‘Cyberfeminism’ is not a movement as such; the term covers a diverse, even contradictory range of feminist theories on technological change and gender. These theories – and, again, Haraway’s cyborg in particular – have been influential on many studies of new media. For cyberfeminists the recognition and critique of the gendered nature of the Enlightenment human subject is central. ‘Posthumanism’ here then is a political gesture towards rethinking the relationships not only between the human and the technological, but between men and women and the technological.
Though in quite different ways, the works of Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant have addressed the sexual politics of new technologies and subjectivities through an enquiry into what it means to be human, each seeing technological change as potentially liberating. Both draw on science fictional ideas of the embodied cyborg, though Plant’s model of a blurring of boundaries between the biological and the machinic is predominantly one of networks rather than bodies. She sees the history of the computer’s development as one of everexpanding complexity, to the point at which this complexity is indistinguishable from the complex systems of both nature and culture:
Parallel distributed processing defies all attempts to pin it down, and can only ever be contingently defined. It also turns the computer into a complex thinking machine which converges with the operations of the human brain. Neural nets are distributed systems which function as analogues of the brain and can learn, think, ‘evolve’ and ‘live’. And the parallels proliferate.
Parallel distributed processing defies all attempts to pin it down, and can only ever be contingently defined. It also turns the computer into a complex thinking machine which converges with the operations of the human brain. Neural nets are distributed systems which function as analogues of the brain and can learn, think, ‘evolve’ and ‘live’. And the parallels proliferate.
The complexity the computer becomes also emerges in economies, weather systems, cities and cultures, all of which begin to function as complex systems with their own parallel processes, connectivities and immense tangles of mutual interlinkings. (Plant 2000: 329)
Plant isn’t speaking metaphorically here, she is asserting that machines not only appear to take on the characteristics of biological systems, including the human brain, but that to all intents and purposes no meaningful distinction between the natural and the machinic can now be made. For Plant the Internet, or matrix, is inherently feminine and manifests lines of communication between women, long repressed, returning in a technological form. The immediacy of women’s communion with each other, the flashes of intuitive exchange, and the non-hierarchical system which women have established in the networking practices of grass roots feminist organisations: all these become the instant access of telecommunication, the decentred circuits and dispersed networks of information.
For though not ‘natural’ as such, machines are, like women, things existing to benefit man, ‘mere things on which men worked’, or objects of exchange (Plant 1993: 13). In opposition to men, they too have been seen as having no agency or self-awareness. Following this logic, then, Plant asserts that there is only one homo sapiens (‘Man’) and that ‘Woman is a virtual reality’. The implication here is that women have always been positioned as some kind of biological-machinic hybrid, and that it is only with the emergence of information technology that this association ceases to be repressive.
Plant isn’t speaking metaphorically here, she is asserting that machines not only appear to take on the characteristics of biological systems, including the human brain, but that to all intents and purposes no meaningful distinction between the natural and the machinic can now be made. For Plant the Internet, or matrix, is inherently feminine and manifests lines of communication between women, long repressed, returning in a technological form. The immediacy of women’s communion with each other, the flashes of intuitive exchange, and the non-hierarchical system which women have established in the networking practices of grass roots feminist organisations: all these become the instant access of telecommunication, the decentred circuits and dispersed networks of information.
For though not ‘natural’ as such, machines are, like women, things existing to benefit man, ‘mere things on which men worked’, or objects of exchange (Plant 1993: 13). In opposition to men, they too have been seen as having no agency or self-awareness. Following this logic, then, Plant asserts that there is only one homo sapiens (‘Man’) and that ‘Woman is a virtual reality’. The implication here is that women have always been positioned as some kind of biological-machinic hybrid, and that it is only with the emergence of information technology that this association ceases to be repressive.
Instead it marks a revolution that doesn’t so much undermine the male modern subject as sweep him away, in ‘a fluid attack, an onslaught on human agency and the solidity of identity. It is the process by which the world becomes female, and so posthuman’ (Plant 1993: 17). Sarah Kember is critical of Sadie Plant’s analysis of the relationships between the human and the machine in the age of networked communication, arguing that collapsing any distinction between life and information – a concept she terms ‘connectionism’ – runs the risk of conflating the complex systems of nature with social systems such as economies. While connectionism ‘offers a rhetoric of resistance to control and authority which is based on the destruction of boundaries’, Kember sees it as fundamentally anti-political in that the assertion of such systems as ‘selforganizing, self-arousing’ (Plant 1995: 58) denies any social or historical context. For Kember, Haraway, by contrast, seeks to ‘trouble and revise the restricted rationality of conventional Western forms of knowledge’ without recourse to connectionism (Kember, 1998; Squires, 1996).
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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