With a Little Help from Our (New) Friends

Caroline Bassett

Vol 1 #8, Winter 1997

What is cyberfeminism? Sadie Plant claims it is an absolutely post-human insurrection – the revolt of an emerging system which includes women and computers against the worldview, and material reality, of a patriarchy which still seeks to subdue them.[1] This is an alliance of ‘the goods’ against their masters, an alliance of women and machines. It is a revolt of the chattels.

It also claims to be a revolt on a certain – rather grand – scale. At the opening to On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations, Plant says that cyber-feminism – and/or the complex systems and virtual worlds upon which it is based – has the capacity to undermine the ‘world view and material reality of two thousand years of patriarchal control’. Later in the same article, she suggests this is already happening. ‘Tomorrow came’ – we are, she says, already downloaded.

Cutting across the absolute certainty of this rhetoric of transformation, though, is a surprising admission of uncertainty. Plant freely admits that she is talking about an ‘irresponsible feminism’; more than that, she wonders if what she is talking of ‘is a feminism at all’.

This uncertainty opens up certain questions about cyberfeminism. Crucially, this one: Does it amount to a politics, or a technology? Is Plant talking about a possible feminist response to computerisation? Or is she, rather, documenting/ predicting a technologically determined alteration in the condition of woman, an alteration which women should embrace because it is a change in their favour, but about which they can do very little.

Two themes in particular emerge as keys to unravelling the claims of cyberfeminism. It is useful to consider how, first, Plant locates cyberfeminism within debates around the subject, and, second, the arguments she makes around the nature of self-organising machines.

Plant + Irigary = One + Zero

Cyberfeminism is only a new twist in a long love/hate relationship between modern feminisms and technologies. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein onwards, feminism has found an edge point in technology. It is regarded as desirable, treacherous and despised, while always revealing of the condition of women, and being implicated in it.

In this sense, cyberfeminism is part of the feminist tradition, but it also repudiates it. Plant’s cyberfeminism emerges, in fact, out of what she understands as the failures of earlier feminism – more broadly, out of the failure of the Enlightenment – she doesn’t want a re-enchantment of the world.

Cyberfeminism, then, begins at the point at which humanism is abandoned. Plant’s analysis focuses on the French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s contention that, for women, a sense of identity is impossible to achieve, since women cannot escape the ‘specular economy’ of the male – an economy in which, through the controlling phallus and eye (the member and the gaze), woman is always comprehended as ‘deficient’. Woman is always ‘the sex which is not one’, the sex which always lacks the equipment to have one.

Given this analysis, the goals of earlier feminisms – those which have demanded for woman her place as the also-subject of history, her share of human domination over nature – are the wrong goals. Pursuing the ‘masculine dream of self control, self-identification, self-knowledge, and self-determination’, as Plant puts it, will always be futile, since ‘any theory of the subject will always have been appropriated by the masculine’ (Irigaray). Rather, the only possible politics for the sex which is not one, and can never be one, is a politics which takes as its starting point the destruction of the subject. The question, then, is how this work of destruction might be carried out. Irigaray’s answers have always been tentative. Plant is not so diffident. She has an answer and it is, of course, self-organising technology: the femaleness of the new species, which is not a species but an emergence, and one that is dangerous to men.

Plant’s contention is that self-organising technology – ‘a dispersed and distributed emergence composed of links between women, between women and computers, computers and communications links, connections and connectionist nets’ – can perform Irigaray’s work of destruction (which is the grounds of possibility for new works of assembly) because it provides space for woman to assemble herself – with a little help from her (new) friends. Cut loose from patriarchy, woman is now ‘turned on with the machines’. (Do we want this?)

Man, meanwhile, despite his Cartesian disdain for being ‘earthed’, is also enmeshed in cybernetic space, becoming simply a ‘cyborg component of a self organizing process beyond his perception or control’. From where Plant begins – with the necessity for destruction, infiltration and corruption – there is some joy to be had in finding Man caught in the nets he spread precisely to consolidate his own position. (Perhaps we do want this.)

Essential Female Machines

This turn of events depends, of course, not only on a particular analysis of the position of woman. It also requires a particular understanding of technology. And here, I think, cyberfeminism falters. While eco-feminism holds technology as hostile to woman, precisely because it understands that technological ‘advances’ represent a further encroachment by ‘man’ upon ‘nature’ and ‘woman’, cyberfeminism, by contrast, asserts that complex systems and virtuality work the opposite way around.

How so? For cyberfeminism, the new nature of new machines might be encapsulated in the notion of self-organisation; as Plant puts it, ‘tools mutate into complex machines which begin to think and act for themselves’. These machines, being emergent, do not have origins to which they must be faithful. They twist beyond the specular economy, and the particular twist they take is toward the ‘female’. Computers do not represent an encroachment of logic, but its confusion. Crucially then, the valence of technology has changed.

But What Does it Mean to Say that Computers are Female?

Three claims Plant makes for technology as female are these:

1. Like women, computers are simulators, having no fixed identity, but, rather, performing. Computers and women are, therefore, using Irigaray’s formulation, ‘not one’ but always multiple, being both nothing (zero) and everything/ everywhere at once. The nature of the computer and the nature of women converge.

2. A second way in which the female is invoked is via a return to weaving, understood in On the Matrix as an authentic, ‘feminine craft’ (certified female by Freud). Weaving, undeniably processual, comes to symbolise elements of technology which cannot be explained in terms of domination and control (i.e. of man putting nature on the carpet). Plant suggests that this technology, always technically demanding, has sewn its cross-stitches into the new: ‘[F]emale programmers were to find connections between knitting, patchwork, and software engineering and find weaving secreted into the pixellated windows which open on to cyberspace.’ Weaving is invoked as a celebration of that which is/always has been female about a certain kind of technology. Plant’s alliance between ‘the goods’ – females and female technologies – suddenly looks remarkably similar to the old ‘cobwebs against bombs’ tactics of the weaving women of Greenham Common.

3. Finally, Plant claims that only those at ‘odds’ with the masculine can access the plane of the new machines. If new technology is not masculine, it is because some of its inventors were not either. She invokes Alan Turing, the inventor of the Turing machine, the forerunner to the modern computer, who was forced to take oestrogen as ‘therapy’ after being convicted of homosexuality by the British courts. Turing’s brain she says, ‘newly engineered and feminised’, produced the Turing machine.

As a matter of fact, it didn’t. Turing invented his machine before he was prosecuted and certainly before his ‘therapy’ took hold (at least according to Andrew Hodges’ biography). But the factual error is less significant, perhaps, than the rather brutal essentialism evident here. (Is a hormone really all it takes to ‘be’ a woman?)

Cyberfeminism claims to ride the new edge of technology, but it also rides a very old edge of feminism. Plant is essentially essentialist; there is little in her account which suggests ways in which the category of the female might itself be subject to mutation.

The When Question

In another way, too, cyberfeminism’s conception of emergent/self-organising technology is to be questioned. Technology changed, says Plant, but is this not equally true of computers, neural networks, telecoms networks, nano-technology (the latter of which could very easily read as an attempt at absolute, molecule by molecule control of nature), biotechnologies, AI? On the Matrix glances across an array of technologies, each one produced as ‘proof’ of ‘the change’, but never precisely described. As a rhetorical strategy, blinding with science (or in this case technology) has surely been (over)done. In addition, there is always a tension between contention and tense; ‘tomorrow came’, says Plant, but she admits that many of these technologies are still under development.

There is a problem, then, with cyberfeminism’s understanding of technology. Plant’s assertions about the long list of technologies she invokes are, often, simply assertions. More than that, they might be understood to reduce technology insofar as they characterise it as ‘female’. Surely it will never be enough to understand emergent technology ‘as feminine’, just as other technologies can never be understood purely and simply ‘as masculine’? This, paradoxically, is to deny the complexity of technology.

This conflict, between gender essentialism and technological transformation, is a faultline that runs through cyberfeminism. It means that, although cyberfeminism understands that everything has changed, in the end it also suggests very little has changed. Despite the rhetoric, cyberfeminism is not ambitious enough.

Conclusion

To return, finally, to the question of a feminism, following the threads of Plant’s arguments through On the Matrix, it becomes clear that Plant never provides a definitive answer to the question: ‘Technology or politics?’ There is always, in her work, a slippage – from what might be effected through a politics practised by women to what will be effected by virtue of virtual (and complex) systems. This slippage is the point for Plant, who courts and develops ambiguity in her writing, consistently con-fusing and re-fusing distinctions between woman – who is ‘turned on by the machines’ – and self-organising machines themselves.

Women and machines, gathered under the same unvarying sign (the sign of the female – the always multiple zero set against the one – in non binary opposition) are, as Plant sees it, elements of the same networks. In this proliferating confusion, distinctions about who or what is doing what to whom – distinctions, that is, about what might amount to ‘doing politics’ and what might amount to celebrating a technology – might seem difficult to draw. More than that, they might even seem irrelevant. ‘As technology changes, woman changes,’ says Plant. Shouldn’t that be enough for us? I don’t think it is, because it lets cyberfeminism off the hook. It makes certain claims to being an active, radical form of politics, one adapted to post-humanism, but it also comes close to suggesting that the position of woman is simply intrinsic to a certain form of technology.

In the moments at which cyberfeminism relies not on humans (women) but on the emerging force of machines (presumed to be ‘female’), Plant seems to deliver us less to a politics than an eschatology: a hope and desire for future things. In this way, despite the sound and the fury of cyberfeminism’s (effective) rhetoric, and, despite the power and precision of its destructive moment (the destruction of the desire for a re-tooled Enlightenment), it often comes close to a politics of quietism.

Footnote 1:

Sadie Plant, 'On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations', Rob Shields (Ed.), Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, London: Sage, 1996, pp. 170-83.