, some kind of agonizing textual choreography. But, yeah, I mean, I think those two things ran parallel. We were trying to kind of bust out of the kind of beigeness of the machines

and bust in, you know, and also bust out of the limits of a kind of a contained sexuality. That's really, really interesting. Yeah. And I would ask as well, I guess, it also means you really had a program like something behind your desires to explore these spaces and that I find really inspiring because I guess the paradox seems to be today that whatever sexual practices of sexual liberation is not done well informed with the program

of emancipation and discovery tends to then just become another sort of packaged experience of accepted transgression. So what I see in a lot of the community today which doesn't have that level of informed and intentional wanting to explore, then it tends to be just a rich man's playground where most people are actually quite in the upper tiers of society it doesn't on its own seem to have this so I really like that you it was a very conscious melding of your ideas and your beliefs and your wanting to explore along with it

Yeah, in terms of the packaging of kink, of course. So, you know, I immediately think of FetLife and those kinds of interfaces. And also, I think I wanted to say in the same way that we were experimental with our machines and broke them a lot, we probably also were very experimental with our kind of practices and broke a lot there as well. Thanks.

I'm just going to paste this quote that I think, hey, Luca. I made it. My laptop just moved to the store. I've got a camera again. The UPS guy just came. And I thought they were going to wipe up my operating system and put Windows back on, but they didn't, so I'm ready to go. Sorry, carry on. Well, I just wanted to bring back this, and I think, Luca, it was you that originally flagged this like in a previous conversation on the Xenopad. There's also some quote by Sadie Plant in this interview with Matt Fuller about this embodiment problem. And in both of your work, Linda and Virginia,

you have this very strong emphasis on the physical body as well, which is really important in dispelling this myth about cyberfeminism just being about escaping identity and physicality through virtual spaces. I've just posted it in the sidebar, but I'll read it out quickly because I know Virginia can't see it. So Matt Fuller says to Sadie, in a recent paper you have asked, is this what it means to get out of the meat, not simply to leave the body, but to go further than the organism? And Sadie replies, Basically, the two positions that are established at the minute are either that you talk about disembodiment or you talk about embodiment.

Either you're out of the body in some stratospheric zone or you're in the organism. I think neither of those are correct. When people talk about getting out of the body, they're still assuming that there is some kind of great transcendent space like heaven for the soul or something non-material at any rate to occupy. And as far as I'm concerned, that isn't there. The universe doesn't like that. It's a material process, not some sort of idealist construction. So you can't get out of the matter. That's the crucial thing. But you can get out of the confining organisation of matter, which is shaped into things and, of course, organisms. The organism is literally organised around its organs. The vocabulary says it all, really. So this is a really important point

because this emphasis on materialism is all through your work, all of your work, and Plante sees it specifically as a reputation of academic idealism, of philosophical idealism, which is then embedded in this post-structuralist critique of the Enlightenment, which I think current ways of deploying this Enlightenment project do actually move away from in an interesting way. but maybe that's a point to kind of come back to. The other thing that I was going to say, though, is that it seems to me that the resolution of this embodiment, disembodiment, actual sort of physical, virtual dualism in a lot of cyberfeminist work is connected to this kind of cybernetic,

even sort of like Silicon Valley philosophy of I guess what's been the right of the code these days, pan-computationalism or this kind of cybernetic reductionism of every mode of being into this one kind of information ontology. So I think Sandy Stone talks about it a little bit in her text where she's going through the epochs. And I'm just trying to find this quote. It talks about everything coming down to these different fluxes of information. And Plan talks about it as well. There's also this constant, especially in the stone space, sorry, cat noise,

of messing up this nature-technic divide through Latour, I think, specifically for her in that piece. But, yeah, and also this paradigm is a way of meshing these two different realms, specifically aesthetically, and this is, like, really prevalent in your work, Linda, this kind of, like, machine body aesthetic where you have this kind of, like, pieces of machinery with flesh and sort of blood and all kinds of like fluids as this sort of space where everything is on an equal level of existence and I was wondering if you

guys could maybe comment on this as like how you guys see yourselves in relation to this dualism that's often leveled as a critique between embodiment and disembodiment. And what you're thinking about when you're making these kind of images where you've got the machinic and the biological or the genetic sort of coexisting in a sort of continuum and whether or not you see that as a kind of flat continuum or a flat sort of ontology or whether it's more, I don't know, more nuanced or operates in a different way for you guys.

I'm actually really shocked when I read about cyber feminism, talking about some utopian disembodiment business, which I thought we had left behind in a file of bubble. And then in terms of that Sadie's quote that's in the sidebar is just fantastic. And I really think that's where it is. And also I think more recently I've been reading things like Joanna Mason, which is sort of the best physics combination of seeing the world, which is about that flat organisation of matter

where nothing is really prioritised of anything else. It's just a class scene of supervision and flesh and bodies and ideas and whatever. Which, yeah, it really makes sense to me. And I wasn't consciously thinking about that when making the work, but something about also it always strikes and damaging rip to pieces and string all around and look at your rustling I'm just trying to set up the stuff

so I can get the sound right again. So it's involving juggling a couple of computers. But I'm totally there, possibly. Sorry. It's okay. I missed some of what Luna was saying there, but I suppose some of the stuff that comes to mind when I'm thinking about embodiment, disembodiment and flesh, machinic kind of assemblages or continuance topologies is some of the stuff about the

ProAnna websites and Hollaback and a variety of other kind of sites which in my own experience I have employed a lot of those spaces during my time with VNS Matrix and before and after as spaces to connect with others so the machine has definitely become the part of me that was able to go a place where I wasn't able to go.

So, for example, as someone who had suffered from what he was with, had panic as a constant companion, including things like agoraphobia and quiet debilitating levels. A lot of these spaces, some of them like Mad Girls, for example, which was a place for consumer survivors and patients of the mental death system. And it was a queer space as well. It enabled me to go beyond and go and be with people

who could support me through whatever struggles I was having, but it enabled me to go where I could not go. So in that sense, that assemblage became very important to my kind of ontological continuation and my ontological survival and security. so yeah I suppose and also the thing I think about when I think about embodiment and virtual spaces is my personal connection with the machine itself so

like in the early days you know before browsers and when you were still using dial-up modems, there was the sound, you know, the ding, ding, ding, meh, mer, pshh, you know. It's like kind of, you know, and you'd like just pause and wait till you heard it connect because sometimes it wouldn't, you know, and you'd have to go through it again and again. And there was this, you know, this moment of, like, suspension and holding your breath and then a total rush you know when oh my god get out stop it

that's it is it going to connect please oh my god I'm getting a total rush now so I was like this deep this deeply embodied kind of rush, you know, and then I was, so if someone was watching me from outside, so I was really like sending my whole self through my fingers through the keyboard and out into this space. But inside my body at the terminal were all kinds of kind of wild, kind of explosive dynamics going on that nobody from the outside could see. So, you know, so for me, that's another thing I think about

when I think of kind of machine body assemblages. But, yeah, anyway, just a couple of things. You know what else? The practice of sitting at a computer for far too long and making work is so a bondage situation, You're so restrained and you can't move and your back hurts and your fingers don't move properly and your wrist starts to hurt. It's like you're actually bound by the machinery of destruction. But through that, as there is through that bondage and restraint and what it is you're doing, through the kind of ecstatic transcendence.

Cool. and after sitting at the computer for all those as you have to go hang upside down yeah um yeah we should definitely bring you in Patricia I don't know what kind of particular

What's the thing you want to bring up? Well, it's a bit... Yeah, I feel a bit inept to discuss a lot of this thing because although I'm working alongside you fabulous crew, I'm not so well versed in a lot of the theory. Although I do programs, so I'm very empathetic to the coding, bouncing machines, and coding. But I think one thing that I'm kind of curious about, to go back to the quote that you had read, you know, probably about, I don't know, 25 minutes ago or so, about, and I'm just kind of, I guess I'm trying to unpack a logic that I'm not, and you're far more versed in this theory than myself to address it, but it just

like a kind of problematic contradiction in the sense that in the quote that you read in the client about exactly talking about there's no essential identity to returned to etc etc but then it's a new sort of technological paradigm as I can inherently female or something like this and then just kind of on the one hand it seems to be trying to productively overturn any sort of identitarian move. On the other hand, it seems like you're justifying that by assigning, ascribing a gender to the apparatus. So it's probably due to my sheer ignorance

that this logic seems contradictory to me. But perhaps that's of some worth to discuss. I'm not sure. Yeah, absolutely. This is a really important point, and certainly registers, I think, as a contradiction, which has been picked up by lots of critics as well. Yeah, so Christina's pointing out this alienation, the alienation then equivalents move is the same as the one that Firestone makes. I think it's a really interesting space of play. And my take on it, and I'd be really glad to hear how other people read this as well, is that Plan is on the one hand doing something that's very timely for the, I suppose, the

kind of theory that was happening at the time, especially coming into this through Irigar 8, and creating this sort of zeros and ones set or schema, I suppose, to understand the interaction of the masculine and the feminine in this technologised space in order to then move on to this possibility of complete alienation from essence so as I put it before I think it's a kind of essentialising to de-essentialise and the way that I understand it is specifically, I mean I think Kant's definitely coming at this through a Deleuzian perspective and contrary to it being a binary opposition it's not

it's more, as she kind of sort of puts it in the on the matrix the zero is a precondition for the one it's more like the relation between the virtual and the actual so it's not strictly an opposition, it's not even an opposition like there's an ultimate difference between them in the Deleuzean sense I'm going to read this little passage which underlines this for me, which is on page 333 on the Matrix article, where she kind of extrapolates out of this Irigaray quote and says, digitization sets zero free to stand for nothing and make

everything work. The ones and zeros of machine code are not patriarchal binaries or counterparts to each other. Zero is not the other, but the very possibility of all of the ones. Zero is the matrix of calculation, the possibility of multiplication, and has been reprocessing the modern world since it arrived from the East. It neither counts nor represents, but with digitization it proliferates, replicates, and undermines the privilege of one. Zero is not its absence, but a zone of multiplicity which cannot be perceived by the one who sees. woman represents the horror of nothing to see but she also has sex organs more or less everywhere she too is more than the sum of her parts beside herself with her extra links

so there's this really cool move of like everything she's at the same time everything and nothing um which destabilizes the kind of traditional understanding of what this essentialism means. So I think Clance occupying a really interesting space here and that ultimately her project leads to this similar move of alienation from essence that Deneo feminism hopes to make. But yeah, I'd love to hear what other people think about this and also about the way that she classes this kind of masculine movement of the Enlightenment towards the end of On the Matrix.

Have we got Petra? Is she? Petra. I'm hiding in a staff lounge right now. That is so cool. So yeah, I'd love to hear what you think about it. Because I mean that kind of thread of, you know, that kind of very typical take on the Enlightenment project that's kind of been a reiteration, kind of almost canonized reading now. Do you think like moving into, is there any sort of sense given your, say, more extensive

reading of her work, that there is a possibility for this trajectory or is it bound absolutely to that historical potential for a future iteration? It's still very much caught up in this...what was I going to say? totally lost my train of thought. So this whole kind of like bottom-up versus top-down sort of cybernetic set of strategies or tactics, maybe. And so any kind of top-down organization instantly reeks of the enlightenment. As soon as you have a sort of hierarchy, then

you're kind of already like embarking on this problematic trajectory that needs to be sort of brought back to this idea of like spontaneous emergence, self-organisation. The kind of markets of Brodelit, Plan talks a lot about these kind of market economies, these spontaneous self-organising, self-assembling market economies that are separate from the capitalist organisation of markets. and they're the kind of things that arise when you get like a festival and you know like a camping festival and people sort of set up like little kind of hangout spaces and you know rudimentary shops and start naming streets and you get this kind of spontaneous network that just comes out of nowhere. So I think she's very much still at least you know in this 90s work

thinking like this. But the interesting kind of leak in this critique is that the kind of enlightenment project that like current left accelerationism is thinking of, the stuff that Reza and Ray are talking about, is very much this kind of imminent, not necessarily bottom up, but there's no kind of central command system to their way of envisioning this kind of stepwise optimization that constantly reconstitutes an ontological position each time it rearranges being. Which is absolutely why it's an interesting kind of follow on from this 90s theory because

it takes kind of the best parts of it, lodges the like general enlightenment critique, but it's very much introducing this kind of hierarchical understanding of systems back in, based, you know, in order to get away from this flat kind of cybernetic optimism of just this one kind of role of being. This is how I kind of conceive of it. It would be really interesting, I think, actually, to see, to talk to Sadie and ask how much she stands by all this stuff these days and how she reads it.

Well, maybe, because in your introduction, I just was making some notes about some of terms you were using, to talk about sort of mapping, because I'm just trying to understand how we bring this into our contemporary context where it's just kind of ubiquitous. I mean it doesn't seem so anachronistic to use the word cyber in a way, because it's really everyday. But then so you were talking about this kind of, as I understood it celebrated liquidity of the cyberfeminists in correlation to our contemporary context and how that maps onto it and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about your thoughts on that.

Yeah, so my idea, I mean, yeah, obviously like the slime stuff, the idea about multiplicity, liquidity dissolution is very much this tactic of early feminism, right Virginia? But this is kind of also happening at a time when there is still, especially within the market, there's still this very operative critique of hierarchical systems that theorists like Deleuze are sort of operating. But after 1971 and kind of the introduction of fiat money, the market sort of takes on this ideal liquidity itself. It becomes like this possibility of

the polymorphous perversity itself. And it's kind of like we're living in a here and now where we're using this, or, you know, it's kind of silly to use this, like, fluidity and perverse kind of plugging into everything kind of trope as a way of critiquing something that's already doing that itself. It's like capitalism's kind of doing it better. And so I think the key is to maybe, like, figure out a way to do this strategy, to do kind of like a Deleuzean strategy or to figure out how to reactivate these kind of ideas in an era that is doing them better than the critics are.

So that's kind of what I was trying to say. I know Helen, Luca, Ivan, you guys got some thoughts on this kind of like idea of liquidity in in a liquid age I think it like kind of correlates to I'll when my home no yeah I think you can yeah I think I mean kinda correlates to some good It was a little bit glitchy. I don't know. Something that was...

It's because it's 135. No, it kind of correlates to another point of... Is it too bad? Should I stop? No, no, no. It's good. It's good. Keep going. Okay. No, it kind of correlates to an earlier point made by one of our guests about this kind you know what they kind of the kind of um very like promising fast-moving um appearance of the internet and how it kind of permeated how it kind of started to bring together artists and technologists and so on and there seems to be this kind of like idealism of bringing these worlds together somehow

um and I'm just thinking about in relation to the liquidity being already kind of subsumed and people are performing it in a much more efficacious way than you could ever do. And I'm just kind of recalling having just been at my old art school a week ago or so in Montreal and how they have a new building and it's basically financed by super fancy because it's basically the art school is turning into some kind of like art, engineering, techno, what have you. And I'm just wondering how this works when alienation has to keep redefining itself in a way. Because it's almost like you have to, and I'm kind of thinking about Benedict Singleton's traps in a sense, right? That it's like you keep building these traps and you have to keep engineering yourself out of these traps.

Because it's, which again refers to the liquidity, that it's like, okay, that was one strategy, it's actually very effective, and there's people doing it super well. Same could be said for art engineering match-ups. So it's more of like trying to understand, yeah, trying to kind of be a devil's advocate and say how realistic is this movement of alienation? Is it always doomed to be cannibalized? And yeah, maybe you want to say something about that. I like that, I really like that point. It's a bit like it gets co-opted or cannibalized

as you say, right? And it's a bit like even, you know, there's that thing where even before I was talking about BDSM being this, you know, a man's free thing and it's been then co-opted into just an experience and now we talk about, you know, being single and sort of cunning and you know, into this generality and then that gets caught up as well. And I guess I would see it as the reason why the US Matrix work on like was so fruitful as opposed to what happens today is that there is a theory and there is an explicit political

role. So I think a way of getting out of that for me is constantly being abreast of, like you mentioned, the Lakers and the Center of Using Art and Engineering, it's managing to continually on this, we should co-opt and the marketing, so we can continually politicize, or not politicize, continually inform these new capitalist developments while knowing how to speak the language and not appearing as the academic buddy-daddies who are still banging on about, you know, Adorno language and, you know, . It's like the co-op thing has already happened. Now we have to get in there as viral agents and be able to sneakily start to get them

thinking about what's important, you know, to us. Because we can't. We can't, you know, we can't, we don't have the money to like create, you know, a big centre of, we just don't. All we can do is act as viral, yeah. I think this like viral and contagion rhetoric that, you know, is very prevalent in the VNS and early cyberpunk is like still useful to us. And I just need to kind of pause the convo for a sec because Virginia's got to head off and catch the train. So just thought we should all say thanks for drifting in on our Hangout.

Thank you. Thank you. It's been really great to get to talk to you. Thank you so much, Virginia. This was, yeah, this was fantastic to hear you talk. We'll let you know when we have the BBS running. Yeah, we'll see you guys. yes to see you on the Zenfm BDS yeah and the pod yeah the diaspora pod is also coming thank you thank you so much hopefully we can all reconnect later so yeah thank you you're all awesome thank you

have a good trip Thanks. I have to get on a train. I can't just transport my matter, unfortunately. But, yeah. Bye. Bye. I'm afraid of flying. Chris says thanks for the insights. I don't think Virginia can see the sidebar. Cool. All right, so, what were we saying? yeah, this kind of like I think this is a really interesting part of the aesthetic that was being put forward and this kind of like viral warfare using these interstitial spaces is still something really interesting

and maybe it's just a kind of a matter of recasting this fluidity as something like this dynamic structuralism You mean like this, what is it, dynamic stability? Yeah, dynamic stability. I think that the viral does connect into that very well. or maybe like the viroid, the not quite viral, but maybe like the parallel in that kind of logic. Like a virus is kind of like both maybe dependent

on that liquidity, but also suspended, you know, like between its mutations into something else. I think that's a cool way to think of it. I like that distinction between the viral and the viral. I guess I'd like to return to the question that prompted that awesome plant quotation to Burroughs and to the word virus idea. but more particularly to the right virus idea at the end of his work, like this notion, you know, he has that great quote, like, the mark of a basic shit is that he has to be

right. I think, you know, language embodies and it keeps us in this, you know, perpetuum, and we do keep getting trapped and we do keep having to build traps, but how, I don't know, I find it very interesting that language can be defined as a virus. It's something that just replicates itself, but there's a responsibility to replicate and to also venture apart or to detach from the replications. I think that was something that seemed to be happening in this movement and something I'm curious about.

This is something I think that maybe your piece at the end of the Accelerate Reader, Patricia, is kind of charging this kind of network of political ideas that is gripped under the idea of left accelerationism to do some of the things that cyber feminism what's going to get back to this idea of the aesthetic to deploying, as Chris is kind of pointing out, this like sort of viral inherent quality of language towards some libidinal effective end to kind of bring the aesthetic back in this I suppose politically charged

way. Do you kind of, does that sort of represent that? Yeah, yeah, sure. Sure, sure. I guess the question I have, and maybe it's just like, you know, tell me if it's moving on too much to the next session, which I am assuming is to do with reason, because it's Ben Woodard is participating. But I'm just curious about this kind of relationship between, I've never had this term before, Viroid, so I really like it. I don't know what the difference is between contagion. I don't know. I think I made it up. I think I took it from Markzoyd. I don't know. Okay. So we have to now quote you every time we use this word. But okay, so not quite a virus, as I understood.

Becoming virus, if you will. But just, yeah, this kind of relation between virus, contagion, and norms. Because this is where I think... You know, like more sort of conventional political theory categories of will come into play and converge in that sort of network of terms, basically. Because I think that's at least what I was asking about in the end of the Accelerate text. It has more to do with how does the will come into play. And in that regard, it really makes me think about these strategies of contagion. And are these strategies of contagion powerful enough to, you know,

or construct norms? Is that the... Sorry, I'm losing my train of thought at this hour. Is that the desired outcome? Or what is the position of the cyberfeminist in the 90s variant in relationship to norms? to norms, is it still a kind of mistrust of this terminology or is it embracing it in this kind of constructive capacity? My hunch on that, but maybe, yeah Linda is probably better to answer this.

I was just going to say Patricia, could you repeat that last bit because I missed some. I missed some for what? I'm just wondering about, okay, the basic question is how this kind of connection between the terms of viral, contagion, norms and say like political will, do you see those as kind of convergent? And what was the sort of position of... I've lost you. Um... The first point is... And you may say, and your introduction was there's only five...

...sips... ...sips... ...sips... ...sips... ...sips... ...sips... ...sips... ...sips... Someone's trying to, yeah. So wait, what was the relationship between viral, this kind of like viral rhetoric, the idea of producing norms, sort of understood as platforms from which some kind of political act can be launched, and political will? That was the bit that I heard, is that right? Maybe you want to type it.

So that maybe the idea of viroid as not quite virus involves sort of like creating like a platform or a norm from which to then do something else. Is that sort of it? I guess that's what I wanted to offer with it. Like, I like Mackenzie-Wark's distinction between their Marxoid political economy versus a Marxist political economy, which I think maybe takes what is useful from it and leaves

what is not. So, I don't know. I just like that formulation. Yeah, obviously, because viruses, I mean, they go both ways, right? They construct new, sort of, by mutating, they construct new ways of creating or constructing an organism, but they also dissolve a previous organism's integrity and can destroy it. This is a really, really interesting kind of thing to think. Would the connection be along the lines of parasitism then? I mean, is that what you're thinking? That, I mean, what a norm does is in some sense, I don't know,

it elicits the will to let it hijack that will in some way. I mean, you act as you. Oh, God. Don't tell me this. It's still working. No, I just think... Okay. Oh, my God. I just got this laptop back from the makers, and the problem's exactly the same as when I sent it. Virus? No, not a virus. It's like the AC adapter seems to not be clicking in properly. Oh god. This is just such a pain. Okay, sorry.

I lost my train of thought there. I might have to... Damn it. I might be switching back to the dark version over here, my Cali box. Okay. What was I talking about there? Right, right, okay, yeah, so I've totally lost this particular train of thought, but I was thinking, Petra, were you thinking in terms of norms as a parasite of the will? And not necessarily in a bad way there, but if you're acting according to norms, if your will is guided by norms, then it's not acting in its own, what Kant would call its pathological interest, right? It's not acting in terms of its own self-interest. It's sort of being

coordinated by something that's kind of outside of it. Or at least somehow, yeah, coordinated is a good word. I'm not totally clear on what we mean by norm. Could anyone clarify that for me, about specifically what we mean by norm in this context? Just like the correlate of, you know, judgments like, I ought to do this, or this should be like that. OK. You know, notions of validity, for example, in reasoning, right? Like if something entails something else, that's not a statement of fact. That's a statement of norm. Patricia has a great one-sentence description

of that at the very end, to an extent. I'll read the future, which is, this is how norms aren't a law, but they are of a law. I thought that was a really good one line. Norms aren't a law, they are? Conception. Okay. So it's definitely, like, by necessity, it couldn't be temporary. Like a norm is like in some kind of way like rationally eternal in that sense? No. No? I think the idea of norms that we're talking about here is not...

I mean, it's like... I don't know. You guys definitely chime in here. Patricia, maybe you can... That's kind of how you're envisaging it. I thought, if you don't mind, if I say something really quickly, Patricia, Amy, everybody, I thought something was that it really just, you know, productive norms. And I think that that is a process that we need to keep doing, but you also admit that they need revision and reorientation themselves. So it's very interesting to me how, yeah, the viral does come from both sides. So yeah, viroid norms, I don't know. Let's work on them.

norms? I don't know. Let's work on them. Well, I guess that makes me think of something interesting, man. If it's kind of... If what is normative is what is rationally internal, or at least coordinated by what can be rational, or something? I don't know. I'm just going to move on, because I kind of don't know what I'm saying. But a virus is in its reproduction kind of falling apart, right? Like, from what I understand of like RNA replication. Sorry, I'm going to be done with this class in like five minutes or so. Okay, I was just going to find out how long it was about to arm the building. Okay, yeah, I'll just leave this quickly.

Sorry about that. Okay, so that... The last thing I saw was... Okay, so like from what I know about RNA In order to replicate itself It's almost kind of trying to like neutralize itself out of existence And it's merely by accident that we get like these more elaborate biological complexes Out of this process is like DNA And this may be entirely wrong But I mean what that makes me think of is that like In this sense maybe what is normative is like the material conditions for its reproduction and not the form. So that what is normative is not formative in the viroid.

And maybe to clarify that a little bit more before I have to go, that the virol has to exhaust its host, and exhausting its host also means that it can no longer reproduce. So, like, um, it's constantly in the act of dying and killing. That is its life. So, like, what could the viroid, what could be viroidally normative in that sense? Is my question here? I also understand that, like, I'm not caught up with it. like your point of Petra, how the RNA has to destroy it.

And he mentions the cruelty of it. Yes, causing norms in almost to break in space. It's common sense and it's subject to constant, like the virus, trying to find proofs of them. the virus adapts to changing conditions and its cool like abstraction often destroys what we thought was fine but unlike a virus it's not just a reaction adapting to its environment it has an impact on what makes us that being we intentionally make commitments and warnings once people rise and light up, it'll just...

I liked what I could hear of that. Yeah, we've got some kind of like... someone's like snuffling into their microphone, I think. Um... Which is making it... I think that's better. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe it was me. a parasite, a noise, like in Michelle's self, a noise that... No, because actually I was thinking about the... I don't know if it makes sense here, but I see like norm very much related to the ethical and the question of what one should do.

I mean, should is a very important thing for the norm. But I think the question of the viral and of the parasitical in particular has to do also with the aesthetic. so I was wondering how how they come I mean how the ethical and the aesthetic come I mean also thinking of the norm like of this whole thing with the norm core which is rather more aesthetic than ethical so I don't know if somebody

has a but I think it kind of respond, but I'm gonna get the police called on me if I don't leave now. I'm really sorry, I have to go everybody. I'm very sad. Thanks for dropping in for like, the brief time that you had. Thanks so much Petra. I think that was a bit of a chance here to take care. Yeah. I got busted, but oh well, it was worth it. I love you all. Bye now. Um... We've got, I just was going to mention Linda, we've got another sort of half an hour vaguely that we can kind of keep talking. I don't know if you've got stuff to go to, but I was just going to say don't, I mean if you need to do things, don't feel like you have to sit in, even though we'd love

for you to stay. Thank you. I don't want you to be kind of sitting here having things that you needed to be at, because I didn't tell you that it was going to 12.30, I just said 12, I think. 12, yeah. About 10 past, I've got it recently. Well, maybe we can kind of throw this question to you. I think this is a big problem with the 21st century issue of trying to create a space for political and social action when we're completely surrounded by this liquidity that capitalism does better than anyone else. And if we want to continue a sort of like technologically

engaged feminist, queer, trans politics, we need to have some way, I think, to plug it into the aesthetic and to use the aesthetic in a way that you guys were deploying it in in relation to political issues like 10, 15 years ago. And I find this really kind of an interesting problem for these political theories that we're talking about. I guess this kind of left accelerationist thing that still has an ambivalent relationship to the aesthetic. And quite rightly so because the art market has become basically just a commodity.

market. So is there a kind of space for an aesthetic political practice that doesn't immediately inscribe itself in the kind of like value structures of the market and that can drive some kind of positive, especially technologically engaged queer trans feminist project. I love the idea of that. I have no idea if that's even possible. So I don't know, but that would be really good. So please could you do that? Yeah, it's like a massive, massive question. Really beautiful

because I think that's something and that it is. It's something about the aesthetic that possibly They could have some intervention or role in doing the contract. No idea. Well, when we figure it out. I mean, is there something that is not, I mean, in a way it's impossible to stay outside and in a way aesthetics is, I mean, in my view it's a bit like using an aesthetical strategy of navigation in order to advance while also reforming ethical norms.

Yeah, I mean, how do you plug the aesthetic and the ethical in a way that's... No, I mean, I was just... Like, as you were mentioning about using the norm, like, I mean, the norm that is a platform, no? And anyway, what Luca was saying, that what the norm does is that it, I mean, you pose a norm, and then the norm gets hijacked. So, I mean, in a way that that platform gets hijacked. And once you, and somehow, I mean, I'm trying to connect here.

but I'm not very... I mean, it's 3 o'clock, you have to understand. But aesthetically, I think, I mean, this strategy, because we were talking a lot about, like, zeros, ones, and nothing and everything, or, you know, like, one, like, singularity, and zero, like, genericity, and somehow, because somehow also the power operates in this strategy of hyper-camouflage, and becoming background, becoming generic. And I was thinking, I mean, if you pose it a norm and you use it as a platform and you become one with it in a way, but anyway it gets hijacked.

I don't know how to... But I think there is something here that... I mean, some modes, I mean, this kind of hyper-identification of becoming background or oscillating between being no one and constructed identities, you know, like, because there is no essence to return to. So you are either nothing or no one or zero or you are either, you know, constructed identity. and I think this has I think this also has to do with I mean it's an aesthetic strategy in a way to me I mean also if we think of the

because Luciana Parisi has been also a proponent of cyber feminism and with her book Abstract Sex about talking about and now I mean I don't want to talk about this but I mean now she's working on computation and all algorithms and she talks a lot about about logics as an aesthetic operation and algorithms being having their own spatial temporality and functioning in an aesthetic regime

And then she mentions, I mean, she kind of goes beyond this binary opposition like 0, 1, and algorithms as only, I mean, being only about discreteness, but being about processing infinities and producing clouds and clouds of inconsistencies. I don't know. I mean, I think that, yeah, I think these problems somehow are, yeah, I mean, since the beginning of the discussion have been somehow on my mind, like the nature of algorithm, of computation, and the gray zone between the zero and the one, like,

and I mean even logic that becomes aesthetic in a way and these strategies that are more yeah like I mean how you navigate as a subjectivity or whatever Yeah, I'm being kind of chaotic, but I hope you got something from this. I think that was very interesting and clear, and I haven't read Zeros and Ones, but I'm going to ask a question I've always been afraid to ask a group of feminists.

How do you guys feel about Lacan's last seminar? this notion of woman as crossed through or barred through, but also as like the engendering force because of its impossibility, like his big other, his, you know, the real. And then we see this in everyone's work, the outside or whatever, but for him at the very and it became woman as zero, but as the, like, I don't know, as maybe that gray zone, or I don't know. I don't know what. It's a very hard text to read. It gets in knots and loops and stuff,

but I just wanted to ask you guys if anyone's read it or have any thoughts on it. Maybe, I don't know. I'm not worried in the con at all, but maybe Luca can answer that. But before she possibly does, Linda's got to head off. So just a quick kind of pause to say thank you so much for joining us. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you. And, yeah, sharing all of your kind of insight into this problematic. And if we figure out an answer, we'll definitely tell you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Linda. It really was lovely of you to come and really fascinating to hear you talk. So hopefully these conversations will not end with this session,

but will continue through the lovely medium that is Amy Island. So thank you very much for being here for your contributions. We do appreciate it. Thanks. It was great to meet you all. You're awesome. See you later. Thank you. Thanks a million. Bye. Alina, that was a really interesting point. I'm wondering if you could put it into text and maybe put it in the classroom for discussion. Yeah, yeah, no, I have to gather my thoughts because I told you it's 3 o'clock here and I have a scheme on my notebook, but it's going mad. But I will, I will, I will. Great. That's a great way to do that, sort of text, is you have some time to think and collect your thoughts.

and that's what I really love about online discussions as well. I hate to, like, jump you, Alina, but I think that your work in progress on Cryptoplexy really plugs into all of this, or at least the part that I caught before I had to go for a little while there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it has to do with that one, yeah. I can't wait to read it. Yeah, you can't wait to write it. If you want to post it in the classroom, that would be kind of whatever. Yeah, no, I have, I mean, it's not a finished paper. I mean, I did a paper on algorithm and the horror of the algorithm,

I mean, linking aesthetics to, I mean, based on Luciana's book and also on my own research linking algorithmic aesthetics to the horror genre and the question of the outside. Yeah, and the paradigms and camouflage and all these are really on my mind. Me too. It makes me think of Kristeva's work on the abject. I guess you mentioned horror. speaking to the arrest

who did a lot of work on that. That's kind of like Virginia's area of interest too at the moment. The ejection stuff. It's a shame. Yeah, yeah. Did anyone have an answer for Chris's question about LeColin? Anyone who knows LeColin? Are you still around, Luca? Because I reckon I know you have stuff to say on this I think Luca's on the dark machine right now Because I really like some of my trans concepts, but I've never gotten into them as well Well, the last

seminar, so yeah, there's like 20 and the last one's called On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Language yeah we can't hear you Lika Hawks is with a bar through it and he literally just crosses it but it's such a weird piece, he honestly argues that the history of mysticism and philosophy is like trying to map that inability to understand and then he starts getting into like not and I've always just wanted to meet someone who knew what the hell was going on but I also don't think

it's at all negative I think it's very curious but potentially fruitful text I think it might have had a big influence on Deleuze's feminism and vitalism actually people tend to differentiate the two but I think Zizek's book wasn't enough that there needs to be more study on their impact or Deleuze's influence from? Well, Gattari was a student of Vakana, and I often feel that actually they have exactly equivalent concepts in their two major books together. They just do completely different terms. Yeah, it just relates so closely to this idea of norm or viroid norm reconstruction

because he created his own algebra for all of it. It's a really fun book. Everyone should get it, actually, and help me figure out what the hell's going on. We posted in the classroom before the discussion. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Any of the grads that should be continued, like, go in and start them up in the classroom? Amy, about the fluidity question, which is also a bit on my mind. I mean, I... But don't you think that this notion of fluidity... I mean, I am also fond of it, but in a way, there is something that I'm...

I think I'm in a very, you know, maybe... trivial understanding like something fluid is something that has a continuity in a way I mean this is trivial view on fluidity but in a way I was thinking now that yeah Yeah, this question of fluidity links to this question of continuity, and in a way, in this respect, it can align itself with a post-humanism understood as, you know, like, kind of smooth.

the smooth continuity between human, machine, animal, while somehow there has been a lot of discussion about the end of the post-human and this kind of break from multiple points of view. I mean, for example, Claire Colbrook or bringing the extinction event as a kind of radical discontinuity. And I was thinking, like, if, you know, how this, somehow how this kind of discontinuity or, you know,

like bringing the outside in messes with a question of fluidity, which actually, yeah, it's like if you read all this kind of, like, treatise or manuals of economics, you would get the best position in the economy is to stay on the edge of chaos. And the edge of chaos is like right before something becomes gaseous, becomes chaos itself. There are two things that just sprung to my end immediately.

One of them is maybe a little bit off topic, and maybe we can talk about it a bit later. But the first one is that the kind of fluidity that I was criticizing as perhaps being ineffective is one that definitely presupposes a non-hierarchical continuum. And this kind of like sort of possibility of all kinds of different connections within this constantly fluid space. But then there's a fluidity of the dynamic structure or the kind of like constantly shifting platform or the constantly like hijacked norm that actually moves through hierarchical kind of constructions in order to bootstrap itself up or out to somewhere else. And I don't know, understanding the outside in relation to this

is always a complicated thing. But perhaps it's a different thought that doesn't connect up to what I just said then, but this idea of the rupture or the disruption of the extinction event makes me think, and your point about the economy's perfect point being this edge of chaos but not quite falling over into it makes me think of the Thais ideas of the restricted and general economies and this kind of economy even that goes so far with chaos but that won't quite go over the edge, I think this is something Chatelet is talking about as well when he's critiquing this equilibrium thermocracy idea of

of the economy that there's like a point that it needs to be fixed at and kind of held there with all the right kind of set of inputs and outputs and it's an economy of affordance of the restricted economy as soon as you kind of start allowing for that one thing that's going to come in and disrupt everything you you're actually like you know you're moving into this whole space of non-affordance the outside. And I think to put this back into kind of stuff we were talking about Chateau the other day that there's a kind of cybernetic way of getting out of that. And this is the positive feedback kind of thing that Plant talks about quite a bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was, I mean, I was That kind of leads to extinction. So as a political process however useful that is, it's still, you know, under question. as a who. You know, it was, I mean, somehow this move, I mean, that I was also thinking about, like, not being, staying at the edge of chaos, but bringing the chaos, like, from outside, you know, inside or from the future to the present or something. I mean, like, this kind of loop, like, movement, not staying there, but somehow bringing, I mean, it's a different kind of...

Also because we were talking about questions of how to avoid essences and this kind of constant treason, constant treachery, constant... yeah like in a way something that supersedes authenticity it's also interesting because you've read a lot more plant than I have I think but it's so interesting in relation to Lance work of course and this notion of an augmenting process that is not

you know, necessarily negative or positive, but, you know, negantropic or, you know, it's interesting. I wanted to ask you about, like, divergences that you've, do you see divergences in our work that correlate to maybe sociohistorical divergences and place and time between them? I don't know, you know what I mean? Or is that it? I think there was a period when they were pretty much on the same wavelength. Like, seriously, showing the same wavelength. And there's one line in here that read to me as absolutely coincident with Land's project. I'm just trying to find it.

Except that, you know, Land uses this trope as well. It feminizes the escaping intelligence. So, you know, whether you want to read... I mean, for Plant, it's all about this emancipation of a feminine space and a feminine vector. And, you know, the inhuman through Haraway is automatically kind of mapped onto the feminine as the other of man and mankind. But she has this sentence which is like... Where is it? Where is it? It's about this feminine intelligence assembling itself as an emergent process against any kind of plan that masculine history would set up.

It's an ahistorical process that kind of moves some kind of convergent wave against the temporalising march of historical politics, which is beautifully underlined in the Bitch Mutant Manifesto, which starts with this kind of technological bastardisation of the angel of history. So I think there's a point where what they're doing is kind of isomorphic, but I think if you really wanted to cut it fine, Plant would pull away from some of the more nihilistic aspects of Land's work in the end. And I think for her, it's really always been about a kind of an inhuman political project but one that doesn't get quite so

grim as what land does. So that's my take on it. Yeah, that's a great, quite like a... Yeah, I'm just going to try and find this line, because it's really quite good. I cannot help myself. But there is something that Lent says, I think maybe in Fang No Man, I don't know, about women staying somehow in the path of nihilism.

Yeah. No, but he says this literally. I guess next week you'll talk about reason and the enlightenment from like a feminist perspective but I'd always think the idea of cunning intelligence Benedict Singleton and that revisionary aspect of Reza's concept of reason are both this kind of you can't pin it down, it's not this you know hierarchical set of ten commandments, this is reason which which is, you know, this is what we're telling you. It's more like that land quote. It's elusive and its concepts are open-ended because they need to be universal.

The minute you try and get too specific, then it's not open-ended. Absolutely. It's autonomous, eminent, sort of self-assembling. reason. Like the whole hundred things of what the cyber feminist, you know, what it's not, it's exactly kind of that. It's like, you know, let me define a universal human value. And rather let's start with, well, we're not about exploiting other human beings. Rather than, this is the white human generic body, and then there's all these different, which is kind of the problem when the Enlightenment tried to posit these, you know, these universal standards

and it was an excuse to go and conquer the natives, you know. Amy, were you looking for the Asimov's part from On the Matrix? That wasn't what I was looking for, but Lucas but now that Lucas posted it and you've mentioned it it's absolutely apt as well. I have that right here. Yeah, do you want to read it? Sure. So this is from Plant, On the Matrix. And she says, When Isaac Asimov wrote his three laws of robotics, they were lifted straight from the marriage vows. Love, honor, and obey. Like women, any thinking machines are admitted on the understanding that they are duty-bound to honor and obey. That's as much as I have of it.

It's beautiful, though, that this kind of escaping machining intelligence is submitted to the same systems of oppression as women. Right. The quote that I was thinking of is has this much more equivocal kind of slightly nihilistic tint to it. It's towards the end. It says, it takes an irresponsible feminism, which may not be a feminism at all, to trace the inhuman paths on which woman begins to assemble herself. That to me it read as It was like something that they would have written eye to eye, basically. That was CD Plant, Christina.

Yeah. I forgot that we were going to have a couple of people present on the Plant piece, which we don't really have time, but did anyone who actually to have, like, sit and think about those ideas, have anything kind of to say before we sign out. I did really like the BDSM piece. I recognize it's late, so, you know, the people in the UK, I just had a few little things up. Yeah, five minutes or something like that. I think almost I got your page. Was that the right essay on the Venus Matrix? one? It was from page 43, wasn't it?

Yeah, I think so. It's all new gen, yeah? It's just got a completely different title. I think it's called...it's called... You're reading the plant piece on VNS, right? Yes. Yeah. In Virtual Futures. Called Coming Across the Future? Yeah, the piece was the actual VNS Matrix piece, but it's actually a really good that you read that. Because it says in the name of the PDF, it says the page range, but then the actual essay is different. Maybe I was doing the page range from the printed original page numbers rather than the PDF numbers.

I didn't think of that, sorry. No, no, I looked at the printed numbers, sorry. Yeah. Maybe I did it backwards, sorry. But, like, that's, you know, just as good to have read. It's a great piece. I was in reality. It's a really good piece. And it's almost back to the Preciado, and Foucault at one point really thought S&M in and of itself would posit this new form of sexuality. and I really liked the masochist is not simply the victim enslaved by mastery, this is the macho bullshit of a discourse which admits nothing beyond subjection, a perspective which cannot escape any relation, any other relation. And I just like that in a sense, even if you look at it from sort of a musical sense,

some of the beauty of electronic music, even that the CCRU was so interested in is, it can be hard and fast but it never is this sort of muscular hard, you know, mainstream like I would say metal but you know, but more like that sort of bro hard music which has its limits because it's all very much in the muscular competitive scheme of things and And it's tiring because there's this inflation of it has to be harder, it has to be faster, and then seeing it's ruined. Whereas stuff like Jungle or good Psytrance, we reach ecstatic levels which completely transcend that linear discourse of just domination, submission.

I thought that was really nice as that. as well the idea of masochism not being at all what Freud and a little bit Deleuze said as well. It's not about stop confusing servitude with dependence and the question of passivity is not the question of slavery, the question of dependency, not the plea to be dominated. This is leotard. And yes, actually, it takes a lot more courage and guts to be on a masochistic role in a scene than it does to be the sadist, the dominated one. And that, in a way, it's also a strategy of resistance.

So being pliable does not imply that you've been broken. It just means if you put on the trope of, if you put this sort of resistance today with the Ezekiel capital, you will end up invariably in jail because they're stronger than us. They can really try and like, I'm going to have a hunger protest, I'm going to fight the system, I'm going to, you know, normally that doesn't end very well. Whereas this form of, you know, sure, I'm going to say whatever you want me to say, but still it's a lot, it's a better strategy of resistance because while they are still in this logic of domination, so they want the outward signs of acquiescence

and they think that in giving that obvious sign of acquiescence, ha, ha, ha, he's not a man, look at him, he hasn't, he didn't, you know. It's like when someone confronts you in a very male sort of, and you're like, you know, that sort of logic doesn't even enter. So they might think you're a pushover or they might think you haven't stood up to them, but actually you just refuse to play a game which is completely ridiculous in many aspects. So, yeah, and it's back to actually Lacan, like castration is pleasure, which doesn't mean actual castration, it just means that you're not going to, you know, you're fooling the old patriarch who doesn't even know it because he doesn't know anything else.

Yeah, he also says no one has the phallus, but women are closer to having it because they can't. His idea of castration is so oddly layered and funny, I think. I think that's a really important thing for reading Lacan. But also dangerous, too, and it's also a danger with, I think, hyperstition and other things that are ongoing, where humor needs necessity and embodiment and whatnot. Well, maybe we should kind of wrap it up, because Petra's running out of battery, and everyone's looking a bit, in Europe and the UK,

looking a bit tired. But I think I'm just... Yeah. slightly. I just want to read out for anyone who isn't able to see the chat bar or watching this later, Luca's great response to your points, Ivan. Maybe as a way of kind of tying up unless anyone else has something else to say afterwards, please go ahead. This is Luca's response. This is kind of what we're betting on. The idea that the destructive critique that cyberfeminism and porno brought to bear on the Enlightenment can be seen as destroying the false universal, so that the real universal can breathe. To paraphrase something, Shuzu says about women. That's a really great quote, Luca. I am copying that.

That's beautiful. So, did anyone want to say anything before we exit? Cool I would like to say thank you everybody Yeah, thank you Thank you Thanks for sneaking into the back room of your work to join us That was awesome And I'm going to use Viroid all the time Thank you for that Yeah, this is something we should A concept we should develop Christina did point out that it's actually an adjective, so I invented it like Al Gore invented the internet.

It's alright, we can reorient it. There's also that really great chat thread that we set up last week based on Petra's kind of points about Bitcoin and ZenoCoin and stuff, which I haven't had a chance to really go and engage with yet, because I've just had a really hectic week. But I encourage everyone to go kind of think about this. And yeah, you're crazy. Awesome. Bye. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone. Bye, buddy.