Again I find my posts returning to the same source material to address a different set of readings.  This week I had intended to dig into A Cyborg Manifesto, but was compelled again to my favorite of the “cyberfeminists”, Sadie Plant.  This time, instead of bringing her myself, as I did with the interview between her and Cyberflesh Girlmonster creator Linda Dement, I want to do so in response to a specific claim against her work that I found in Jessie Daniels’s Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s). Daniels says on page 104:

While Plant has been justifiably criticized for reinscribing essentialist notions of gender (Wilding 1998),Wajcman (2004) writes that Plant’s optimism about the potential of gender equality in cyberspace must be understood as a reaction against previous conceptualizations of technology as inherently masculine. In addition to essentializing gender, Plant’s binary of “zeroes” and “ones” leaves no conceptual room for understanding how gender intersects with “race.””

And while her conclusion is more or less correct as Plant, particularly in Zeros and Ones, does not address race in any meaningful way, but the path Daniels uses to get there mischaracterize the core of Plant’s writing.  To show why I personally like Plant’s work I’m going to post a number of quotes from her shorter (and arguably better) pieces she wrote in the years preceding the publication of her book Zeros and Ones and consider what aspects of Plants work I find specifically compelling, particularly in relation to Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.

The shortest response to Daniels first claim about “reinscribing essentialist notions of gender” comes from Plant’s On The Matrix: Cyberfeminist simulations:

There is no authentic or essential woman up ahead, no self to be reclaimed from some long past, nor 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 has always downloaded their roles.”

If Plant’s use of “man” or “woman” are to be properly understood it isn’t through essential notions, derived biologically or even socially in the popular sense, but from her digital re-processing of Luce Irigaray psychoanalytic work.  In Irigaray’s writing “man” and “woman” need not necessarily align with biological features nor with personal identifications, but instead have more to do with a relationship to language. Without going deep into specifics one either has and attempts to master language (man) or lacks proper access to language and mimics and mediates between speaking subjects (woman).

From page 59 of Plant’s The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics:

Woman, like the computer, appears at different times as whatever man requires of her. She learns how to imitate; she learns simulation.  And, like the computer, she becomes very good at it, so good, in fact, that she too, in principle, can mimic any function.  As Irigaray suggests… “she is—though her inexhaustible aptitude for mimicry—the living foundation for the whole staging of the world” Irigaray, 1991:118).”

This brings us back to Daniels, “Plant’s optimism about the potential of gender equality in cyberspace must be understood as a reaction against previous conceptualizations of technology as inherently masculine.” Again, there is some truth to this but it misses the bigger claim about the relationship women have to this particular sort of technology.   Like Haraway, Plant concedes that computers were first a military weapon, but she first spends much of The Future Looms discussing the role Ada Lovelace played in conceptualizing what would become the computer years before it would become a weapon.  Plant identifies two key figures from the 1940s who were integral to the development of computers: Grace Murray Hopper and Alan Turning.  Hopper, Plant explains, programed the earliest models of computer and coined the word “bug” after a disruption caused by an actual bug inside an early machine.  Turning’s role is more complicated as he was not born a woman, but only later became identified with the feminine after his homosexuality got him removed from the British military and hormonally sterilized. 

But Plant isn’t naive about how men, in the most traditional, heterosexual sense, have dominated fields of technology historically.  This is where Plant shows the influence McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” has on her work because even as women begin taking to message boards and chat rooms (because it was the 90s), it isn’t what is being said that is of any particular importance, but the digital network itself that are truly subversive to men’s control over the technology.  From The Future Looms, pages 62, 54, and 63:

Still confident of his own indisputable mastery over them, man continues to turn them on.  In doing so he merely encourages his own destruction.  Every software development is a migration of control, away from man, in whom it has been exercised only as domination, and into the matrix, or cyberspace… The matrix weaves itself in a future which has no place for historical man: he was merely its tool, and his agency was itself always a figment of its loop.”

Only with the cybernetic system does self-control no longer entail being place beneath or under something: there is no ‘self’ to control man, machine or any other system: instead both man and machine become elements of a cybernetic system which is itself a system of control and communication.  This is the strange world to which Ada’s programming has led: the possibility of activity without centralized control, an agency, of sorts, which has no need of a subject position… Her software already encouraged the convergence of nature and intelligence which guides the subsequent development of information technology.”

Cybernetic systems are fatal to his culture; they invade as a return of the repressed, but what returns is no longer the same; cybernetics transforms woman and nature, but they do not return from man’s past, as his origins.  Instead they come around to face him, wheeling round from his future, the virtual system to which he has always been heading.”

Its clear that, despite the historically masculine position computers have been put in, Plant never understand them as “inherently masculine” but in fact just the opposite.  The cybernetic system this technology enables is not one of binaries or oppositions or “ironies” in Haraway’s conception, but one of that was always already present in “the once smooth surfaces of patriarchal order” but remains invisible until it’s able to complete the loop and rewrite itself into a new sort of existence. 

More explicitly about this from On the Matrix, page 325:

Complex systems and virtual worlds are not only important because they open up spaces for existing women within an already existing culture, but also because of the extent to which they undermine both the world-view and the material reality of two thousand years of patriarchal control. Network culture still appears to be dominated by both men and masculine intentions and designs. But there is more to cyberspace than meets the male gaze.”

“There is more to cyberspace than meets the male gaze” remains a crucial point for Plant in addressing what “zeros and ones” are and what they do.  Unlike Daniels’s claim that zero and one are a binary, Plant explains on page 333 of On the Matrix:

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 the ones.  Zero is the matrix of calculation, the possibility of multiplication, and has been reprocessing the modern world since it began to arrive from the East. It neither represents, but with digitalization it proliferates, replicates, and undermines the privilege of one.  Zero is not absence, but a zone of multiplicity which cannot be perceived by the one who sees.”

and further:

“It is the imperceptible ‘elsewhere’ of which Irigaray speaks, the hole that is neither something nor nothing; a newly accessible virtual space which cannot be seen by the one it subsumes.  If the phallus guarantees man’ identity and his relation to transcendence and truth, it is also this which cuts him off from the abstract machinery of a world he thinks he owns. It is only those at odds with this definition of humanity who seem to be able to access this plane.  They have more in common with multifunctional systems than the active agency and singular identity proper to the male subject.”

Plant’s work in this way has a more techno-deterministic slant to it but without the harsh value judgments which tend to follow from such positions; for her the cyborg has in a sense always existed and needed only to reach a certain point before it could make itself known.  Unlike Haraway who sees the cyborg as a move away from a totalizing system, made up of unities and unities of opposites into a world of affinities, Plant follows from the multiplicity of Irigaray’s “specular economy” to explain how her cybernetic system can be total, decentralized, and non-binary all at once.

1 Thought.

  1. This is an absolutely wonderful post. Good push back on Daniels’ reading of Plant. As you’re reading her, I believe that she is more aligned with Haraway than might be generally thought. The difference is that I do not think Plant is a socialist feminist utopianist. (To be honest, I’m not sure Haraway is either–socialist feminist yea, utopianist not so much..like Plant, I think, she offers a space for hope, rather than proposes some kind of truly alternative worldview, as that would be a rebuilding of the garden of Eden, and antithetical to the cyborg.) But perhaps Plant’s work in a way stands up better over time. Pity that she isn’t as widely read in my circles.

    You are smart to bring the great feminist philosopher Luce Irirgaray into this mix given the importance of Lacan in shaping modernist thinking–including current notions of the default position of male whiteness that we see reflected in much internet culture. Plant, too, is in part responding to Lacan, who was “remediating” the thought of Freud.

    Both Daniels’ article and Scott’s short piece address the rise of body reformation through internet channels of information, a kind of trans revolution for cyberfeminism that frees people to rebuild their gender with “science,” ie, networking to provide hormonal therapy, surgeries, etc. From your reading of Plant, is it possible that this is just one effect of the revolution set into motion that Plant saw, and Irigaray imagined at the core of linguistic philosophy to challenge phallism and biological destiny?

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