Futures and Fictions Read online

  Following the cyborg critique of essentialist feminism and of the patriarchal alliance with technology, other gender strategies have focused on the performativity of language, signs and speech acts, arguing for a political production of meaning emerging from the specific use of signs. One can define this tendency in terms of a “culturalist” strategy of hyper-representation, aiming to radicalise the artificiality of culture by starting from the use of language. This strategy is part of a more general critique against normative discourses and, in turn, against the realisation of the rational project of the enlightenment in a double-edged architecture of governance. However, whilst this approach works to reveal the naturalisation of techniques and technologies of governance, the critical insistence on the cultural — or language-oriented — fabrication of gender also came to be questioned for its tendency to propose a relativistic and fragmented framework, in which the political question of gender became absorbed, as it were, by a neoliberal thirst for fluid signifiers.

  The hyperstitional strategies proposed by the cyborg required both dismembering the unification of language whilst highlighting the materiality or the embodiment of language. However, this view had limited the material substrate of gender, i.e. sex, to just another conceptual variable in a linguistic system of signs. From this standpoint, the materiality of gender could only be historically — and thus cognitively — contextualised, showing that materiality is always already mediated by rule-bounded conceptual structures — that is a system of norms. Since here more than ever the semiotic matrix of epistemology allowed for a flexible deconstructing and reconstructing of ontological truths, the politics of the cyborg to some extent risked accelerating the cultural dissipation of the biophysical reality of matter, and of sexual difference. In particular, these semiotic strategies that characterised the feminist strategies in the early 1990s led to the conception of a hybrid form of subjectivity in which sexual difference became decentred from its privileged position in gender politics. The philosophy of sexual difference, and the work of Luce Irigaray in particular, had become particularly contested for its suspicious substantialism or essentialism.

  Nevertheless, as the cyborg politics of signs merged with the neoliberal capitalisation of fluid signifiers, language became a cage for gender difference, risking a never-ending relativism of meaning springing from the emphasis on the plurality of local culturalisms. The semiotic exploration of postgendered alliances was questioned for its limits. Postgendered feminism was challenged by the emerging articulation of an immanent (and non-discursive) conception of matter, body and sex. Instead of explaining the materiality of sex through the semiotic chain of historically determined events, it became once again urgent to re-articulate the relation between the ontological and epistemological condition of subjectivity beyond representation, and the cognitive structure of meaning. In particular, the invisible plane of affects, the unmeasurable qualities of intensity, the corollary production of ideas, the numerical infinites between 0s and 1s, pushed cyborg politics further within the matrix of nature and the matrix of the machine. Here the hyperstitional activity involved not only a re-formulation of subjectivity as a human-animal-machine hybrid, but aimed to unearth the fluidity of matter and the infinity of numbers. In particular, Sadie Plant’s book Zeros and Ones reclaimed the complexity of feminine sexuality, and by bringing together Continental with Anglo-American feminisms, she wrote of the history of computing with the histories of women, from Ada Lovelace’s corollary coding for the Babbage machines, to World War II data inputters and phone operators. As women mediated the communication between man and machine, the alliance with techne acquired a feminine tonality that would gender the very means of transmission. To claim the feminine materiality of the matrix also meant that matter and thought belonged to an immanent plane of multiplicity, instead of being caught in a dualistic mediation between matter and sign. Hence the connection between human and technology above all means that body and machine undergo affective encounters and intensive degrees of change. Here scientific epistemology coincides not with normative discourse, but with its experimental method of probing into the unknown and challenging the determination of truth.

  By suspending the analysis of meaning and representation, Plant’s cyberfeminism radicalised the political dimension of the body-sex-machine and worked through the speculative character of scientific epistemology (from chaos theory to quantum physics, from molecular biology to information theory) to argue for the indeterminacy of bio-physical materiality. Here sex is not filtered through the lenses of gender, but it is denaturalised, rendered alien from a specific biological bias. This involved not simply a rejection of nature, but the invention of a new philosophy of nature: a re-potentiation of what nature is and can be. If sex does not coincide with biological imperatives, so the body is not limited to the boundaries of the organism but becomes a plane of vectors stretching and curving together to generate assemblages of another kind. Sensation, or the elevation of sensibilities beyond sensori-motor and cognitive functions, enables the body to enter new phases of non-human becomings, a multiplicity of sexes for which new genders have to be invented. Here ontology is, as it were, plunged within the molecular dynamics of matter, offering a continuity of being in the process of becoming, whilst side-skipping the cognitive model of thought and its alleged representation.

  Against the relativism of positions, cyberfeminism is committed to hyperstitional tactics to allow a continuous deterritorialisation from norms, rules, positions and pushes to the extremes of the immanent incompleteness of knowing and incompleteness of being. By embracing the Spinozian question, we do not know what a body can do, cyberfeminism had already sided with the promise of technology vis-à-vis becoming one with the dynamic mutations of nature. Here the nature/culture binary is not overcome by debunking the ideological construction of nature. On the contrary, the culturalist assumption about what nature is and can become is disentangled from the classic epistemological belief in a static nature that can be instrumentalised, subsumed and mastered. The cyberfeminist re-habilitation of nature rather addresses the untapped potentialities of matter, whereby molecular alliances across substances prefigure the Promethean qualities of a never-ending nature, claiming back its futurity. In other words, the realist and materialist approach to nature as a plane of becoming enables cyberfeminism to argue for the artificiality of the body-sex and to politically vindicate nature beyond the essentialisms. Here nature can be changed insofar as it is already machinic and open to becoming cultural, so as to affect the production of signs, meanings and representations.

  Whilst there is no “given” nature, the invisible activities of natural processes are here taken as instances of the indeterminacies of knowledge and as sources of fictionalised praxis and tactics of becoming other than what one is. From this standpoint, the politics of representation is replaced by “low-grade” activities of becoming, where nature and culture are, as it were, in an auto-affective bifurcating loop, and the sex-gender alliance becomes open to the pragmatics of processes. In short, these alliances are to be determined and are not given by normative and biological truths. This is also the sense of a pragmatic or practical politics where gender and sex can be changed, mutated and re-articulated. However, whilst the cyborg strategy embraces the pragmatic or performative activity of the sign, constructing the world through the matrix of language, extending the body-sex to artificial manipulations, cyberfeminism rather makes of the body-sex-machine itself a hyperstitional praxis, embedding everyday living in the invisible potentiality of indeterminate nature.

  These two political models of feminist emancipation contribute to shift the critique of technology beyond a mere debunking of patriarchal and capitalist discourse. These models rather politically hack normative epistemology by exposing the challenges that technoscientific experimentalism poses to given truths. These two planes of critique have gone a long way to question scientific truism and have shown that science is itself an open affair, embedding wider cu
ltural, political and economic consequences. Nevertheless, whilst the cyborg strategy of hacking feminism involves a continuous mediation between matter and signs, the anti-representational immediacy of cyberfeminism as a micropolitics exposes an immanent continuity between epistemology and ontology, whereby the infinite potentialities of nature are expressed as affects, percepts and concepts constituting lived experience as such.

  One has however to pause here and recognise that the cyberfeminist embracing of the inexhaustible potential of nature has also risked becoming divorced from the material transformations of history. In particular, it has overlooked the implications of its hyperstitional approach in the context of the cognitive/ affective phase of neoliberal capital for which the immediacy of visceral response, and the appeal to a continuous transformation of being, have become the dominant motor of/for the abstraction of value. The consolidation of so-called cognitive capital embraces the scientific paradigm of scientific indeterminacy and has demarcated a shift towards the datification of the real, based on the assumption that there is no truth to hold on to, but only a sea of information from which truths can be fabricated. Paradoxically, the capitalisation of human intelligence has led to a capitalisation of affective responses working to neutralise — i.e. render null — the classic cognitive order of intelligibility (i.e. symbolic reasoning, reflexivity, logical implications). Within this cognitive phase of technocapitalism, ontology has become subjected to the epistemological claims about the indeterminacies of truths, leading to a form of visceral control where the amplification of affective responses has led to the systematic capitalisation of the intellect. The visceral modulation of the masses together with the stealthy incorporation of any form of desire into branding and marketing strategies aims not only to direct reactions towards pre-constituted goals, but to tap into the pre-cognitive pool of decision-making, short-circuiting the distance between emotion and cognition. At the core of cognitive technocapitalism is a preemptive mode of power carrying out two main complementary activities: the harnessing of unknowns and the abstraction of non-conscious cognition. On the one hand, preemption involves the inclusion of indeterminacies in the calculation of chance. On the other, the epistemological formulation of a bodily-centred form of cognition points out that decisions can be taken at an increasingly fast speed and before self-awareness. In other words, the potential indeterminacies of many sexes or of a virtual plane of nature have come to coincide with the speed of non-conscious automated decisions, in which energy is transformed into information through the cybernetic machine of communication, command and control.

  In this regime of contagious responses in which the immediacy of a certain kind of thinking replaces the critical capacity of self-reflection and causal awareness, affective politics risks remaining caught within the algorithmic culture of the programmed and the programmable. The paradoxical impasse between intelligent machines and corporeal intelligence urges us to shift the articulation of the relation between ontology and epistemology away from the mutual equivalence between being and doing, and concepts and objects. In other words, within the historical phase of cognitive technocapitalism, cyberfeminism shall not be limited to mirror the automation of affective thinking. One can argue that the limits of what Deleuze calls the “being of the sensible” are evidenced in how the promises to exceed technocapitalist control remain with cyberfeminism nonetheless caught within the paradoxical overlap of visceral power and politics. But how to subtract from this paradoxical state perpetuated in neoliberal technocapitalism? How to turn the technocapitalist capture of the future into a hyperstitional activitation of collective desires able to invent a politics of the future? Can Xenofeminism offer us another entry point into the complicated mesh of affective capital, visceral governance and reactive control?

  As with the cyborg manifesto and cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism claims a “fictive ideality” (an expression borrowed from the collective) to discover and construct new conditions for the alliance between technology-gender-sexuality. These conditions include for instance the temporalities of machines, whose asymmetric timelines are already imparting irreversible de-naturalisations onto human’s capacity to live in time. And yet the ingression of alien temporalities into human culture also delineates the opportunity for an alternative political subjectivity that can no longer appeal to the injustice of nature or natural laws. Compared to cyberfeminism however, Laboria Cuboniks’s fictive ideality does not place trust in the promise of the unknown because indeterminacies have entered the hands of a free-falling capital disseminating molecular fragmentations under a hypersexist, hyperracist and hyperclassist governance. However, even if cyberfeminists’ fictive ideality ended in the dissipation of structures and the political validity of indeterminacy, it does not mean that the alliance with technology that cyberfeminism proposed is to be simply condemned. Instead, Xenofeminism takes the challenge to further radicalise the alliance for the political promises that are already embedded in the logic of machines and the artificiality of knowledge. If the Xenofeminist Manifesto must be seen as contributing to technogender revolutions, then it seems important to bring back to its core the question of how to reclaim a fictive ideality of the future and enable political projects with and through technoscientific interventions.

  According to Laboria Cuboniks, political projects shall not resign and leave the labour of inventing the future in the hands of a free-falling deterritorialising capital. As with the cyborg and cyberfeminism, Xenofeminists’ fictive ideality is here an invitation to imagine, to orchestrate and to endorse the future even if it cannot be known in advance. Indeterminacy is not a limit to knowledge, but an incitement to gather collective intelligences and experiment with multiscalar modalities gathered amongst localised practices and their inferential connectives, so as to unite scales through the hypothetical construction of general meanings. The hyperstitional quality of the Xenofeminist Manifesto works not to extend localities to generalities aiming to represent feminist, queer and gender local practices in global political projects. Instead it requires the laborious invention and intervention in the creation of models that go up and across localities. Interventions are above all alienation not only from the natural order, but also from any given circumstance. Any given always contains an ideological infrastructure that would have to be made clear, worked through, and eventually overcome through the invention of other models, other abstractions.

  This is a kind of alienation that requires the labour of reasoning, that begins with the social and collective imagination for building models or carrying out logical experimentations, enabling ideation to step forward into action, and work through local constraints in order to build a structure that can allow freedom. Not a freedom from constraints but a freedom towards the instrumental transformation of constraints for the collective endorsement of new ends. This is where alienation becomes a political possibility not only to destratify from the cognitive structure of habits and symbolic truths, but also to endorse material practices with new meaning, and allow the inferential implications of reasoning to re-assess truths, functions, behaviours and conducts.

  One has to clarify however that this political possibility is not simply a performative exercise because alienation from human nature, as Lilith, the main character in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, is forced to learn, is an inhumane effort of collective re-engineering. The degree of inhumanity here concerns the traumatic qualities of being forced to change under the pressure of contingencies and the labour of re-commencing a dia-logical engagement with unfamiliar truths, rules and laws, surpassing the tendency of resigning in order not to risk, yet again, fallibility. Alienation therefore involves not an abandonment of the space of reason, but the claiming back of reasoning as inferential tools of emancipation, the labour of following a persistent direction towards thinking how to construct an us or a we with and through machines.

  Indeed, technological mediation cannot be divorced from the advancing of the automation of knowledge implying th
e formation of a new synthesis between reasoning, logic and calculation. If an alien language for sexual and gender politics through machine-thinking could be part of this new synthesis then the question for Xenofeminism could be how, and which experiments we need to embark on so as to scale up from within this new form of artificial knowledge. Xenofeminism has launched a mathematico-geometric format that affords new entries and experiments to change our nature. But to endorse the estranged consequences of a new synthetic reason would then also mean to automate sex. How Xenofeminists’ fictive ideality might contribute to turn this dehumanising phase of transformation into a possibility for political emancipation is yet to be known, but the difficulty of this question can no longer be avoided.

  Works Cited

  Butler, Octavia (1987), Dawn: Xenogenesis 1. London: Popular Library.

  Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press.

  Haraway, Donna (1991), “The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 149-81.

  Plant, Sadie (1998), Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Techoculture. London: Fourth Estate.