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Table of Contents List of Additional Readings~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 4 Revolutionary Letters, Diane Di Prima~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 5 Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Redefining Difference, Audre Lorde ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 25 The Personal is Political, Carol Hanisch ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 35 Napster was only the beginning ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 41 Les Guerilleres, Monique Wittig~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 43 The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, Audre Lorde~ ~ ~ 129 The Beautiful Warriors: Technofeminist Practice in the 21st century~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 132

A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Donna Haraway~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 277

Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, John Perry Barlowe~ ~ ~ ~ 306 Rejection of Closure, Lyn Hejinian~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 308 Hyperstitions, Delphi Carstens~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 320 Something’s Missing: A Discussion betwen Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 324 Art Practice as Fictioning (or, myth-science), Simon O’Sullivan~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 341 From Science Fiction to Science Fictioning (or, What is the Traction of Science Fiction on the Real?), Simon O’Sullivan ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 346 Beyond the Screens: Films, Cyberpunk, and Cyberfeminism, Sadie Plant ~ ~ ~ 373 Fiction as Method, Introduction, ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 379 Artifact of Hope, Carla Harryman ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 433 Dreaming The Dark, Chapters 1 & 2, Starhawk ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 468 Everting the Virtual, lecture transcript excerpt, Maggie Mer Roberts~ ~ ~ ~ 500 Now, Introduction, Invisible Committee ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ 503 Non-Philosophy as Art Practice (or, Fiction as Method), Simon O’Sullivan ~ ~ 508 4 synth dedicated to Bob Dylan PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

This version published 2005 without permission, and is based on the 3rd edition Additional Books for Now of the work by City Lights. Anti-profit, anti-copyright. Revolutionary Letters has been out of printfor manyyears, and we wanted to After the Future, Franco Bifo Berardi bring it back. Breathing, Franco Berardi Look for an expanded edition,rumored to come out soon from Last Gasp Press of SF. Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici Capitalist Sorcery, Breaking the Spell, Philippe Pignarre and REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #1 Isabele Stengers I have just realized that the stakes are myself I have no other Earthpath, Starhawk ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over the roulette table, I recoup what Ican Philosophy, David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan nothing else to shove under the nose of the maitre de jeu In Catastrophic Times, Isabelle Stengers nothing to thrust out the window, no white flag this flesh all I have to offer, to make the play with Now, The Invisible Committee this immediate head, what it comes up with, my move as we slither over this go board, stepping always Technic and Magic, Federico Campagna (we hope) between the lines The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #2 A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari The value of an individual life a credo they taught us to instil fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’ To Write Like a Woman, Essays in Feminism and Science a fog in our eyes, we are Fiction, Joanna Russ endless as the sea, not separate, we die a million times a day, we are born True Names, Vernor Vinge a million times, each breath life and death: get up, put on your shoes, get Zeros and Ones, Sadie Plant started, someone will finish // Tribe It takes every bit of discipline I can muster to make this a 4 list of reasonable length. “for Now,” is the out: staking out a near- to mid-future terrain of exploration with the proviso that there is as always a supplementary bag of holding con- taining old-friend books, touchstone and secret books. 5 dedicated to Bob Dylan synth PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

This version published 2005 without permission, and is based on the 3rd edition of the work by City Lights. Anti-profit, anti-copyright. Revolutionary Letters has been out of printfor manyyears, and we wanted to bring it back. RevolutionaryLook for an expanded edition,rumored to come ou tLetterssoon from Last Gasp Press 1968-71 of SF.

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #1 I have just realized that the stakes are myself I have no other ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life my spirit measured out, in bits, spread over the roulette table, I recoup what Ican nothing else to shove under the nose of the maitre de jeu nothing to thrust out the window, no white flag this flesh all I have to offer, to make the play with this immediate head, what it comes up with, my move as we slither over this go board, stepping always (we hope) between the lines

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #2 The value of an individual life a credo they taught us to instil fear, and inaction, ‘you only live once’ a fog in our eyes, we are endless as the sea, not separate, we die a million times a day, we are born a million times, each breath life and death: get up, put on your shoes, get started, someone will finish // Tribe

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an organism, one flesh, breathing joy as the stars // breathe destiny down on us, get remember we are all used to eating less going, join hands, see to business, thousands of sons than the ‘average American’ and take it easy will see to it when you fall, you will grow before we a thousand times in the bellies of your sisters ever notice we’re hungry the rest of the folk will be starving used as they are to meat and fresh milk daily and help will arrive, until the day no help arrives REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #3 and then you’re on your own. // store water; make a point of filling your bathtub hoard matches, we aren’t good at the first news of trouble: they turned off the water at// rubbing sticks together any more in the 4th ward for a whole day during the Newark riots; aremember tinder box we is are useful, all used if you to can eating work less it or better yet make a habit don’tthan the count ‘average on gas American’ stove, gas and heater take it easy of keeping the tub clean and full when not in use electricbefore we light change this once a day, it should be good enough keepever notice hibachi we’re and charcoal, hungry the CHARCOAL rest of the folkSTARTER will be a starving help for washing, flushing toilets when necessary keroseneused as they lamp are and to candles,meat and learn fresh to milk keep daily warm and cooking, in a pinch, but it’s a good idea withand help breathing will arrive, until the day no help arrives to keep some bottled water handy too rememberand then you’re the blessed on your American own. habit of bundling get a couple of five gallon jugs and keep them full // for cooking hoard matches, we aren’t good // REVOLUTIONARYat rubbing sticks together any LETTER more #4 store food — dry stuff like rice and beans stores best a tinder box is useful, if you can work it goes farthest. SALT VERY IMPORTANT: it’s health and energy Left to themselves people don’t count on gas stove, gas heater healing too, keep a couple pounds grow their hair. electric light sea salt around, and, because we’re spoiled, some tins Left to themselves they keep hibachi and charcoal, CHARCOAL STARTER a help tuna, etc. to keep up morale — keep up the sense take off their shoe’s. kerosene lamp and candles, learn to keep warm of ‘balanced diet’ ‘protein intake’ remember Left to themselves they make love with breathing the stores may be closed for quite some time, the trucks sleep easily remember the blessed American habit of bundling may not enter your section of the city for weeks, you can cool it indefinitelyshare blankets, dope & children // they are not lazy or afraid with 20 lb brown rice REVOLUTIONARYthey plant seeds, they smile, theyLETTER #4 20 lb whole wheat flour speak to one another. The word 10 lb cornmeal comingLeft to into themselves its own: touch people of love; 10 lb good beans — kidney or soy ongrow the their brain, hair. the ear. 5 lb sea salt //Left to themselves they 2 qts good oil Wetake return off their with shoe’s. the sea, the tides dried fruit and nuts weLeft return to themselves as often as they leaves, make as love numerous add nutrients and a sense of luxury assleep grass, easily gentle, insistent, we remember to this diet, a squash or coconut theshare way, blankets, dope & children in a cool place in your pad will keep six months. ourthey babes are not toddle lazy barefoot or afraid thru the cities of the universe. they plant seeds, they smile, they 5 speak to one another. The word 6 coming into its own: touch of love; on the brain, the ear. // We return with the sea, the tides we return as often as leaves, as numerous as grass, gentle, insistent, we remember the way, our babes toddle barefoot thru the cities of the universe.

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REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #5 USE ALL THESE AS LITTLE as possible, side effects multifarious at some point and they cloud the brain you may be called upon tend to weaken the body and obscure to keep going for several days without sleep: judgment keep some ups around, to be // clearheaded, avoid ‘comedown’ as much as possible, ginseng tea, ginger compresses, sea salt, take vitamin B along with amphetamines, try prayer and love powdered guarana root, available are better healers, easier come by, save the others at herb drugstores, it is an up for life and death trips, you will know used by Peruvian mountainfolk, tastes when you see one like mocha (bitter) can be put in tea will clear your head, increase oxygen supply keep you going past amphetamine wooziness REVOLUTIONARY NOTE #6 // at some point avoid the folk you may have to crash, under tension, keep some downs who find Bonnie and Clyde too violent on’ hand, you may have to cool out who see the blood but not the energy form sickness, or freak-out, or sorrow, keep some downs they love us and want us to practice birth control on hand, I don’t mean they love us and want the Hindus to kill their cows tranquillizers, ye olde fashioned SLEEPING PILL they love us and have a colorless tasteless powder (sleep heals heads, heals souls) chloryll hydrate which is the perfect synthetic food . . . (Mickey Finn) one of the best, but nembutal, etc. OK in a pinch, remember REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #7 no liquor with barbiturates // there are those who can tell you at some point how to make molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, you will need painkillers, darvon bombs whatever is glorified shit, stash some codeine & remember you might be needing it’s about five times more effective find them and learn, define if taken with aspirin your aim clearly, choose your ammo // with that in mind ups, downs & painkillers are // the essence: antibiotics it is not a good idea to tote a gun for extreme infections, any good or knife wide-spectrum one will do, avoid penicillin unless you are proficient in its use too many allergies, speaking of which all swords are two-edged, can be used against you cortisone is good for really bad attacks by anyone who can get ‘em away from you (someone who freaks out asthma-style, or with hives) // // it is

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possible even on the east coast contact lenses to find an isolated place for target practice earrings for pierced ears are especially hazardous success // will depend mostly on your state of mind: try to be clear meditate, pray, make love, be prepared in front, what you will do if it comes at any time, to die to trouble // if you’re going to try to split stay out of the center but don’t get uptight: the guns don’t stampede or panic others will not win this one, they are don’t waver between active and passive resistance an incidental part of the action know your limitations, bear contempt which we better damn well be good at, neither for yourself, nor any of your brothers what will win // is mantras, the sustenance we give each other, NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us the energy we plug into shoving at the thing from all sides (the fact that we touch to bring it down. share food) the buddha nature of everyone, friend and foe, like a million earthworms REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #9 tunnelling under this structure advocating till it falls the overthrow of government is a crime overthrowing it is something else REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #8 altogether, it is sometimes called revolution Everytime you pick the spot for a be-in but don’t kid yourself: government a demonstration, a march, a rally, you are choosing the ground is not where it’s at: it’s only for a potential battle. a good place to start: You are still calling these shots. 1. kill head of Dow Chemical Pick your terrain with that in mind. 2. destroy plant Remember the old gang rules: 3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM to build again. stick to your neighborhood, don’t let them lure you i.e., destroy the concept of money to Central Park everytime, I would hate as we know it, get rid of interest, to stumble bloody out of that park to find help: savings, inheritance Central Park West, or Fifth Avenue, which would you (Pound’s money, as dated coupons that come in the mail choose? to everyone, and are void in 30 days // is still a good idea) go to love-ins or, let’s start with no money at all and invent it with incense, flowers, food, and a plastic bag if we need it with a damp cloth in it, for tear gas, wear no jewelry or, mimeograph it and everyone wear clothes you can move in easily, wear no glasses print as much as they want

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and see what happens grooving // friendship renewed, neat pickup truck, we stopped declare a moratorium on debt at a gas station the Continental Congress did man uptight at the ‘on all debts public and private’ sightgrooving of us, sight of Kirby’s hair, his friendly & no one ‘owns’ the land loosefriendship face, renewed,my hair, our neat dress pickup truck, we stopped it can be held manat a gas surly, station uptight, we drove for use, no man holding more awayman uptight brought at down the than he can work, himself and family working (acrosssight of fields us, sight of insecticide of Kirby’s and hair, migrant his friendly workers) // andloose face, my hair, our dress let no one work for another ‘Man’man surly, I said uptight, we drove except for love, and what you make above your needs be given to the tribe‘thataway cat brought down a Common-Wealth so(across uptight, fields what’s of insecticide he and migrant workers) // soand uptight about, it’s not None of us knows the answers, think about your‘Man’ hair, I said not really, it’s just these things. what‘that cat the TV tells him about hippies The day will come when we have toknow gotso uptight, him scared, what’s what he he reads in the answers. hisso uptight magazines about, it’s not gotyour him hair, scared, not really, we got it’s to just comewhat the out TV from tells behind him about the image hippies REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #10 sitgot down him scared, with him, what if he reads in sathis downmagazines to a beer with you he’d find These are transitional years and the dues got him scared, we got to will be heavy. a helluva lot more to say than he’ll find withcome the out man from who behind makes the your image image Change is quick but revolution sit down with him, if he will take A while. he’s got nothing in common withsat down the men to a whobeer runwith his you mind, he’d who find tell him America has not even begun as yet. a helluva lot more to say than he’ll find This continent is seed. what to think of us’ //with the man who makes your image SMASHhe’s got nothingTHE MEDIA, in common I said, REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #11 ANDwith the BURN men THE who SCHOOLS run his mind, who tell him sowhat people to think can meet,of us’ can sit drove across and// talk to each other, warm and close San Joaquin Valley noSMASH TV image THE flickering MEDIA, I said, with Kirby Doyle betweenAND BURN them. THE SCHOOLS grooving so people can meet, can sit getting free Digger meat and talk to each other, warm and close for Free City Convention REVOLUTIONARYno TV image flickering LETTER #12 grooving between them. behind talk of Kirby’s family the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction been here a long time the vortex of artistic creation is the vortex of self destruction REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #12 11 the vortex of creation is the vortex of12 destruction the vortex of artistic creation is the vortex of self destruction

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the vortex of political creation is the vortex of flesh destruction no need flesh is in the fire, it curls and terribly warps to gather publicly fat is in the fire, it drips and sizzling sings just gather spirit, see the forest growing bones are in the fire put back the big trees they crack tellingly in put back the buffalo subtle hieroglyphs of oracle the grasslands of the midwest with their herds of elk and deer charcoal singed put fish in clean Great Lakes the smell of your burning hair desire that all surface water on the planet for every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction be clean again. Kneel down and drink rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy from whatever brook or lake you conjure up.

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #13 REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #14 now let me tell you are you prepared what is a Brahmasastra to hide someone in your home indefinitely Brahmasastra, hindu weapon of war say, two to six weeks, you going out near as I can make out for food, etc., so he never. a flying wedge of mind energy hits the street, to keep your friends away hurled at the foe by god or hero coolly, so they ask no questions, to nurse or many heroes him, or her, as necessary, to know hurled at a problem or enemy ‘first aid’ and healing (not to freak out cracking it at the sight of torn or half-cooked flesh) // to pass him on at the right time to the next Brahmasastra can be made station, to cross the Canadian border, with a child by any or all so that the three of you can be made by all of us look like one family, no questions asked, straight or tripping, thinking together or fewer, to stash letters, guns, or bombs like: all of us stop the war forget about them at nine o’clock tomorrow, each take one soldier till they are called for, to KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT see him clearly, love him, take the gun not to ‘trust’ out of his hand, lead him to a quiet spot even your truelove, that is, sit him down, sit with him as he takes a joint lay no more knowledge on him than he needs of viet cong grass from his pocket . . . to do his part of it, a kindness Brahmasastra can be made we all must extend to each other in this game by all of us, tripping together winter solstice at home, or in park, or wandering REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #15 sitting with friends When you seize Columbia, when you blinds closed, or on porch, no be-in seize Paris, take

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the media, tell the people what you’re doing for 100 years, pumped from the car what you’re up to and why and how you mean poisons the hard-pressed cities, or try this to do it, how they can help, keep the news statistic, the USA coming, steady, you have 70 years has 5% of the world’s people uses over of media conditioning to combat, it is a wall 50% of the world’s goods, our garbage you must get through, somehow, to reach holds matter for survival for uncounted the instinctive man, who is struggling like a plant ‘underdeveloped’ nations for light, for air // when you seize a town, a campus, get hold of the power REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #17 stations, the water, the transportation, we will all feel the pinch forget to negotiate, forget how there will not be to negotiate, don’t wait for De Gaulle or Kirk a Cadillac and a 40,000 dollar home to abdicate, they won’t, you are not for everyone ‘demonstrating’ you are fighting simply a war, fight to win, don’t wait for Johnson or the planet will not bear it Humphrey or Rockefeller, to agree to your terms // take what you need, ‘it’s free What there will be is enough because it’s yours’ food, enough of the ‘necessities’, luxuries REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #16 will have to go by the board // we are eating up the planet, the New York Times even the poorest of us takes a forest, every Sunday, Los Angeles will have to give up something draws its water from the Sacramento Valley to live free the rivers of British Columbia are ours on lease for 99 years // REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #18 every large factory is an infringement let’s talk about splitting, splitting is an art of our god-given right to light and air frequently called upon in revolution to clean and flowing rivers stocked with fish retreat, says the I Ching, must not be confused to the very possibility of life with flight, and furthermore, frequently, it furthers for our children’s children, we will have to ONE TO HAVE SOMEWHERE TO GO look carefully, i.e., do we really want/ // need i.e., know in advance electricity and at what cost in natural resource the persons/place you can go to, human resource means to get there do we need cars, when petroleum keep money (cash) in house for travelling pumped from the earth poisons the land around an extra set of i.d., Robert Williams

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was warned by his own TV set when the Man if what you want was coming for him, is clinics where the AMA he had his loot at home, his wife and kids can feed you pills to keep you weak, or sterile all crossed the country with him, into CANADA shoot germs into your kids, while Mercke & Co and on to CUBA grows richer // if you want it’s a good idea free psychiatric help for everyone to have good, working transportation ‘wheels’, one friend so that the shrinks has two weeks stashed in his VW bus pimps for this decadence, can make food, water, matches, clothing, blankets, gas, he can go it flower for us, if you want at least that long, before he hits a town, can leave if you still want a piece at any time a small piece of suburbia, green lawn something to think about . . . laid down by the square foot color TV, whose radiant energy kills brain cells, whose subliminal ads REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #19 brainwash your children, have taken over your dreams (for The Poor People’s Campaign) // if what you want is jobs degrees from universities which are nothing for everyone, you are still the enemy, more than slum landlords, festering sinks you have not thought thru, clearly of lies, so you too can go forth what that means and lie to others on some greeny campus // // if what you want is housing, THEN YOU ARE STILL industry (G.E. on the Navaho reservation) THE ENEMY, you are selling a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator, yourself short, remember TV, more plumbing, scientific you can have what you ask for, ask for freeways, you are still everything the enemy, you have chosen to sacrifice the planet for a few years of some science fiction Utopia, if what you want REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #20 // still is, or can be, schools (for Huey Newton) where all our kids are pushed into one shape, are taught I will not rest it’s better to be ‘American’ than black till men walk free & fearless on the earth or Indian, or Jap, or PR, where Dick each doing in the manner of his blood and Jane become and are the dream, do you & tribe, peaceful in the free air look like Dick’s father, don’t you think your kid // secretly wishes you did till all can seek, unhindered // the shape of their thought

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no black cloud fear or guilt if they know factoring, chemical formulae, theory between them & the sun, no babies burning of numbers, equations, philosophy, semantics young men locked away, no paper world symbolic logic, latin, history, socalled, which is to come between flesh & flesh in human merely history of mind of western man, least interesting encounter of numberless manifestations on this planet? // // till the young women do you care come into their own, honored & fearless if he learns to eat off the woods, to set birthing strong sons a broken arm, to mend loving & dancing his own clothes, cook simple food, deliver // a calf or baby? if there are cars should he not till the young men can at last be able to keep his running? lose some of their sternness, return how will he learn these things, will he learn them to young men’s thoughts, till laughter cut off in a plaster box, encased bounces off our hills & fills in a larger cement box called ‘school’ dealing with paper our plains from morning till night, grinding no clay or mortar, no pigment, setting no seedlings in black earth come spring, how will he REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #21 know to trap a rabbit, build a raft, to navigate by stars, or find safe ground Can you to sleep on? what is he doing all his learning years own land, can you inside, as if the planet were no more than a vehicle own house, own rights for carrying our plastic constructs around the sun to other’s labor, (stocks, or factories or money, loaned at interest) what about REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #23 the yield of same, crops, autos airplanes dropping bombs, can you A lack of faith is simply a lack of courage own real estate, so others one who says ‘I wish I could believe that’ means simply that he pay you rent? to whom is coward, is pleased does the water belong, to whom to be spectator, on this scene where there are no spectators will the air belong, as it gets rarer? where all hands not actually working are working against the american indians say that a man as they lie idle, folded in lap, or holding up newspapers can own no more than he can carry away full of lies, or wrapped around steering wheel, on one more on his horse. pleasure trip

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #22 REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #24 what do you want Have you thought about the American aborigines your kids to learn, do you care who will inhabit

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this continent? Cave dwellers, tent people, tree dwellers, will your can we affordcan we to lose, afford before to lose, we before win, can we we win, can we great-grandchildrencan we afford to lose, be before among we them? win, can Will we they sell cut hair, orcut give hair, up or drugs, give up take drugs, take artifacts–abalonecut hair, or give up or drugs, wool–to take the affluent job, join Minute’Men,job, join Minute’Men, marry, wear marry, their wear clothes, their clothes, highlyjob, join civilized Minute’Men, Africans marry, wear their clothes, play bingo,play what bingo, what whoplay comebingo, here what in the summer, will they wear can we stomach,can we how stomach, soon how soon buckskin,can we stomach, or cotton, how loincloth, soon run down does it leavedoes its it mark, leave can its mark, we can we deer,does itcatch leave fish its barehanded, mark, can we build teepees, hogans, remember living straightliving in straight a straight in a part straight of town part still of town see still see toliving use straightthe wheel, in ato straight write, to part speak, of town or simply still see drum & pipe, our people,our can people, we live can we live smiling,our people, will can your we great-grandchildren live be among them? if we don’tif see we our don’t people? see our ‘It people? is better ‘It is better if we don’t see our people? ‘It is better to lose & win,to lose than & win, win & than be win & be to lose & win, than win & be defeated’ sddefeated’ Gertrude sd Stein,Gertrude which Stein, wd which you wd you REVOLUTIONARYdefeated’ sd Gertrude Stein, whichLETTER wd you #25 choose? choose? Knowchoose? every way out of your house, where it goes, every alley REVOLUTIONARYREVOLUTIONARY LETTER LETTER #28 #28 REVOLUTIONARYon the block, which back yards LETTER connect, which #28 walls are scalable, which bushes O my brothersO my brothers willO my hold brothers a man. busted forbusted pot, for for looting, pot, for for looting, loving for loving Constructbusted for at pot, least for one looting, man-sized for loving hiding place young beautifulyoung brothers beautiful & brothers sisters, &for sisters, holding for out holding hope out hope inyoung your beautiful walls, know brothers for sure & sisters, whichfor neighbors holding out hope in both handsin both to the hands Man, to enraging the Man, him enraging him willin both let you hands sneak to the in theMan, back enraging door & him saunter out the front O my brothers,O my freakingbrothers, out freaking this moment out this this moment beautiful this summer beautiful evening summer evening whileO my thebrothers, man is freaking parked inout your this driveway, moment this or tearing beautiful summer eveningin all the cagesin all theof America cages of America yourin all pad the apart,cages of which America neighbors won’t be home, which cellar doors while thewhile sun goes the down sun goes on this down fabled on this & holy fabled land: & holy land: arewhile open–whom the sun goes you down can summonon this fabled in your & holy neighborhood land: // // to// do your errands, check the block, set up know thatknow we have that this we land,have thiswe are land, filling we are its crevices filling its crevices aknow getaway that while we have you this sit land,tight insidewe are & filling your its house crevices its caves andits caves forests, and its forests, coastlines its coastlines and holy places and holy places isits watched caves and . . .forests, its coastlines and holy places with our mawittihng ouflreshma,tiwngithflteshhe ,fiweritceh pthelayfioefrceou pr lchayilodfrenour ouchrilnumbedren oursrinumbencreas-rs increas- with our mating flesh, with the fierce play of our children our numbeingrs increas-ing ing we are approachingwe are approaching your cells, your to cut cells, you to loose cut you loose REVOLUTIONARYwe are approaching your cells, LETTER to cut you loose #26 to march triumphantto march triumphant with you, with crying you, out crying out ‘DOESto march THE triumphant END with you, crying out to Maitreya,to Maitreya, across the across Pacific the Pacific JUSTIFYto Maitreya, THE across MEANS?’ the Pacific this is process, there is no end, there are only REVOLUTIONARYREVOLUTIONARY LETTER LETTER #29 #29 REVOLUTIONARYmeans, each one LETTER #29 had better justify itself. beware ofbeware those of those Tobeware whom? of those who say wewho are say the we beautiful are the losers beautiful losers who say we are the beautiful losers who standwho in their stand long in their hair andlong wait hair to and be wait punished to be punished REVOLUTIONARYwho stand in their long hair LETTERand wait to be #27 punished who weepwho on beaches weep on for beaches our isolation for our isolation who weep on beaches for our isolation // // How// much we are notwe alone: are not we alone: have brothers we have in brothers all the hills in all the hills we are not alone: we have brothers in all the hills 21 22 22 22 synth 15

can we afford to lose, before we win, can we we have sisters in the jungles and in the ozarks better we should all have homemade flutes cut hair, or give up drugs, take we even have brothers on the frozen tundra and practice excruciatingly upon them, one hundred years job, join Minute’Men, marry, wear their clothes, they sit by their fires, they sing, they gather arms till we learn to play bingo, what they multiply: they will reclaim the earth make our own music can we stomach, how soon // does it leave its mark, can we nowhere we can go but they are waiting for us living straight in a straight part of town still see no exile where we will not hear welcome home REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #32 our people, can we live ‘goodmorning sister, let me work with you not western civilization, but civilization itself if we don’t see our people? ‘It is better goodmorning brother, let me is the disease which is eating us to lose & win, than win & be fight by your side’ not the last five thousand years, but the last twenty thousand defeated’ sd Gertrude Stein, which wd you are the cancer choose? not modern cities, but the city, not REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #30 capitalism, but ism, art, religion, once they are REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #28 (To Those Who Sold the Revolution Summer of ’68) separate enough to be seen and named, named art named remember to wear a hat, if you have a hat religion, once they are not O my brothers and stick your hair inside it, if it’s long hair simply the daily acts of life which bring the rain, bring bread, heal, bring busted for pot, for looting, for loving or don’t, wear shoes if it’s snowing and you have shoes the herds close enough to hunt, birth the children young beautiful brothers & sisters, for holding out hope remember they buy out all the leaders, be a leader simply the acts of song, the acts of power, now lost in both hands to the Man, enraging him if you want to be bought out, but remember to to us these many years, not killing a few white men will bring O my brothers, freaking out this moment this beautiful summer evening tell the truth, just before they buy you, tell the truth back power, not killing all the white men, but killing in all the cages of America loud, and the kids will hear you, not hear your money the white man in each of us, killing the desire while the sun goes down on this fabled & holy land: as it falls on the liquorstore counter, day after day for brocade, for gold, for champagne brandy, which sends // not hear your dreams of nightmare betrayal and torture people out of the sun and out of their lives to create know that we have this land, we are filling its crevices not hear your mercedes, they’ll hear the truth you spoke COMMODITY for our pleasure, what claim its caves and forests, its coastlines and holy places they’ll believe you and honor you after you die, brought down do we have, can we make, on another’s time, another’s with our mating flesh, with the fierce play of our children our numbers increas- by that cia bullet you can’t avoid just by taking their money life blood, show me ing they’ll believe you and DO WHAT YOU SAY a city which does not consume the air and water we are approaching your cells, to cut you loose NOT WHAT YOU DO for miles around it, mohenjo-daro was a blot to march triumphant with you, crying out on the village culture of India, the cities of Egypt sucked to Maitreya, across the Pacific the life of millions, show me REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #31 an artifact of city which has the power as flesh has power, as spirit of man (for LeRoi, at long last) REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #29 has power not all the works of Mozart worth one human life beware of those not all the brocaded of the Potala palace who say we are the beautiful losers better we should wear homespun, than some in orlon REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #33 who stand in their long hair and wait to be punished some in Thailand silk who weep on beaches for our isolation the children of Bengal weave gold thread in silk saris how far back // six years old, eight years old, for export, they don’t sing are we willing to go?“that seems to be we are not alone: we have brothers in all the hills the singers are for export, Folkways records the question, the more we give up

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the more we will be blessed, the more REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #35 we give up, the further back we go, can we make it under the sky again, in moving tribes rise up, my that settle, build, move on and build again brothers, do not owning only what we carry, do we need bow your heads any longer, or pray the village, division of labor, a friendly potlatch except to the spirit you waken, the a couple of times a year, or must it be spirit you bring to birth, it merely a ‘cybernetic civilization’ never was on earth, rise up, do not which may or may not save the water, but will not droop, smoking hash or opium, dreaming sweetness, perhaps show us our root, or our original face, return there will be time for that, on the long beaches us to the source, how far lying in love with the few of us who are left, but now (forward is back) are we willing to go the earth cries out for aid, our brothers after all? and sisters set aside their childhoods, prepare to fight, what choice have we but join them, in their hands rests the survival of the very planet, the health REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #34 of the solar system, for we are one with the stars and the spirit we forge hey man let’s make a revolution, let’s give they wait for, Christ, Buddha, Krishna every man a thunderbird Paracelsus, had but a taste, we must reclaim color TV, a refrigerator, free the planet, re-occupy antibiotics, let’s build this ground apartments with a separate bedroom for every child the peace we seek was never seen before, the earth inflatable plastic sofas, vitamin pills BELONGS, at last, TO THE LIVING with all our daily requirements that come in the mail free gas & electric & telephone & no rent, why not? REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #36 // hey man, let’s make a revolution, let’s who is the we, who is turn off the power, turn on the the they in this thing, did stars at night, put metal we or they kill the Indians, not me back in the earth, or at least not take it out my people brought here, cheap labor to exploit anymore, make lots of guitars and flutes, teach the chicks a continent for them, did we how to heal with herbs, let’s learn or they exploit it? do you to live with each other in a smaller space, and build admit complicity, say ‘we hogans, and domes and teepees all over the place have to get out of Vietnam, we really should BLOW UP THE PETROLEUM LINES, make the cars stop poisoning the water, etc.’ look closer, look again, into flower pots or sculptures or live secede, declare your independence, don’t accept in the bigger ones, why not? a share of the guilt they want to lay on us MAN IS INNOCENT & BEAUTIFUL & born to perfect bliss they envy, heavy deeds

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make heavy hearts and to them brothers & sisters life is suffering, stand clear. danced in the sun, till the stars came out & the pigs drove around us in a circle, where we stood REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #37 touching each other & loving, then I went home & made love like a flower, like two flowers opening GEOGRAPHY, U.S.A. to each other, we were the east edge is the jewel in the lotus, next morning still high wandered uptown megalopolis, is to Natural History Museum & there Washington, D.C., spread out in a room of Peruvian fauna, birds 800 miles, ecology of paradise I saw as a past, like the dinosaurs totally fucked up, even saw birds pass from the earth & the brothers there do not completely believe flowers, most trees & small creatures: that they can win; the west edge chipmunks & rabbits & squirrels & delicate wildflowers is langorous w/wealth, there venison saw the earth bare & smooth, austerely plastic & efficient is brought down from the hills & figs & wine men feeding hydroponically, working like ants from abandoned orchards, the sisters thought flatly, without regret (I have unlearned raise their bastard young on welfare checks & rotten regret) sprayed vegetables, talk ‘free’, talk end of money, for them ‘WHAT BEAUTIFUL CREATURES the war is over, all the wars; the middle USED TO LIVE ON THE EARTH’ is hardly heard from yet, it is stirring, stretching muscles, bare bones of continent, eternal’ progression of young barbarians REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #40 huge boiling meat-fed hordes who can’t be taught there’s anything to lose, angelic herds whose unholy yell if the power of the word is anything, America, your oil fields is gonna shake us all burning your cities in ruins, smouldering, pillaged by children your cars broken down, at a standstill, choking the roads REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #38 your citizens standing beside them, bewildered, or choosing a packload of objects (what they can carry away) if the NOT PEOPLE’S PARK power of the word lives, America, your power lines down PEOPLE’S PLANET, CAN THEY eagle-eyed lines of electric, of telephone, towers FENCE THAT ONE IN, BULLDOZE IT of radio transmission 4 A.M.? toppled & rankling in the fields, setting the hay ablaze your newspapers useless, your populace illiterate REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #39 wiping their asses with them, IF THE WORD HAS POWER YOU SHALL NOT STAND let me tell you, brothers, that on May 30th I went to one of our AMERICA, the wilderness is spreading from the parks life festivals you have fenced it into, already dropped acid in Tompfkins Square Park with my desert blows through Las Vegas, the sea licks its chops

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at the oily edges of Los Angeles, // the camels are breeding, the bears, the elk are increasing something like 90% of the land of USA so are the indians and the very poor belongs to 5% of the population: do you stir in your sleep, America, do you dream of your power how can they hold on pastel colored oil tanks from sea to shining sea? when the hordes of the infants of the very poor sleep well, America, we stand by your bedside, grow up, grow strong the word has power, the chant is going up REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #43 REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #41 ‘I dreamed of a world without the sick and the fat’ Revolution: a turning, as the earth – Yevtushenko turns, among planets, as the sun the map: first goal is health turns round some (darker) star, the galaxy strong bodies make strong spirit, Venceremos Brigade describes a yin-yang spiral in the aether, we turn coming back from Cuba discover they know how to breathe from dark to light, turn they can get up with the sun; first thing: faces of pain & fear, the dawn to zap the sugar habit, get rid of meat awash among them & heavy drugs, to eat no chemicals, no processed food first step: to find out what health feels like: even keel REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #42 tireless energy pouring steady through // what is this then, prana (vital energy) moving smooth ‘overpopulation’ problem, have you thru all yr flesh: next goal release looked at it, clearly, do you know sex force–strong flesh becomes bright flesh // anger becomes ‘Buddha’s anger’ a steady roar ten times as much land needed if we eat righteous, behind yr action, not spasmodic, threatens hamburger, instead of grain; we can no self-destruction; loose touch on all fit, not hungry, if we minimize brothers & sisters, loose force (& contain it) our needs, RIP OFF LARGE, EMPTY RANCHES, make the food Holy Power nutritious: chemical fertilizers to build up, or pull down have to go, nitrates poison the water; large scale machine farming has to go, the soil REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #44 is blowing away (300 years to make one inch of topsoil), do you know (for my sisters) // As we know that blood 40% of the women of Puerto Rico is birth, agony already sterilized, transistor radios breaks open doors, as we the ‘sterilization bonus’ in India; all propaganda can bend, graciously, beneath burdens, undermine aimed at the ‘non-white’ and ‘poor white’ populations like rain, or earthworms, as our cries

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yield to the cries of the newborn, as we hear REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #46 the plea in the voices around us, not words of passion or cunning, discount And as you learn the magic, learn to believe it anger or pride, grow strong Don’t be ‘surprised’ when it works, you undercut in our own strength, women’s alchemy, quick arms your power. to pull down walls, we liberate out of our knowledge, labor, sucking babes, we liberate, and nourish, as the earth REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #47 TO BE FREE we’ve got to be free REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #45 of any idea of freedom. Today the State Dept lifted the ban on And it seems to me the struggle has to be waged travel to China; and closed on a number of different levels: Merritt College. // they have computers to cast the I Ching for them but we have yarrow stalks REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #48 and the stars Be careful. it is a battle of energies, of force-fields, what the newspapers With what relief do we fall back call a battle of ideas on the tale, so often told in revolutions // that now we must to take hold of the magic any way we can organize, obey the rules, so that later and use it in total faith we can be free. It is the point to seek help in realms we have been taught to think of at which the revolution stops. To be carried forward as ‘mythological’ later & in another country, this is to contact ALL LEVELS of one’s own being the pattern, but we can & loose the forces therein break the pattern always seeking in this to remain psychically inconspicuous // on the not so unlikely chance learn now we see that those we have thought of as ‘instigators’ with all our skin, smell with our eyes too are just the front men for a gang of black magicians sense & sex are boundless & the call based ‘somewhere else’ in space is to be boundless in them, make the joy to whom the WHOLE of earth is a colony to exploit now, that we want, no shape (the ‘Nova Mob’ not so far out as you think) for space & time now but the shapes we will // Best not to place bodies in the line of fire but to seek other means: study the Sioux REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #49 learn not to fuck up as they did–another ghost dance started on Haight Street in 1967 Machinery: extended hands of man We ain’t seen the end of it yet doing man’s work. Diverted rivers

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washing my clothes, diverted fire that’s where my friends are, dancing in wires, making light; you bastards, not that and heat. To see it thus is to see it, even you know what that means diverted rivers must resume their course, and fire // consume, whatever name you call it. Ain’t gonna cop to it, ain’t gonna be scared no more, we all know the same songs, mushrooms, butterflies REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #50 we all have the same babies, dig it As soon as we submit the woods are big. to a system based on causality, linear time we submit, again, to the old values, plunge again into slavery. Be strong. We have the right to make REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #53 the universe we dream. No need to fear “science” grovelling apology for things as they are, ALL POWER HOW TO BECOME A WALKING ALCHEMICAL EXPERIMENT TO JOY. which will remake the world. eat mercury (in wheat & fish) breathe sulphur fumes (everywhere) take plenty of (macrobiotic) salt REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #51 & cook the mixture in the heat of an atomic explosion Don’t give up the eleven o’clock news for Chairman Mao, don’t switch from one “programming” to another REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #54 hang loose, Mao was young fifty years ago, & in China. It takes courage to say no // No to canned corn & instant REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #52 mashed potatoes. No to rice krispies. No to special K. No to margarine SAN FRANCISCO NOTE mono & di-glycerides, NSDA I think I’ll stay on this for coloring, causing cancer. No to earthquake fault near this white bread, bleached w/nerve gas (wonder still-active volcano in this bread). No to everything fried armed fortress facing a in hardened oil w/silicates. No to dying ocean & once-so-delicious salami, now red covered w/dirt w/sodium nitrate. while the // streets burn up & the No to processed cheeses. No rocks fly & pepper gas no again to irradiated bacon, pink lays us out phosphorescent ham, dead plastic cause pasteurized milk. No to chocolate pudding

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like grandma never made. No thanx As we spin (further) from the light to coca-cola. No to freshness preserves, our bodies sprout new madnesses dough conditioners, no congenital pale disease, like new plants potassium sorbate, no on the edge of (radioactive) craters aluminum silicate, NO we sprout new richness of design BHA, BHT, NO baroque apologies for Kaliyuga di-ethyl-propyl-glycerate. till Kether calls us home // hauls in the galaxies like some No more ice cream? not w/embalming fluid. big fish. Goodbye potato chips, peanut butter, jelly, jolly white sugar! No more DES all-American steaks or hamburgers either! REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #57 Goodbye, frozen fish! (dipped & coated w/ aureomycin) Fried eggs over easy w/ NOTES TOWARD AN AMERICAN HISTORY hormones, penicillin & speed. Over & over I’ve look for Goodbye, frozen fish! (dipped & coated w/ the picture in the cloth: man Carnation Instant Breakfast, Nestle’s Quik. standing idle & tall against Fritos, goodbye! your labels are very confusing. horizon: “savage” landscape // we stare, poverty-struck All I can say at New England pewter in is what my daughter age six once said to me: farmhouse window: quote “if I can’t pronounce it Adams, Jefferson, hew maybe I shouldn’t eat it.” map of the sacred meadow or, Dick Gregory // coming out of a 20-day fast: this was the “the people of America are controlled land we were promised, by the food they eat” wasnt it? is Fresno new Jerusalem? where is Dallas? how wd Olson/ REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #55 Pound/Tom Paine explain Petaluma. Over & over Kirby Doyle All thru Amerika mad all I see & find is tells tale of his grandfather walking out Indian America of the desert the forms & shapes of his wife & two sons waiting in a wagon Great-Turtle-Island (he had the mule) & the boats in Gloucester, Newfoundland & Greece REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #56 (the same) The forms proliferate. the wood

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carved in Alaska & New Guinea . . . REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #59 Over & over we seek that savage man sufficient & generous; we find Look to the cities, see how “urban renewal” Rockefeller, Nixon; tears out the slums from the heart of town sad letters of Jefferson forces expendable poor to the edges, to some mourning the ravaging of moundbuilders’ land remote & indefensible piece of ground: requesting his daughter not to neglect her French. Hunters Point, Lower East Side, Columbia Point We; over & over; seeking line & form out of sight, out of mind, & when bread riots come gold-leaf as in Sienna (conjured by cutting welfare, raising prices) “outline” as Blake the man wont hesitate to raze those ghettos we sit on shifting ground & few will see, & fewer will object. at the edge of this ocean “as far from Europe as you can get” & watch the hills flicker like dreamskin REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #60 First Observable Effects of So-Called “Energy Crisis” (Fall 1973) REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #58 1. off-shore drilling renewed, Santa Barbara & elsewhere we can expect What we need to know is laws of time & space new off-shore wells to be opened they never dream of. Seek out regardless of consequences the ancient texts: alchemy 2. price of crude oil shoots sky-high, making homeopathy, secret charts the extraction of shale oil feasible (profitable) of early Rosicrucians (Giordanisti). which shale oil territory has been prepared Grok synchronicity Jung barely for exploitation by forcing beef prices up, advocating scratched the surface of. beef boycots, forcing LOOK TO THE “HERESIES” of EUROPE FOR smaller ranches toward bankruptcy BLOODROOT 3. Peabody Coal plans to occupy Cheyenne land (remnants of pre-colonized pre-Roman Europe): on legal grounds they are “incapable” Insistent, hopeful resurgence of communards of exploiting its “natural resource”, i.e. free love & joy; “in god all things are common” dont wait to extract minerals at the cost secret celebration of ancient season feasts & moons. of all else Rewrite the calendar. 4. grim austerity consciousness // empty shelves & stiff upper lip Head-on war is the mistake we make & plenty of hoarding, reminiscent time after time of early 40’s, conditioned reflex There is a way around it, way to outflank right psychological climate for WW III technology, short circuit 5. of course, police & military will have enough gas “energy crisis”: retreat & silence & how will you like cunning to be stationary populace in the grip courage & love of a mobile army?

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REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #61 instead of living cosmos? // Take a good look whose dream those hierarchies: planets & stars at history (the American myth) blindly obeying fixed laws, as they desire check sell out us, too, to stay in place of revolution by the founding fathers whose interest to postulate “Constitution written by a bunch of gangsters man’s recent blind “descent” from “unthinking” animals to exploit a continent” is what our pitiable geocentric isolation: Charles Olson told me. lone voice in the stars Check Shay’s rebellion, Aaron Burr, Nathan Hale. // Who wrote the history books where you what point in this cosmology but to drain went to school? hope of contact or change Check Civil War: maybe industrial north /oppressing us w/“reason” needed cheap labor, South had it, how many sincere “movement” people writers & radicals played REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #63 into their hands? Check Haymarket trial: it broke the back Free Julian Beck of strong Wobblie movement: how many jailed, fined, Free Timothy Leary killed to stop that one? What’s happening to us Free seven million starving in Pakistan has happened a few times before Free all political prisoners let’s change the script Free Angela Davis // Free Soledad brothers What did it take to stop the Freedom Riders Free Martin Sobel. . . . ’ What have we actually changed? Free Sacco & Vanzetti month I was born Free Big Bill Hayward they were killing onion pickers in Ohio Free Sitting Bull Month that I write this, nearly 40 years later Free Crazy Horse they’re killing UFW’s in the state Free all political prisoners I’m trying somehow to live in. LET’S REWRITE Free Billy the Kid the history books. Free Jesse James History repeats itself Free all political prisoners only if we let it. Free Nathan Hale Free Joan of Arc Free Galileo & Bruno & Eckhart REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #62 Free Jesus Christ: Free Socrates check Science: whose interest does it serve? Free all political prisoners whose need to perpetrate Free all political prisoners mechanical dead (exploitable) universe All prisoners are political prisoners

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Every pot smoker a political prisoner Help to free me Every holdup man a political prisoner Free yourself Every forger a political prisoner Help to free me Every angry kid who smashed a window a political prisoner Free Barry Goldwater Every whore, pimp, murderer, a political prisoner Help to free me Every pederast, dealer, drunk driver, burglar Free Governor Wallace poacher, striker, strike breaker, rapist Free President Nixon. Polar bear at San Francisco zoo, political prisoner Free J Edgar Hoover Ancient wise turtle at Detroit Aquarium, political prisoner Free them; Flamingoes dying in Phoenix tourist park, political prisoners Free yourself Otters in Tucson Desert Museum, political prisoners Free them Elk in Wyoming grazing behind barbed wire, political prisoners Free yourself Prairie dogs poisoned in New Mexico, war casualties Free yourself (Mass grave of Wyoming bald eagles, a battlefield) Free them Every kid in school a political prisoner Free yourself Every lawyer in his cubicle a political prisoner Help to free me Every doctor brainwashed by AMA a political prisoner Free us Every housewife a political prisoner DANCE Every teacher lying thru sad teeth a political prisoner May 1968-Dec 1971. Every Indian on reservation a political prisoner Every black man a political prisoner Every faggot hiding in bar a political prisoner BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Every junkie shooting up in John a political prisoner Diane di Prima was born inBrooklyn, New York in 1934, a second generation Every woman a political prisoner Help to free me American of Italian descent. Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was Every woman a political prisoner Free yourself an active anarchist, and associateof Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman. She began You are political prisoner locked in tense body Help to free me writing atthe age of seven, and committed herself toalife as a poet atthe age You are political prisoner locked in stiff mind Free Barry Goldwater offourteen. Forthe pastthirty-fouryears she has lived in northern California, You are political prisoner locked to your parents Help to free me raising five children.In the late ’60s she took part in the political activities ofthe You are political prisoner locked to your past Free Governor Wallace Diggers and iswidely considered the mostimportant woman writer ofthe Beat Free yourself Free President Nixon. movement. Free yourself Free J Edgar Hoover [email protected] I am political prisoner locked in anger habit Free them; I am political prisoner locked in greed habit Free yourself I am political prisoner locked in fear habit Free them I am political prisoner locked in dull senses Free yourself I am political prisoner locked in numb flesh Free yourself Free me Free them Free me Free yourself Help to free me Help to free me Free yourself Free us DANCE 41 May 1968-Dec 1971. 42

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Diane di Prima was born inBrooklyn, New York in 1934, a second generation American of Italian descent. Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an active anarchist, and associateof Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman. She began writing atthe age of seven, and committed herself toalife as a poet atthe age offourteen. Forthe pastthirty-fouryears she has lived in northern California, raising five children.In the late ’60s she took part in the political activities ofthe Diggers and iswidely considered the mostimportant woman writer ofthe Beat movement. [email protected]

42 synth 25 Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference

Audre Lorde 26 synth synth 27 28 synth synth 29 30 synth synth 31 32 synth synth 33 34 synth synth 35 The Personal is Political

INTRODUCTION ner, who contended that consciousness-rais- January 2006 ing was just therapy and questioned whether the new independent WLM was really “polit- The paper, “The Personal Is Political,” was ical.” originally published in Notes from the Sec- ond Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970 and This was not an unusual reaction to radical was widely reprinted and passed around the feminist ideas in early 1969. WLM groups Movement and beyond in the next several had been springing up all over the coun- years. I didn’t know just how much it had try—and the world. The radical movements gotten around until I did a Google search of Civil Rights, Anti-Vietnam War, and Old and found it being discussed in many differ- and New Left groups from which many of us ent languages. sprang were male dominated and very ner- vous about women’s liberation in general, but I’d like to clarify for the record that I did especially the spectre of the mushrooming not give the paper its title, “The Personal Is independent women’s liberation movement, Political.” As far as I know, that was done of which I was a staunch advocate. Arriving by Notes from the Second Year editors Shu- in New York City after ten months in the lie Firestone and Anne Koedt after Kathie Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, I had Sarachild brought it to their attention as a found SCEF to be one of the more mature possible paper to be printed in that early col- and better progressive groups around. It had lection. Also, “political” was used here in the a good record of racial, economic and politi- broad sense of the word as having to do with cal justice work since New Deal days, and I power relationships, not the narrow sense of joined its staff in 1966 as its New York of- electorial politics. fice manager. SCEF allowed New York Rad- ical Women to meet in its New York office, The paper actually began as a memo that I where I worked, and at my request agreed wrote in February of 1969 while in Gaines- to explore setting up a women’s liberation ville, Florida. It was sent to the women’s project in the South. However, many on the caucus of the Southern Conference Educa- SCEF staff, both men and women, ended tional Fund (SCEF) a group for whom I was up joining the criticism of women getting a subsistence-paid organizer doing explorato- together in consciousness-raising groups to ry work for establishing a women’s liberation discuss their own oppression as “naval-gaz- project in the South. The memo was origi- nally titled, “Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie’s Thoughts on a Women’s Liberation Movement,” and was written in reply to a memo by another staff member, Dottie Zell- Carol Hanisch 36 synth ing” and “personal therapy”—and certainly can think of things we were taught to think “not political.” or do that we rejected once the forces that kept us thinking or doing them were re- They could sometimes admit that women moved.) It was consciousness-raising that were oppressed (but only by “the system”) led to the emergence of the Pro-Woman and said that we should have equal pay for Line with its scientific explanation based on equal work, and some other “rights.” But an analysis of our own experiences and an they belittled us no end for trying to bring examination of “who benefits” from women’s our so-called “personal problems” into the oppression. Understanding that our oppres- public arena—especially “all those body is- sive situations were not our own fault—were sues” like sex, appearance, and abortion. Our not, in the parlance of the time, “all in our demands that men share the housework and head”—gave us a lot more courage as well childcare were likewise deemed a personal as a more solid, real foundation on which to problem between a woman and her individ- fight for liberation. ual man. The opposition claimed if women would just “stand up for themselves” and “The Personal is Political” paper and the take more responsibility for their own lives, theory it contains, was my response in the they wouldn’t need to have an independent heat of the battle to the attacks on us by movement for women’s liberation. What SCEF and the rest of the radical movement. personal initiative wouldn’t solve, they said, I think it’s important to realize that the pa- “the revolution” would take care of if we per came out of struggle—not just my strug- would just shut up and do our part. Heav- gle in SCEF but the struggle of the indepen- en forbid that we should point out that men dent WLM against those who were trying benefit from oppressing women. to either stop it or to push it into directions they found less threatening. Recognizing the need to fight male supremacy as a movement instead of blaming the indi- It’s also important to realize the theory the vidual woman for her oppression was where paper contains did not come solely out of my the Pro-Woman Line came in. It challenged individual brain. It came out of a movement the old anti-woman line that used spiritual, (the Women’s Liberation Movement) and a psychological, metaphysical, and pseudo-his- specific group within that movement (New torical explanations for women’s oppression York Radical Women) and a specific group with a real, materialist analysis for why of women within New York Radical Women, women do what we do. (By materialist, I sometimes referred to as the Pro-Woman mean in the Marxist materialist (based in Line faction. reality) sense, not in the “desire for consum- er goods” sense.) Taking the position that Of course there were women within New “women are messed over, not messed up” York Radical Women and the broader fem- took the focus off individual struggle and put inist movement who argued from the be- it on group or class struggle, exposing the ginning against consciousness raising and necessity for an independent WLM to deal claimed women were brainwashed and com- with male supremacy. plicit in their own oppression, an argument rooted in the sociological and psychological The Pro-Woman Line also helped challenge rather than the political. They, too, helped in the “sex role theory” of women’s oppression the formulation of Pro-Woman Line theo- that said women act as we do because “that’s ry. By arguing the then “standard wisdom” how we were taught” by “society.” (We all against us, they forced us to clarify and synth 37 hone and develop and refine and articulate further development. Perhaps the two that the new theory so that it could be spread bothers me the most are: “Women are smart more widely. After New York Radical Wom- not to struggle alone” and “It is no worse to en meetings, the Pro-Woman Line faction be in the home than in the rat race of the would usually end up at Miteras, a nearby job world.” restaurant that served fantastic apple pie a la mode. There we would discuss how the The first statement doesn’t mean that wom- meeting had gone and the ideas that had en are smart not to struggle at all, as some been talked about until two or three in the have interpreted the Pro-Woman Line. morning, both agreeing with and challenging Women are sometimes smart not to struggle each other in wonderful, lively debate among alone when they can’t win and the repercus- ourselves. sions are worse than the oppression. Howev- er, individual struggle does sometimes get us In September of 1968—six months before some things, and when the WLM is at low “The Personal Is Political” was written, the tide or invisible, it may be the best we can Miss America Protest brought home to many do. We need to always be pushing the enve- why the Pro-Woman Line theory we were lope. Even when the WLM is at high tide, developing was so important when it came to because our oppression often takes place in taking action outside the group. In another isolated circumstances like the home, it still paper entitled “A Critique of the Miss Amer- takes individual action to put into practice ica Protest” I wrote about how the anti-wom- what the Movement is fighting for. But in- en faction of the protesters detracted from dividual struggle is always limited; it’s going our message that ALL women are oppressed to takes an ongoing Movement stronger than by beauty standards, even the contestants. any we’ve seen so far to put an end to male Signs like “Up Against the Wall, Miss Amer- supremacy. ica” and “Miss America Is a Big Falsie” made these contestants out to be our enemy On the second point, I have come to agree instead of the men and bosses who imposed with Susan B. Anthony that to be free, a false beauty standards on women. woman must have “a purse of her own.” Women can’t be independent without par- Political struggle or debate is the key to good ticipating in the public workforce. That also political theory. A theory is just a bunch means uniting in a fight for public childcare of words— sometimes interesting to think and for a restructuring of the workplace with about, but just words, nevertheless—until women’s equality in mind, while insisting it is tested in real life. Many a theory has men share the housework and childcare on delivered surprises, both positive and nega- the homefront, so that women don’t end up tive, when an attempt has been made to put having to do it all. it into practice. I wish we could have anticipated all the ways While trying to think how I would change that “The Personal Is Political” and “The “The Personal Is Political” paper if I could Pro-Woman Line” would be revised and rewrite it with today’s hindsight, I was actu- misused. Like most of the theory created by ally surprised how well it stands the test of the Pro-Woman Line radical feminists, these time and experience. There are a few things ideas have been revised or ripped off or even I would elaborate on, like my simplistic stood on their head and used against their definition of class, and there are a few state- original, radical intent. While it’s necessary ments in the paper that are badly in need of that theories take their knocks in the real 38 synth world, like everything else, many of us have We have not done much trying to solve immediate learned that once they leave our hands, they personal problems of women in the group. We’ve need to be defended against revisionism and misuse. mostly picked topics by two methods: In a small group it is possible for us to take turns bringing What follows is the original version of “The questions to the meeting (like, Which do/did you Personal Is Political” as edited from the prefer, a girl or a boy baby or no children, and why? memo for the 1970 anthology, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, edited What happens to your relationship if your man by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt. — makes more money than you? Less than you?). Then Carol Hanisch we go around the room answering the questions from

our personal experiences. Everybody talks that way. The Personal Is Political At the end of the meeting we try to sum up and gen- by Carol Hanisch eralize from what’s been said and make connections.

February, 1969 I believe at this point, and maybe for a long time to come, that these analytical sessions are a form of For this paper I want to stick pretty close to an political action. I do not go to these sessions because aspect of the Left debate commonly talked about— I need or want to talk about my ”personal problems.” namely “therapy” vs. “therapy and politics.” Another In fact, I would rather not. As a movement woman, name for it is “personal” vs. “political” and it has I’ve been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-ori- other names, I suspect, as it has developed across ented, sacrificing, and in general pretty much in con- the country. I haven’t gotten over to visit the New trol of my own life. To admit to the problems in my Orleans group yet, but I have been participating in life is to be deemed weak. So I want to be a strong groups in New York and Gainesville for more than woman, in movement terms, and not admit I have a year. Both of these groups have been called “ther- any real problems that I can’t find a personal solu- apy” and “personal” groups by women who consider tion to (except those directly related to the capitalist themselves “more political.” So I must speak about system). It is at this point a political action to tell it so-called therapy groups from my own experience. like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say. The very word “therapy” is obviously a misnomer if carried to its logical conclusion. Therapy assumes So the reason I participate in these meetings is not that someone is sick and that there is a cure, e.g., a to solve any personal problem. One of the first things personal solution. I am greatly offended that I or any we discover in these groups is that personal prob- other woman is thought to need therapy in the first lems are political problems. There are no personal place. Women are messed over, not messed up! We solutions at this time. There is only collective action need to change the objective conditions, not adjust for a collective solution. I went, and I continue to go to them. Therapy is adjusting to your bad personal to these meetings because I have gotten a political alternative. understanding which all my reading, all my “political discussions,” all my “political action,” all my four- synth 39 odd years in the movement never gave me. I’ve been There is no “more liberated” way; there are only bad forced to take off the rose colored glasses and face alternatives. the awful truth about how grim my life really is as a woman. I am getting a gut understanding of every- This is part of one of the most important theories we thing as opposed to the esoteric, intellectual under- are beginning to articulate. We call it “the pro-wom- standings and noblesse oblige feelings I had in “other an line.” What it says basically is that women are people’s” struggles. really neat people. The bad things that are said about us as women are either myths (women are This is not to deny that these sessions have at least stupid), tactics women use to struggle individually two aspects that are therapeutic. I prefer to call (women are bitches), or are actually things that we even this aspect “political therapy” as opposed to want to carry into the new society and want men to personal therapy. The most important is getting rid share too (women are sensitive, emotional). Women of self-blame. Can you imagine what would happen if as oppressed people act out of necessity (act dumb women, blacks, and workers (my definition of worker in the presence of men), not out of choice. Women is anyone who has to work for a living as opposed to have developed great shuffling techniques for their those who don’t. All women are workers) would-stop own survival (look pretty and giggle to get or keep blaming ourselves for our sad situations? It seems a job or man) which should be used when necessary to me the whole country needs that kind of political until such time as the power of unity can take its therapy. That is what the black movement is doing place. Women are smart not to struggle alone (as are in its own way. We shall do it in ours. We are only blacks and workers). It is no worse to be in the home starting to stop blaming ourselves. We also feel like than in the rat race of the job world. They are both we are thinking for ourselves for the first time in our bad. Women, like blacks, workers, must stop blaming lives. As the cartoon in Lilith puts it, “I’m changing. ourselves for our “failures.” My mind is growing muscles.” Those who believe that Marx, Lenin, Engels, Mao, and Ho have the only and It took us some ten months to get to the point where last “good word” on the subject and that women have we could articulate these things and relate them to nothing more to add will, of course, find these groups the lives of every woman. It’s important from the a waste of time. standpoint of what kind of action we are going to do. When our group first started, going by major- The groups that I have been in have also not gotten ity opinion, we would have been out in the streets into “alternative life-styles” or what it means to demonstrating against marriage, against having be a “liberated” woman. We came early to the con- babies, for free love, against women who wore make- clusion that all alternatives are bad under present up, against housewives, for equality without recog- conditions. Whether we live with or without a man, nition of biological differences, and god knows what communally or in couples or alone, are married or else. Now we see all these things as what we call unmarried, live with other women, go for free love, “personal solutionary.” Many of the actions taken celibacy or lesbianism, or any combination, there are by “action” groups have been along these lines. The only good and bad things about each bad situation. women who did the anti-woman stuff at the Miss 40 synth

America Pageant were the ones who were screaming them to others. for action without theory. The members of one group want to set up a private daycare center without any One more thing: I think we must listen to what so- real analysis of what could be done to make it better called apolitical women have to say—not so we can do for little girls, much less any analysis of how that a better job of organizing them but because together center hastens the revolution. we are a mass movement. I think we who work full- time in the movement tend to become very narrow. That is not to say, of course, that we shouldn’t do What is happening now is that when non-movement action. There may be some very good reasons why women disagree with us, we assume it’s because they women in the group don’t want to do anything at the are “apolitical,” not because there might be some- moment. One reason that I often have is that this thing wrong with our thinking. Women have left the thing is so important to me that I want to be very movement in droves. The obvious reasons are that we sure that we’re doing it the best way we know how, are tired of being sex slaves and doing shitwork for and that it is a “right” action that I feel sure about. men whose hypocrisy is so blatant in their political I refuse to go out and “produce” for the movement. stance of liberation for everybody (else). But there is We had a lot of conflict in our New York group about really a lot more to it than that. I can’t quite articu- whether or not to do action. When the Miss Amer- late it yet. I think “apolitical” women are not in the ica Protest was proposed, there was no question but movement for very good reasons, and as long as we that we wanted to do, it. I think it was because we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join all saw how it related to our lives. We felt it was the charmed circle,” we will fail. What I am trying a good action. There were things wrong with the to say is that there are things in the consciousness action, but the basic idea was there. of “apolitical” women (I find them very political) that are as valid as any political consciousness we think This has been my experience in groups that are we have. We should figure out why many women accused of being “therapy” or “personal.” Perhaps don’t want to do action. Maybe there is something certain groups may well be attempting to do therapy. wrong with the action or something wrong with why Maybe the answer is not to put down the method we are doing the action or maybe the analysis of why of analyzing from personal experiences in favor of the action is necessary is not clear enough in our immediate action, but to figure out what can be minds. done to make it work. Some of us started to write a handbook about this at one time and never got past the outline. We are working on it again, and hope to have it out in a month at the latest.

It’s true we all need to learn how to better draw conclusions from the experiences and feelings we talk about and how to draw all kinds of connections. Some of us haven’t done a very good job of communicating synth 41 Napster was only the beginning

a spectre is haunting the corporate world--the i already got it via sms. one shouldn’t expect spectre of organized world-wide file-sharing. the 50 million former users of napster to be mp3, to name the most common synonym digitally illiterate: they won’t judge an e-book for the becoming-distributor of millions of by its cover. former customers, has clearly shown that the flows of digital data are much more driven this is not project gutenberg. it is neither by people and popular protocols than they are about constituting a canonical body of his- determined by legislation, ownership or the torical texts (by authors so classical that new global rules of the corporate-political. they’ve all been watching the grass from napster has reverse-engineered the ideology below for almost a century of posthumous of a whole industry, and it has finally proven copyright), nor is it about htmlifying freely its total, complete and absolute obsolescence. available books into unreadable sub-chap- today more than ever, the nets are zones of terized hyper-chunks. texts relate to texts excess, immune against the business mod- by other means than a href. just go to your el of electronic scarcity. the transnational local bookstore and find out yourself. the companies that are trying to break up the net is not a rhizome, and a digital library file-sharing networks have declared a war should not be an interactive nirvana. the they will never be able to stop. there are go- conceptual poverty of today’s post-academic, ing to be thousands of napsters. textz.com is post-corporate public online services--and not even zero-point-five of them. we haven’t seen dot-museum yet--is not and has never been a desirable alternative to the we are not the dot in dot-com, neither are dystopic vision of a future controlled by the we the minus in e-book. the future of online super-pervasive data-streams of the emerging publishing sits right next to your computer: military-entertainment complex. there are it’s a $50 scanner and a $50 printer, both still other options. nostalgia is slavery. stay connected to the internet. we are the & in home, read a book. copy & paste, and plain ascii is still the format of our choice. it shouldn’t require a information does not want to be free. in fact plug-in to read a book on the net, nor should it is absolutely free of will, a constant flow it require a credit card. the text industry is of signs of lives which are permanently being a paper tiger. along with the mass erosion turned into commodities and transformed of their proprietary rights goes the vanish- into commercial content. textz.com is not ing of their digital watermarks. packed to- part of the information business. they say day, cracked tomorrow. whatever electronic there was a time when content was king, gadgets they will come up with--they are all but we have seen his head rolling. our week going to be dead media on their very release beats their year. ever since we have been day. forget about your brand new kafka dvd. moving from content to discontent, collecting 42 scripts and viruses, writing programs andsynth bots, dealing with textz as warez, as execut- ables--something that is able to change your life. this is not promotional material. facing the unified principles of information--the combined horror of global communication and so-called guerilla marketing--there is no more need for media theory or cultural stud- ies. the resistance against corporate culture can itself no longer remain in the cultural domain. you make a mistake if you see what we do as merely apolitical. we are studying the coils of the serpent, watching the walk of the penguin, mapping the moves of our wired enemies. intellectu- al, digital and biological property--corner- stones of the new regimes of control--are the direct result of organized corporate piracy. they are not only replacing such dubious and obsolete notions as freedom, democra- cy, human rights and technological progress. all these new forms of ownership are, in the first place, attempts to expropriate people’s work, data and bodies--just as the they begin to acquire, for the first time in history, the technical means to organize them in a radi- cally different way. today’s global media and communication conglomerates are mafias, and we shouldn’t count on what’s left of the national governments when it comes to fight- ing back. “humanity won’t be happy until the last copyright holder is hung by the guts of the last patent lawyer.” napster was only the beginning. the nineties of the net are over. let’s move on.

2001 synth 43

Les Guérillères

GOLDEN SPACES LACUNAE THE GREEN DESERTS ARE SEEN THEY DREAM AND SPEAK OF THEM THE IMMOBILE BIRDS OF JET THE WEAPONS PILED IN THE SUN THE SOUND OF THE SINGING VOICES THE DEAD WOMEN THE DEAD WOMEN

CONSPIRACIES REVOLUTIONS FERVOUR FOR THE STRUGGLE INTENSE HEAT DEATH AND HAPPINESS IN THE BREASTED TORSOS THE PHOENIXES THE PHOENIXES FREE CELIBATE GOLDEN THEIR OUTSPREAD WINGS ARE HEARD

THE BIRDS THE SWIMMING SIRENS THE TRANSLUCENT SPANS THE WINGS THE GREEN SUNS THE GREEN SUNS THE VIOLET FLAT GRASSLANDS THE CRIES THE LAUGHS THE MOVEMENTS THE WOMEN AFFIRM IN TRIUMPH THAT ALL ACTION IS OVERTHROW

Monique Wittig ubu.com

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When it rains the women stay in the summer house. They hear the water beating on the tiles and streaming down the slopes of the roof. Fringes of rain surround the summer-house, the water that runs down at its angles flows more strongly, it is as if springs hollow out the peb- bles at the places where it reaches the ground. At last someone says it is like the sound of micturition, that she cannot wait any longer, and squats down. Then some of them form a circle around her to watch the labia expel the urine.

The women frighten each other by hiding behind the trees. One or other of them asks for grace. Then they chase each other in the dark- ness, ill-wishing the one who is caught. Or else they search gropingly, scenting the one whose perfume is to be honoured. Amomum aniseed betel cinnamon cubeb mint liquorice musk ginger clove nutmeg pep- per saffron sage vanilla receive homage in turn. Then the wearers of these perfumes are chased in the dark as in blindman’s buff. Cries laughter sounds of falling are heard.

In dull weather the women may shed hot tears, saying that in the sun- shine the roofs of the houses and the walls are of quite another colour. Mist spreads over the water over the fields about the houses. It pene- trates through closed windows. Someone arrives to visit the house. She cannot see it. The huge paintings in vivid colours disappear behind orange vapours. Then she slumps to the ground demanding to be entertained. They tell her in great detail the story of the woman who, speaking of her vulva, used to say that thanks to that compass she could navigate from sunrise to sunset.

Some of the women swim letting themselves drift toward the last splashes of sunlight on the sea. At the most luminous spot when, daz- zled, they try to move away, they say that they are assailed by an unbear- able stench. Later they are seized with vomiting. Then they begin to moan as they strain their arms, swimming as fast as they can. At a cer- tain point they collide with the floating decaying carcase of an ass, at times the swell of the sea reveals sticky shapeless gleaming lumps of indescribable colour. They say that they shouted with all their might, shedding many tears, complaining that no sea-breeze got up to drive away the smell, supporting under the arms and groins one of them who has fainted, while the vomit accumulates around them on the sur- face of the water. ubu.com

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If anyone walks on the hillside she can hardly remain upright. Through the hedges white colchicum and violets or pink-capped mushrooms can be seen. The grass is not tall. Heifers stand in it, in great number. The houses have been shuttered since the autumn rains began. There are no little girls playing in the gardens. There are no flowers in the flower-beds. A few toys lie about, a painted wooden hoop a red and blue olisbos a white balloon a lead rifle.

The women visit the market to obtain provisions. They pass by the stalls of fruit vegetables bottles of pink blue red green glass. There are piles of orange oranges ochre pineapples mandarines walnuts green and pink mangos blue nectarines green and pink peaches orange-yel- low apricots. There are melons water-melons paw-paws avocados green almonds medlars. There are cucumbers aubergines cabbages aspara- gus white cassava red pimentos gourds. Wasps coming and going set- tle on the bare arms of the young women selling them.

The huntresses have dark maroon hats, and dogs. Hearing the rifle- shots, Dominique Aron says that the bird is still flying, the hare still running, the boar the deer the fox the wart-hog still afoot. It is possi- ble to keep a watch on the surroundings. If some troop advances up the road raising a cloud of dust the women watch its approach shout- ing to those within for the windows to be closed and the rifles kept behind the windows. Anne Damieii plays, Sister Anne do you see any- thing coming, I see only the grass growing green and the dusty road.

At evening a horse harnessed to a cart goes by. The cart carries a heap of cut beetroots or potatoes or grass for fodder. Long before and long after it passes the sound of the hooves striking the tarred road can be heard. The horse on its way is not being driven by anyone.

Somewhere there is a siren. Her green body is covered with scales. Her face is bare. The undersides of her arms are a rosy colour. Sometimes she begins to sing. The women say that of her song nothing is to be heard but a continuous O. That is why this song evokes for them, like everything that recalls the O, the zero or the circle, the vulval ring.

By the lakeside there is an echo. As they stand there with an open book the chosen passages are re-uttered from the other side by a voice that becomes distant and repeats itself. Lucie Maure cries to the double ubu.com

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THAT WHICH IDENTIFIES THEM LIKE THE EYE OF THE CYCLOPS, THEIR SINGLE FORENAME, OSEA BALKIS SARA NICEA lOLA CORA SABINA DANIELA GALS WINTHA EDNA JOSEPHA ubu.com

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echo the phrase of Phénarète, I say that that which is is. I say that that which is not also is. When she repeats the phrase several times the dou- ble, then triple, voice endlessly superimposes that which is and that which is not. The shadows brooding over the lake shift and begin to shiver because of the vibrations of the voice.

The women are seen to have in their hands small books which they say are feminaries. These are either multiple copies of the same original or else there are several kinds. In one of them someone has written an inscription which they whisper in each other’s ears and which pro- vokes them to full-throated laughter. When it is leafed through the feminary presents numerous blank pages in which they write from time to time. Essentially, it consists of pages with words printed in a varying number of capital letters. There may be only one or the pages may be full of them. Usually they are isolated at the centre of the page, well spaced black on a white background or else white on a black back- ground.

After the sun has risen they anoint their bodies with oil of sandalwood curcuma gardenia. They steady one foot on a tree-trunk. Their hands rub each leg in turn, the skin glistening. Some of them are lying down. Others massage them with their fingertips. The bare bodies gleam in the strong morning light. One of their flanks is iridescent with a gold- en lustre. The rising sun does likewise when it sends its rays slanting across the erect rounded tree-trunks. The arcs of the circles so touched reflect a little of the light, their outlines are blurred.

There are peat-bogs above the hills. The mud they are made of has the colour of henna. They seethe, there are surface explosions, bubbles. A stick stirred around within them is caught by viscous soft bodies. It is not possible to fish these out. As soon as any pressure is exerted on them they slip away, they escape. The women say that at times the bursting of the bubbles is accompanied by groans murmurs. The sun dries up the bogs. The vapour that ascends then has a nauseating odour.

The gipsy women have a mummified corpse which they bring out when it is not raining, because of the smell of the body which is not quite dry. They expose it to the sun in its box. The dead woman is clothed in a long tunic of green velvet, covered with white embroidery and gilded ornaments. They have hung little bells on her neck, on her ubu.com

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FLORA ZITA SAVA CORNELIA DRAUPAIM JULIENNE ETMEL CHLOË DESDEMONA RAPHAELA IRIS VERA ARSINOË LISA BRENDA ORPHISE HERODIAS BERENICE SIGRID ANDOVERA ubu.com

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sleeves. They have put medallions in her hair. When they take hold of the box to bring it out the dead woman begins to tinkle everywhere. Every now and then someone goes out on to the three steps that lead up to the caravan to look at the clouds. When the sky is obscured two of them set about shutting the lid of the box and carrying it inside.

The little girls search in the bushes and trees for the nests of goldfinches chaffinches linnets. They find some green canaries which they cover with kisses, which they hug to their breasts. They run singing, they bound over the rocks. A hundred thousand of them return to their houses to cherish their birds. In their haste they clasped them too tightly to themselves. They ran. They bent down to pick up pebbles which they cast far away over the hedges. They took no heed of their chirping. They climbed straight up to their rooms. They removed the birds from their garments, they found them lifeless, heads drooping. Then they all tried to revive them by pressing them to their mouths, letting their warm breath fall on them, lifting the limp heads, touching their beaks with a finger. They remained inert. Then a hundred thousand little girls bewailed the death of their green canaries in the hundred thousand rooms of the hundred thousand houses.

Whatever the time appointed to begin the work, they must hurry to get finished before sunset. The bottoms of the ladders are visible placed on the ground, the tops are hidden in the jumble of fruit and foliage. The baskets at the foot of the trees are filled at times to overflowing. There are belles de Choisy English cherries morellos marascas Montmorency cherries bigaudelles white-hearts. They are black white red translucent. Wasps hornets are busy around the baskets. Their buzzing can be heard in whatever part of the meadow one happens to be. The women climb into the trees, they descend arms laden with fruit. Some have baskets hooked to their belt. Some stand still at dif- ferent heights on the rungs. Others move about among the branches. One sees them jump to the ground and get rid of their burden. The slanting rays of the sun glance over the leaves making them glitter. The sky is orange-coloured.

The women say that they expose their genitals so that the sun may be reflected therein as in a mirror. They say that they retain its brilliance. They say that the pubic hair is like a spider’s web that captures the rays. They are seen running with great strides. They are all illuminated at their centre, starting from the pubes the hooded clitorides the folded ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig double labia. The glare they shed when they stand still and turn to face one makes the eye turn elsewhere unable to stand the sight.

When the moon is full the drum is sounded on the main square. Trestle tables are erected. Glasses of every colour are put out and bot- tles containing differently coloured liquids. Some of these liquids are green red blue, they evaporate if they are not used as soon as the cork that seals them has been drawn. Everyone may drink until she falls dead-drunk or until she has lost her self-control. The odour of the drugs which have been allowed to escape from the bottles stagnates on the square, sickeningly sweet. Everyone drinks in silence standing or lying down on carpets unrolled in the street. Then they have the little girls brought out. They are seen standing half asleep bewildered hesi- tant. They are invited to try their strength on the whimpering out- stretched bodies. The children go from one to the other trying to wake them up, using stones buckets of water, shouting with all their might, squatting down to be at the level of the ears of the sleeping women.

Marthe Vivonne and Valerie Céru make a report. They say that the river is rising up between its banks. The fields of flowers by its banks are swept away by the waters. Avulsed corollas, upside down, eddy cap- sized in the current. All along the river there is an odour of putres- cence. A noise like that of a broken flood-gate is heard. Overturned boats drift by. Whole trees are carried away, their fruit-laden branches trailing in the water. Marthe Vivonne and Valerie Céru say they have not seen any corpses of animals. They say that for a long while on the way back they heard the rushing of the river, the shock of the current against its bed.

The excursions with the glenuri on their leashes are not without diffi- culty. Their long fihiform bodies are supported on thousands of feet. They constantly endeavour to move away to some place other than where they are. Their innumerable eyes are grouped round an enor- mous orifice that serves them as a mouth as well as taking the place of a head. It is filled by a soft extensile membrane that can become taut or relaxed, each of its movements producing a different sound. The harmony of the glenuri may be compared to fifes drums the croaking of toads the miaowing of rutting cats the sharp sound of a flute. The excursions with the glenuri are constantly being interrupted. This is because they systematically insinuate themselves into any interstice that affords passage to their bodies, for example the gates of public ubu.com

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AIMEE POMA BARBA BENEDICTA SUSANNA CASSANDRA OSMONDA GENE HERMINIA KIKA AURELIA EVANGELINE SIMONA MAXIMILIANA ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig gardens, the grills of drains. They enter these backwards, they are stopped at a given moment by the size of their heads, they find them- selves trapped, they begin to utter frightful shrieks. Then they have to be freed.

The women say that in the feminary the glans of the clitoris and the body of the clitoris are described as hooded. It is stated that the pre- puce at the base of the glans can travel the length of the organ excit- ing a keen sensation of pleasure. They say that the clitoris is an erec- tile organ. It is stated that it bifurcates to right and left, that it is angled, extending as two erectile bodies applied to the pubic bones. These two bodies are not visible. The whole constitutes an intensely erogenous zone that excites the entire genital, making it an organ impatient for pleasure. They compare it to mercury also called quick- silver because of its readiness to expand, to spread, to change shape.

Daniela Nervi, while digging foundations, has unearthed a painting representing a young girl. She is all flat and white lying on one side. She has no clothes. Her breasts are barely visible on her torso. One of her legs, crossed over the other, raises her thigh, so concealing the pubis and vulva. Her long hair hides part of her shoulders. She is smil- ing. Her eyes are closed. She half leans on one elbow. The other arm is crooked over her head, the hand holding a bunch of black grapes to her mouth. The women laugh at this. They say that Daniela Nervi has not yet dug up the knife without a blade that lacks a handle.

Martha Ephore has made all the calculations. The engineers were mis- taken. Or else the water arriving from the mountain slopes is insuffi- cient to feed the lake beyond the barrage, even in time of spate. Or else they have been at fault over the position of the construction which they have sited too far upstream in relation to the junction of the water-courses. Every morning the engineers arrive at the dam which they patrol in all directions, marking the still fresh cement with the imprint of their feet, so that after they leave a team of masons have to busy themselves getting rid of them. Some of the women run with umbrellas held high, giving orders. Others walk about calmly. By the shore of the lake or what ought to be the lake young girls in bermudas stroll about holding each other by the hand.

The women say that the goddess Eristikos has a pin head and yellow eyes. They say that the goddess Eristikos adores perfumes. In her ubu.com

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√ CALYPSO JUDITH ANNE ISEULT KRISTA ROBERTA VLASTA CLEONICE RENEE MARIA BEATRICE REINA IDOMENEA GUILHERMINA ARMIDE ZENOBIA LESSIA ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig honour they wear next the skin garments made of fragrant herbs. They set them on fire at nightfall by putting a light to each sprig. They are grouped in circles, their garments are incandescent in the dark- ness. They stand motionless, arms extended on either side of their bodies. The burning herbs crackle and give off an odour. Smoke clouds disperse. When the heat reaches the skin they savagely tear off their tunics and cast them in a heap. That is why they must continual- ly manufacture new ones.

There exists a machine to record divergences. It is placed on an agate plinth. This is a parallelepipedon of low stature, at the centre of a meadow studded with daisies in spring, marguerites in summer, white and blue saffron in the autumn. The calculations taking place within the machine are continuously registered as clicks clicking high- pitched sounds as of tinkling bells, noises like those of a cash-register. There are lights that go out and come on at irregular intervals of time. They are red orange blue. The apertures through which they shine are circular. Every divergence is ceaselessly recorded in the machine. They are scaled to the same unit whatever their nature. The position in the field of the machine for recording divergences resembles that of a cer- tain fountain guarded by young girls bearing flaming swords. But the machine is not guarded. It is easy of access.

The women recall the story of the one who lived for a long time where the camels pass. Bareheaded beneath the sun, Clemence Maïeul inces- santly invokes Amaterasu the sun goddess, cutting her abundant hair, abasing herself three times on the ground which she strikes with her hands, saying, I salute you, great Amaterasu, in the name of our moth- er, in the name of those who are to come. Our kingdom come. May this order be destroyed. May the good and the evil be cast down. They say that Clemence Maïeul often drew on the ground that O which is the sign of the goddess, symbol of the vulval ring.

The women say that any one of them might equally well invoke anoth- er sun goddess, such as Cihuacoatl, who is also a goddess of war. Thus on the occasion of the death of one of their number they might use the song of mourning which is a glorious song. Then they sing in uni- son, Strong and warlike daughter, my well beloved daughter/valiant and tender little dove, my lady/you have striven and worked as a valiant daughter/you have overcome, you have acted like your moth- er the lady Cihuacoatl/you have fought with valour, you have used shield and sword/arise my daughter/go to that good place which is ubu.com

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the house of your mother the sun/where all are filled with joy content and happiness.

The women leap on the paths that lead to the village, shaking their hair, their arms laden with dog-faced baboons, stamping the ground with their feet. Someone stops, tears out a handful of her long hair and lets the strands go one by one with the wind. Like the balloons that little girls release on holidays, rising into the sky, light unsubstan- tial fihiform and twisting, they are blown upward by the wind. Or per- haps the women sing in unison a song that includes these words, Who till now sucked at my nipple/a monkey. Then they throw down all the baboons and begin to run, chasing them into the shade of the wood until they have disappeared in the trees.

They say, how to decide that an event is worthy of remembrance? Must Amaterasu herself advance on the forecourt of the temple, her face shining, blinding the eyes of those who, prostrate, put their foreheads to the ground and dare not lift their heads? Must Amaterasu raising her circular mirror on high blaze forth with all her fires? Must the rays from her slanting mirror set fire to the ground beneath the feet of the women who have come to pay homage to the sun goddess, the great- est of the goddesses? Must her anger be exemplary?

The women say that references to Amaterasu or Cihuacoati are no longer in order. They say they have no need of myths or symbols. They say that the time when they started from zero is in process of being erased from their memories. They say they can barely relate to it. When they repeat, This order must be destroyed, they say they do not know what order is meant.

What was the beginning? they say. They say that in the beginning they are huddled against each other. They are like black sheep. They open their mouths to bleat or to say something but no sound emerges. Their hair their curls are plastered against their foreheads. They move over the smooth shining surface. Their movements are translation, gliding. They are dazed by the reflections over which they pass. Their limbs gain no adhesion anywhere. Vertically and horizontally, it is the same mirror neither hot nor cold, it is the same brilliance which nowhere holds them fast. They advance, there is no front, there is no rear. They move on, there is no future, there is no past. They move flung one against the other. The movements they initiate with their ubu.com

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IDO BLANCHE VALENTINA GILBERTA FAUSTA MONIMA GE BAUCIS SOPHIE ALICE OCTAVIA JOSIANA GAlA DEODATA KAHA VILAINE ANGE FREDERICA BETJE ubu.com

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lower limbs or with their upper limbs multiply the changes of position. If there had been an initial change of position it would be a fact that contradicted their unchanging functioning. It would be a fundamen- tal variation that contradicted the unitary system, it would introduce disorder. They come and go ensheathed in something black and glit- tering. The silence is absolute. If sometimes they try to stop to listen to something, the sound of a train, a ship’s siren, the music of X X, their attempt to halt propels them from one side to the other, makes them sway, gives them a fresh departure. They are prisoners of the mirror.

The women say that the feminary amuses the little girls. For instance three kinds of labia minora are mentioned there. The dwarf labia are triangular. Side by side, they form two narrow folds. They are almost invisible because the labia majora cover them. The moderate-sized labia minora resemble the flower of a lily. They are half-moon shaped or triangular. They can be seen in their entirety taut supple seething. The large labia spread out resemble a butterfly’s wings. They are tall triangular or rectangular, very prominent.

They say that as possessors of vulvas they are familiar with their char- acteristics. They are familiar with the mom pubis the clitoris the labia minora the body and bulbs of the vagina. They say that they take a proper pride in that which has for long been regarded as the emblem of fecundity and the reproductive force in nature.

They say that the clitoris has been compared to a cherry-stone, a bud, a young shoot, a shelled sesame, an almond, a sprig of myrtle, a dart, the barrel of a lock. They say that the labia majora have been com- pared to the two halves of a shellfish. They say that the concealed face of the labia minora has been compared to the purple of Sidon, to trop- ic coral. They say that the secretion has been compared to iodized salt water.

They say that they have found inscriptions on plaster walls where vul- vas have been drawn as children draw suns with multiple divergent rays. They say that it has been written that vulvas are traps vices pin- cers. They say that the clitoris has been compared to the prow of a boat to its stem to the comb of a shellfish. They say that vulvas have been compared to apricots pomegranates figs roses pinks peonies mar- guerites. They say these comparisons may be recited like a litany. ubu.com

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OTFONE KAMALA POMARA SIGISMUNDA MARCELINA GALATEA ZAIRE EVELINA CONSTANCE ANNUNCIATA VICTORIA MARGUERITE ROSE JULIA AGLAË LEDA ubu.com

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Anemone Flavien tells them the story of the woman selling pins who knocks at the young girl’s door. When the young girl opens the win- dow and leans out the white cat glides before her face, which makes her cry out. Her hair hangs down on the side towards which she leans. Then the merchant woman presents her with pins in her open hands. They have green red blue heads. When the woman catches her foot she drops all the pins between the separate paving-stones. The young girl complains loudly that her attire will be ruined. A little girl passing by sets about picking up the red green blue pins, when she gets up she puts them in the hands of the merchant woman. The pin-seller lifts her head to heaven, she begins to run opening her hands, laughing with all her might, scattering the green red blue pins everywhere, the little girl hops along behind her, while the young woman begins to utter piercing cries at her window.

Or else the women play a game. There is a whole row of toads with staring eyes. They are motionless. The first to feel a kick rolls over on its side in one piece like a mannequin stuffed with straw and without a sound. The others go jumping away. Their backs can be seen from time to time above the lucerne and the pink clover. They are like fat hens, heads lowered, pecking and looking at the ground. They do not progress evenly. Some of the faster ones are far ahead. One of them disappears in the hedge. It is soon followed by others, except for one solitary one that continues to roam in the fields.

Or else three cats are caught by the tail in a trap. They each go their own way miaowing. The heavy trap jerks forward slowly behind them. They scream, they lash out, scratching the ground with their claws. Their hair is on end. One of them stands still and begins to arch its back grinding its teeth and shrieking. The two other cats strive to shake him off by tugging at the trap. But they only succeed in making him turn a somersault in the iron collar. Then all three fight each other, they fling themselves against each other scratching and biting, they wound each other’s eyes, their muzzles, they tear the hair from their necks, they can no longer stop fighting and the trap which gets between their legs only adds to their fury.

Fabienne Jouy tells a story about wolves. It begins thus: The glazed snow glistens. She says that it takes place at sunset. It continues like this: The sun is red, low in the sky, enormous. The stretched-out bod- ies do not stir. A feeble gleam of light comes from the weapons piled nearby. The first howls of the wolves are heard before sundown. They ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig are far away scattered far apart. They are howling. They are nearby. Shadows come and go, flitting under the trees, leave the shelter of the woods, approach, retreat. The howling of the wolves never stops. The still bodies lying on the snow are joined by the hesitating moving mass of wolves. Ears erect, paws aquiver, they are above the faces, they sniff at the cheeks, the mouths, they come and go, they make a rush. The faces are torn to ribbons. The white face of the beautiful Marie Viarme hangs detached from the trunk, torn across at the throat. One sees the sudden streaming of blood on her cheeks. Clothes are torn, half-eaten bodies swim in a vile red-black lake, the snow is tinged by it. The wolves pant, they come and go, abandoning a body, seizing it anew, running to another, paws aquiver, tongues lolling. The wolves’ eyes begin to shine in the half light. Fabienne Jouy has finished her story when she says, It is not known which way the wind was blowing. Comment is not advisable after someone has told a story. Despite this Cornélie Surger cannot refrain from saying, To hell with stories of wolves, now if it had had to do with rats, yes if only they had been rats.

The women break the walnuts to extract their oil. They take the frag- ments to the press where they are crushed. The kernels are arranged on the grindstone. The long wooden screw that turns the grindstone is iron-tipped. Trickles of oil overflow. At the same time they crush sesame poppy seeds. The petals of macerated flowers, pinks herbs mal- lows are crushed by the grindstone. The white perfumed flowers of the myrtle also serve for the preparation of an oil which is the water of the angels. It is collected in a stone flask. Oily vapours move about in the overheated room. The walls are greasy, sweating. The women let down their hair, they soak it in the aromatic baths. Their hands and arms glisten, their breasts are bare.

The banks of the river are muddy. The black water seems deep. It is not possible to touch the bottom with a stick. Pale blue water-irises, red water-lilies cling to the roots of the trees that overhang the bank. The heads of the swimming women appear down below in the middle of the river, they are confused with their reflections in the water. A black barge moving up-river is always on the point of touching them. The swimmers touched, so it seems, sink. But their heads reappear, round, bobbing in the wash. The long strident whistle of a lock-keeper makes itself heard. There is smoke somewhere upstream. The sun is no longer visible. The water becomes darker and darker until it has lost its fluid appearance. ubu.com

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AUBIERGE CLARISSA PHÆDRA EUDOXIA OLIVE IO MODESTA PLAISANCE HYGEIA LOUISA CORALIE ANEMONE TABITHA THELMA INGRID PRASCOVIA NATALIE POMPEIA ALIENOR ubu.com

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The women look at the old pictures, the photographs. One of them explains. For instance the series of the textile factory. There is a strike that day. The women workers form a picket line in the field where the buildings are sited. They move in a circle one behind the other singing stamping their feet on the ground clapping their hands. They have black blouses and woollen scarves. All the windows, all the doors of the factory are closed. One or other of them carries at arm’s length a plac- ard on which slogans are written, painted in red on the white paper. Under their feet in the field is a circle of beaten earth.

Or else someone comments on the series of photographs of demon- strations. The women demonstrators advance all holding a book in their upraised hands. The faces are remarkable for their beauty. Their compact mass bursts into the square, quickly but without violence, borne by the impetus intrinsic to its size. Great commotions take place at various points in the square when the demonstrators attempt to halt around groups of one or more speakers. But they are immediately pushed dragged along by the thousands of young women who follow them and who stop in their turn. Despite the disturbance of the gen- eral order created by individual movements there is no trampling underfoot, there are no shouts, there are no sudden violent rushes, the speakers are able to stay put. At a certain point the whole crowd begins to come to a halt. It takes some time for it to come to a com- plete standstill. Over to one side speeches have commenced, voices over the loud-speakers claim the attention of the demonstrators.

The cranes have laid bare the rootlets of a tree. With grabs they have unearthed the brittle filiform curled extremities. Shrivelled shrunken decaying leaves are attached to them. Systematically demarcating the zones from which the tree is nourished they have arrived at the centre of the tree, the trunk. They have freed the buried tree completely, branches leaves trunk roots. The eroded whitened trunk seems almost transparent. Branches and roots look alike. From the main branches and roots there come off twigs that form a complicated tangled net- work, sparsely cluttered in places by a few leaves, a few fruits.

The water party is heralded by a rattle of very hard wood, box or san- dalwood, which, shaken, makes a discordant noise. The water is col- lected in vats of enormous capacity. Others are situated in cellars invaded by the tide. As a general rule there is always plenty of water. It is used to soak the ground before undertaking any construction. It is thus that the outlines of secondary roads can be laid down, trenches ubu.com

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dug, new terraces built, roundabouts constructed.

Laure Jamais begins her story with, Plume, plume l’escargot, petit haricot. It is about Iris Our. Laure Jamais says, is she or is she not dead? Her nerves relax. She moves more feebly. The severed carotid releases gushes of blood. There is some on her white garments. It has flowed over her breast, it has spread, there is some on her hands. Though bright, it seems thickened and coagulated. Clots have formed crusts on her clothes. Iris Our’s arms dangle on either side. Her legs are out- stretched. A fly comes and settles. Later it can be heard still buzzing. The window is open, on its other side there stir the branches of a pale green acacia. The sky is not to be seen. Iris Our ’s eyes are closed. There is a sort of smile on her lips, her teeth are bared. Later the smile broadens, it is the beginning of a laugh. However the severed carotid allows no sound to form at her lips, save for a gurgling attributable to the swallowing of blood.

The first women to swim up the river make the flying-fish jump. They have rounded saffron-coloured bodies. They are seen rising up out of the water, lifting themselves. They fall back noisily. Everywhere the fish begin to leave the water. At a certain point the swimming women find themselves in the shallows. Their hands and feet encounter fishy bod- ies, make them leap up. Between the pale blue sky and the ochre water there are the red bodies of fish moving away, leaping.

The women look at the old colour engraving. Someone says of it, these are women in royal blue uniform marching in platoon. There are fif- teen of them. Their trousers have a black stripe at the side. The uni- forms have gilt buttons. They advance to the sound of the music of a fife. Above their heads the trees are tossed by the wind. White acacia blossom and lime blossom fall on their heads. One of the women begins to laugh. On the square the noise of the fountain is so great that it drowns the music. But, whether because the musicians have redoubled their efforts or because they are a match for the fountain, at a certain point the sound of the water is only faintly heard. The win- dows of the houses are open. No heads appear in them. The women traverse the length of the main street and halt under the arcades. Their marching order is broken. They enter chattering and the peo- ple in the café, turning their heads towards them, regard them. In the midst of the royal blue uniforms there is a woman clothed entirely in red, also in uniform. ubu.com

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DEMONA EPONINA GABRIELA FULVIA ALEXANDRA JUSTINE PHILOMELA CELINE HELENA PHILIPPINA ZOË HORTENSE SOR DOMINIQUE ARABELLA MARJOLAINE LOIS ARMANDA ubu.com

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As regards the feminaries the women say for instance that they have forgotten the meaning of one of their ritual jokes. It has to do with the phrase, The bird of Venus takes flight towards evening. It is written that the lips of the vulva have been compared to the wings of a bird, hence the name of bird of Venus that has been given them. The vulva has been compared to all kinds of birds, for instance to doves, star- lings, bengalis, nightingales, finches, swallows. They say that they have unearthed an old text in which the author, comparing vulvas to swal- lows, says that he does not know which of them moves better or has the faster wing. However, The bird of Venus takes flight towards evening, they say they do not know what this means.

The golden fleece is one of the designations that have been given to the hairs that cover the pubis. As for the quests for the golden fleece to which certain ancient myths allude, the women say they know little of these. They say that the horseshoe which is a representation of the vulva has long been considered a lucky charm. They say that the most ancient figures depicting the vulva resemble horseshoes. They say that in fact it is in such a shape that they are represented on the walls of palaeolithic grottos.

The women say that the feminaries give pride of place to the symbols of the circle, the circumference, the ring, the O, the zero, the sphere. They say that this series of symbols has provided them with a guideline to decipher a collection of legends they have found in the library and which they have called the cycle of the Grail. These are to do with the quests to recover the Grail undertaken by a number of personages. They say it is impossible to mistake the symbolism of the Round Table that dominated their meetings. They say that, at the period when the texts were compiled, the quests for the Grail were singular unique attempts to describe the zero the circle ring the spherical cup con- taining the blood. They say that, to judge by what they know about their subsequent history, the quests for the Grail were not successful, that they remained of the nature of a legend.

There are also legends in which young women having stolen fire carry it in their vulvas. There is the story of her who fell asleep for a hun- dred years from having wounded her finger with her spindle, the spin- dle being cited as the symbol of the clitoris. In connection with this story the women make many jokes about the awkwardness of the one who lacked the priceless guidance of a feminary. They say laughing that she must have been the freak spoken of elsewhere, she who, in ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig place of a little pleasure-greedy tongue, had a poisonous sting. They say they do not understand why she was called the sleeping beauty.

Snow-White runs through the forest. Her feet catch in the roots of the trees, which make her trip repeatedly. The women say that the little girls know this story by heart. Rose-Red follows behind her, impelled to cry out while running. Snow White says she is frightened. Snow- White running says, O my ancestors, I cast myself at your holy knees. Rose-Red laughs. She laughs so much that she falls, that she finally becomes angry. Shrieking with rage, Rose-Red pursues Snow-White with a stick, threatening to knock her down if she does not stop. Snow- White whiter than the silk of her tunic drops down at the foot of a tree. Then Rose-Red red as a peony or else red as a red rose marches furi- ously to and fro before her, striking the ground with her stick shout- ing, You haven’t got any, you haven’t got any, until eventually Snow- White asks, What is it that I have not got? the effect of which is to immobilize Rose-Red saying, Sacred ancestors, you haven’t got any. Snow-White says that she has had enough, especially as she is no longer at all frightened and seizing hold of the stick she begins to run in all directions, she is seen striking out with all her might against the tree-trunks, lashing the yielding shrubs, striking the mossy roots. At a certain point she gives a great blow with the stick to Rose-Red asleep at the foot of an oak and resembling a stout root, pink as a pink rose.

The women say that they have found a very large number of terms to designate the vulva. They say they have kept several for their amuse- ment. The majority have lost their meaning. If they refer to objects, these are objects now fallen into disuse, or else it is a matter of sym- bolic, geographical names. Not one of the women is found to be capa- ble of deciphering them. On the other hand the comparisons present no problems. For example when the labia minora are compared to vio- lets, or else the general appearance of the vulvas to sea-urchins or starfish. Periphrases such as genitals with double openings are cited in the feminaries. The texts also say that the vulvas resemble volutes, whorled shells. They are an eye embedded in eyelids that moves shines moistens. They are a mouth with its lips its tongue its pink palate. As well as rings and circles the feminaries give as symbols of the vulva tri- angles cut by a bisector ovals ellipses. Triangles have been designated in every alphabet by one or two letters. The ovals or ellipses may be stylized in the form of lozenges, or else in the shape of crescent moons, that is, ovals divided in two. These are the same symbols as the oval rings, settings surrounding stones of every colour. According to the feminaries rings are contemporaneous with such expressions as ubu.com

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OUGARIT EMERE BERTHA JOAN ELIANA FEODISSIA TORE SULEMNA AMARANTHIS JIMINIA CRETESIPOLIS VESPERA HEGEMONIA MAY DORIS FORZITIA HEMANA ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig jewels treasures gems to designate the vulva.

The women say that it may be that the feminaries have fulfilled their function. They say they have no means of knowing. They say that thor- oughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being encum- bered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations.

Sometimes it rains on the orange green blue islands. Then a mist hangs over them without obscuring their colours. The air one inhales is opaque and damp. One’s lungs are like sponges that have imbibed water. The sharks swallow the necklaces that are thrown overboard to be got rid of, the strings of glassware, the opalescent baubles. A few stay stuck in the teeth of some shark that rolls over and over to free itself of them. One may glimpse its white belly. An equatorial vegeta- tion is visible on the banks. The trees are all near the sea. They are bananas arengas oreodoxas euterpas arecas latanias caryotas elaeis. Except they are the green oaks of Scotland. There is no shelter the length of the beaches, there is no bay, there is no port. The islands are surrounded by a hinge of cerulean blue sea. The women stand, as it may be, on the bridge of the boat. Marie-Agnes Smyrne vomits the forty-seven oranges she swallowed whole for a bet. They fall from her mouth one by one, strings of saliva accompany them. At a certain point the ships’ sirens are heard.

At each of their advances the women utter a brief cry. When they halt, their voices have long modulations. They move after the fashion of kangaroos, legs together which they bend to make their leap. Sometimes they spin on themselves like tops, heads in arms. It is dur- ing this movement that they exhale a perfume of arum lily verbena which spreads instantly through the surrounding space. The perfume differs according to the speed of their rotation. It disintegrates passing through various tonalities. Then it smells of mignonette lilac gardenia or else sweet-pea convulvulus nasturtium. It smells of warm rose-petals lychee currants. It smells of leaves decaying in the earth, the corpses of birds. When night falls they emerge from their furs to go to bed. They arrange them in the shape of bags, they hang them from the branches of trees and slip inside. Their colony is seen to cover the trees, as far as eye can reach, with great fur bundles. ubu.com

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Sophie Ménade’s tale has to do with an orchard planted with trees of every colour. A naked woman walks therein. Her beautiful body is black and shining. Her hair consists of slender mobile snakes which produce music at her every movement. This is the hortative head of hair. It is so called because it communicates by the mouths of its hun- dred thousand snakes with the woman wearing the headdress. Orpheus, the favourite snake of the woman who walks in the garden, keeps advising her to eat the fruit of the tree in the centre of the gar- den. The woman tastes the fruit of each tree asking Orpheus the snake how to recognize that which is good. The answer given is that it sparkles, that merely to look at it rejoices the heart. Or else the answer given is that, as soon as she has eaten the fruit, she will become taller, she will grow, her feet will not leave the ground though her forehead will touch the stars. And he Orpheus and the hundred thousand snakes of her headdress will extend from one side of her face to the other, they will afford her a brilliant crown, her eyes will become as pale as moons, she will acquire knowledge. Then the women besiege Sophie Ménade with questions. Sophie Ménade says that the woman of the orchard will have a clear understanding of the solar myth that all the texts have deliberately obscured. Then they besiege her with questions. Sophie Ménade says, Sun that terrifies and delights/multi- coloured iridescent insect you devour yourself in night’s memory/blazing genital/the circle is your symbol/you exist from all eternity/you will exist for all eternity. At these words the women begin to dance, stamping the ground with their feet. They begin a round dance, clapping their hands, giving voice to a song from which no coherent phrase emerges.

The women say that even without the feminaries they can recall the time when, as was typical of them, they made war. They say that all they need do is to invent terms that describe themselves without conven- tional references to herbals or bestiaries. They say that this can be done without pretension. They say that what they must stress above all is their strength and their courage.

The great register is laid open on the table. Every now and again one of them approaches and writes something therein. It is difficult to inspect it because it is rarely available. Even then it is useless to open it at the first page and search for any sequence. One may take it at ran- dom and find something one is interested in. This may be very little. Diverse as the writings are they all have a common feature. Not a moment passes without one of the women approaching to write some- thing therein. Or else a reading aloud of some passage takes place. It ubu.com

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may also happen that the reading occurs without any audience, save for a fly that bothers the reader by settling on her temple.

Sometimes Phiomèle Sarte sings squatting on her heels, swaying her bust forwards and backwards rocking from right to left. Should she cease singing she falls forward, face to the ground, or sideways, her cheek striking the ground, her legs folding like a gun-dog’s. Then she sings on without a break. When her eyes close from fatigue two of the women carry her to a bed or else on to the grass in the sun and she falls asleep there.

Hélène Myre passes among the group with transparent trays. Voices, murmurs are heard. From the orangery there come the discordant sounds of a cartolo. Many of the women blow a trumpet and wander running through the avenues. Meanwhile Hélène Myre in passing offers glasses of differently coloured syrups. If she is asked what the blue or red liquid is she replies that the liquid is the same whatever its colour, syrupy and sugary, fingers dipped in it are sticky and coloured. In this connection someone says jokingly, tell me your colour and I will tell you who you are. From the branches of the trees fall shooting stars which change from blue to red to orange and abruptly go out. Round lanterns are hung from the wire on which the fans of the fruit-trees are horizontally trained. At a certain point those suspended from the arches of the rose avenue catch fire, the light they shed fades, slowly disappears.

Their eyes, stuck to a shred of skin, are hidden in their long locks. When they toss their heads to shake some wisp off their cheeks or else when they bend forward, their eyes are visible rolling gleaming bluish haloed by the white of the agate-round cornea. They put their hands there only to tidy themselves, when they comb their hair strand by strand. Then each eye, touched, closes its lids, like a firefly going out. When they bound in the meadows holding each other by the hand, it seems as if there were hundreds of great pearls in their hair sparkling in the sun. If they begin to weep they are enclosed from head to foot in their falling tears. Through the light small rainbows halo them and make them glitter.

It is an animal without head or tail that resembles a top. It spins on itself without uttering a sound. Sometimes it is covered with scales, at others it is covered with feathers. No one knows how it moves. It is not ubu.com

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ROSAMUND AIELE EDME DEBORAH OSMENA GALLIA EDVOKIA ABIGAIL LAMIA ESTEVA TIMARETA SAUGE LEUCOTHEA ARLETTE MERE PASIPHAË CARRIE AUDREY ubu.com

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seen to advance or retreat or move sideways as crabs do. All of a sud- den it is there. It may emit a faint smell of aconite of incense or else smell unpleasantly of garlic or carnation. In the houses it stands in the centre of the rooms, ceaselessly spinning on itself. If it is forced to go away it suddenly appears again. Its eyes and mouth are at the level of the ground. They are invisible. It is possible that it makes use of them during its gyrations. It has no known cry. It is called the julep because it seems to have a predilection for rosewater. The little girls try to tame the juleps. They put them on a leash to drag them behind them. But even pulling with all their might they cannot succeed in making the juleps budge. They remain fixed to the point where they were seen to appear. They seem fixed to the ground by a species of magnetism.

The women say that they perceive their bodies in their entirety. They say that they do not favour any of its parts on the grounds that it was formerly a forbidden Object. They say that they do not want to become prisoners of their own ideology. They say that they did not gar- ner and develop the symbols that were necessary to them at an earlier period to demonstrate their strength. For example they do not com- pare the vulvas to the sun moon stars. They do not say that the vulvas are like black suns in the shining night.

In a high wind the leaves fall from the trees. They go on to gather them in bread baskets. Some, scarcely touched, rot. They are scattered in the fields in the woods. In the baskets there are leaves of chestnut hornbeam maple clove guaiac copal oak mandarine willow copper- beech elm plane terebinth latania myrtle. Tébaïre jade scatters them in the room crying, Friends do not let your imagination deceive you. You compare yourselves privately to the fruits of the chestnut cloves mandarines green oranges but you are fruits only in appearance. Like the leaves you fly away at the slightest breeze, beautiful strong light subtle and prompt of understanding as you are. Beware of dispersal. Remain united like the characters in a book. Do not abandon the col- lectivity. The women are seated on the piles of leaves holding hands watching the clouds that pass outside.

They play a game. It is performed on an enormous parade-ground. The ground is divided into zones corresponding to the colours of the spectrum. There are a hundred and fifty violet hoops a hundred and fifty indigo hoops a hundred and fifty blue hoops a hundred and fifty green hoops a hundred and fifty yellow hoops a hundred and fifty orange hoops a hundred and fifty red hoops. The teams consist of ubu.com

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METTE KHADIOTA MICHAELA PHANO HUGUETTE LELIA SIDONIA OMAYA MERNEITH INIBRINA WUANG-QIANG ASPASIA HANNAH LETITIA NORA BENOITE RADEGONDE ubu.com

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seventy-five persons each, arranged on either side of the midline of the paradeground. Each team has equal strips of violet indigo blue green yellow orange red territory. A machine situated at the centre of the parade-ground ejects the hoops one after the other at a fast pace. They rise vertically above the heads of the players. They rotate on themselves. At the same time they describe a vast circle which contin- ually increases, due to the momentum imparted to them by the machine. The path of their movements would be an immense spiral. The women playing must catch the hoops without leaving the coloured zones allotted to them. Very soon there is an indescribable tumult of bodies jostling each other in the attempt to take hold of the same hoop or to withdraw from the confusion.

The bearers of fables are very welcome. A party is given in their hon- our. Tables are set up in the conservatories, in the orangeries. The drinks are mixed with narcotics, there are belladonna henbane night- shade datura in the wines in the spirits. There are also aphrodisiacs hashish opium. The drinkers are placid to begin with. Through the open doors they are visible stretched out on the divans, half asleep, or lying in the grass on the lawns. Later on they are seized with delirium. Some play an instrument and sing in part of the gardens, tears run down their cheeks, eventually sobs interrupt their singing. Others dance tangling their hair and stamping the ground with their feet with all their might. Around the tables, under the influence of the drugs, they engage in discourses which pile up paradoxes absurdities logo- machies fallacies sophistries. At a certain point someone challenges the speakers, calling a halt, demanding reasoning devoid of error. Then the women all fail silent and go to sleep.

They do not say that vulvas with their elliptical shape are to be com- pared to suns, planets, innumerable galaxies. They do not say that gyratory movements are like vulvas. They do not say that the vulva is the primal form which as such describes the world in all its extent, in all its movement. They do not in their discourses create conventional figures derived from these symbols.

They weep, lying down or seated apart. The frost solidifies their tears which shine and sparkle on their cheeks. They weep, their sobs rack their bodies, they can be seen rolling in the snow. There are places where the wind blows white powdery clouds into their faces. Their cries moans lamentations do not rise from the depths. They might just as well be dumb. They do not bring their stiffened hands to their ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig cheeks or their mouths to arrest the flow of blood from their gums. The icy cirque where they stand reflects all the sun’s rays. The waves of light seem to detach themselves from the ground, to rise like flames, to quiver, to turn from red to orange-yellow or from pink to violet. It is like a volcanic crater that burns ready to overwhelm them.

Drunk, the women say they are drunk. Great fields of scarlet poppies have been trampled underfoot. Their heads, their torn petals hang loosely or lie in confusion on the ground. Not a drop of dew is visible on the flowers. The women dance. They hold each other round the neck and let themselves fall to the ground, lips black, eyes starting. They say they are drunk. Their arms and legs are bare. Their loosened hair hides their cheeks, then, flung back, reveals shining eyes, lips parted in song.

One must not run. One must walk patiently counting the number of one’s steps. If one makes no mistake, if one turns to the left at just the right moment, one will not touch the tree sticky with honey with one’s outstretched arms. At this stage of the march one must interrupt the calculations and begin again at zero. If one makes no mistake in the calculations, if one jumps with feet together at just the right moment, one will not fall into the snake-pit. At this stage of the march one must interrupt the calculations and begin again at zero. If one makes no mistake in the calculations, if one bends down at just the right moment, one will not be caught in the jaws of the trap. At this stage of the march one must interrupt the calculations and begin again at zero. If one makd no mistake in the calculations and if one cries Sara Magre at just the right moment, one will fall into the arms of the incomparable, the gigantic, the wise Sara.

Six of the women are none too many to hold her. Her mouth is open. Inarticulate words and cries are heard. She stamps the ground with her feet. She twists her arms to free them from the grip, she shakes her head in every direction. At a given moment she lets herself fall to the ground, she strikes the ground with her arms, she rolls about shriek- ing. Her mouth seizes the earth and spits it out. Her gums bleed. Words like death blood blood burn death war war war are heard. Then she tears her garments and bangs her head on the ground until she falls silent, done for. Four of the women carry her, singing, Behind my eyelids/the dream has not reached my soul/whether I sleep or wake/there is no rest. ubu.com

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ISADORA VI-SEUM JEZEBEL ODILE ZUBAÏDA DINARZADE GISELLE MARY CANDRA SITA CELIMENA ASTRID MARLENE CLEO LYSISTRATA ZENEIDA EMON CLORINDA MESSALINA ubu.com

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To greet the messengers they go beneath the great oak. In the great- est heat it casts a cool shade. They are seated in a circle. They speak or doze. Sometimes no messenger arrives. Then they rise and shaking out their clothes they disperse and are lost to sight in the branching avenues.

Sometimes the women may chance to talk together about the latest fable that has been told them. For example Diane Ebèle tells Aimée Dionis the fable of Koue Feï which is about a young girl who pursues the sun. She is constantly on the point of catching it. To escape her, the sun plunges into the sea. Koue Feï then starts to swim after it. Thus she traverse the entire ocean. She comes up to it just when it is leaving the water, about to escape her again. Hastily Koue Feï jumps into the sun and instals herself within it. She makes it sway from side to side in its course, several stars fall because of this. But Koue Feï has managed to sit inside the sun. Now she controls its path. She can make it follow its orbit faster or slower as she wishes. That is why, in order to have good weather when they leave for the fishing, the two little girls address themselves to Koue Feï, mistress of the sun, so that she may pause for a while above the sea.

The weather-vanes are arranged next to each other on the hill. The metal blades that rotate round the shafts are painted green blue red white yellow black. Each blade is surrounded by long fine fringes which are borne up by the wind. None of the weather-vanes point in the same direction. Some turn at full speed. The white ones in their movements retain the light of the sun. Like mirrors they reflect its flashes.

In speaking of their genitals the women do not employ hyperboles metaphors, they do not proceed sequentially or by gradation. They do not recite long litanies, whose refrain is an unending imprecation. They do not strive to multiply the intervals so that in sum they signify a deliberate lapse. They say that all these forms denote an outworn lan- guage. They say everything must begin over again. They say that a great wind is sweeping the earth. They say that the sun is about to rise.

They look at the coloured picture on the screen. The façade of pink bricks glitters in the frost. Some rays of the rising sun strike it glanc- ingly, setting the windowpanes ablaze. On a pile of branches with dried-up leaves there are thrown the drooping faded flower-heads of ubu.com

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DIONE INEZ HESIONE ELIZA VICTORIA OTHYS DAMHURACI ASHMOUNIGAL NEPHTYS CIRCE DORA DENISE CAMILLA BELLA CHRISTINA GERMANICA LAN-ZI SIMONA HEGET ZONA DRAGA ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig roses marguerites anemones. The next picture shows the sky where not a bird passes, the fountain in front of the house where the water does not flow. Later they look at the four great trimmed plane-trees and the regular area they bound, almost a square, made of a well- shorn meadow. The house can be glimpsed again between the four trees. The pediment is a narrow triangle. The shutters are entirely of wood. The main door can be seen to be slightly ajar. The red tiles of the entrance hail are visible.

The women stand by the lake shore. Their words and their songs blend into a sonorous whole that is reflected by the flat surface from the other side. The opaque bell-jars of the water-spiders make holes here and there in the water. When daylight fades the reflections of the trees are enormous. The ephemerides dart forward at water-level: Thousands of flat-bellied soldier-flies lie still on the irises the water- lilies the great lilies. The women study their reflections. They are like an army of giantesses. The outlines of their garments are interrupted. The green and red colours that compose them make unquiet splashes that are not motionless, that coalesce and redisintegrate. When one looks around it is apparent that the reflections are reproduced in the series of eighteen lakes, all identical, all distorted.

Their peregrinations are cyclical and circular. Whatever the itinerary, whatever point of departure they choose, they end up at the same place. The paths are parallel, equidistant, narrower and narrower as they approach the centre of the figure. If they follow the path from the interior to the exterior they must traverse the widest of the circles before finding the cross-passage that leads them to the centre. The sys- tem is closed. No radius starting from the centre allows of any expan- sion or of breaking through. At the same time it is without limit, the juxtaposition of the increasingly widening circles configures every pos- sible revolution. It is virtually that infinite sphere whose centre is every- where, circumference nowhere.

One of the women relates the death of Adè1e Donge and how the embalming of her body was carried out. The story tells how she is placed on a trestle table. The intestines are withdrawn through the open belly. The abdomen emptied of its organs is washed with water to which sulphuric acid has been added. Then it is dried. Various sub- stances are introduced, ground mint benzoin sage styrax mixed with formalin phenol permanganate hydrogen peroxide. The separated layers and membranes have to be reunited, they must be sewn ubu.com

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JILL STEPHANIE CYDIPPA OLEA ALBERTINE DELMIRA ANDREA SOPHONISBE ALBA CLELIA TAI-REN BUTHAYNA JEPHTHA HOLAA BLANDINA ATIKA NAUNAME CHRYSEIS ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig together. The head is emptied of the brain after the cranium has been drilled using a trephine. Balsamatic desiccative antiseptic substances are introduced into the cranial cavity. The viscera are preserved like precious materials in large glass jars that bear inscriptions. They ignore the brain. They abandon it carelessly on some piece of furni- ture. A domestic animal might seize and devour it. The women yawn at this account or else they applaud without much enthusiasm.

Now they are marching through a field of tall flowers. The orange-yel- low tufts bend over above their heads. When the women stumble against the stalks pollen falls from the shaken pistils in great quantity. The giant flower is a stem whose extremity is rolled up on itself, it is whorled, it copies the shape of a bishop’s crozier. The hermaphrodis is a flower that gives off an overpowering perfume. Among the marchers some can no longer keep up. They fall on their knees, they let themselves sink to the ground, head dropping, body like a gun- dog’s. Or else they writhe with their arms, they cry out, they throw themselves face down as if seized with madness. They advance into the forest, between the stiff woody stems, faces caught by the sun, covered by the pollen that escapes continually from the invisible stamens.

The story told by Emily Norton takes place at a time when every detail of a birth is ceremoniously regulated. When the child is born the mid- wife begins to utter cries like women who fight in battle. This means that the mother has conquered as a warrior and that she has captured a child. The women look over Emily Norton’s shoulder at the effigies of women with mouths wide open, screaming, squatting, the child’s head between their thighs.

They say that at the point they have reached they must examine the principle that has guided them. They say it is not for them to exhaust their strength in symbols. They say henceforward what they are is not subject to compromise. They say they must now stop exalting the vulva. They say that they must break the last bond that binds them to a dead culture. They say that any symbol that exalts the fragmented body is transient, must disappear. Thus it was formerly. They, the women, the integrity of the body their first principle, advance march- ing together into another world.

Things being in this state, they summon the trades. Distaffs looms rollers shuttles combs point-paper presses cams cloth toiles cashmere ubu.com

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twill calico crepe chintz satin spools of thread sewing-machines type- writers reams of paper stenographers’ pads ink-bottles knitting-nee- dles ironing-boards machine-tools spinners bobbin-winders staplers assembly-lines tweezers blow-lamps soldering-irons bonders yarn for braiding for twisting knitting-machines cauldrons great wooden tubs stew-pans sauce pans plates stoves brooms of every bristle vacuum- cleaners washing-machines brushes et cetera. They heap them on to an immense pyre to which they set fire, blowing up everything that will not burn. Then, starting to dance round it, they clap their hands, they shout obscene phrases, they cut their hair or let it down. When the fire has burnt down, when they are sated with setting off explosions, they collect the débris, the objects that are not consumed, those that have not melted down, those that have not disintegrated. They cover them with blue green red paint to reassemble them in grotesque grandiose abracadabrant compositions to which they give names.

The shape of my shield/is the white belly of a snake/ day and night I watch over your safety. Françoise Barthes reads out aloud from the great register the story of Trung Nhi and Trung Trac. Françoise Barthes says that it is about two young peasant women who always fought side by side. They died together after three years of war. They were to be seen shoulder to shoulder in the thick of the battle, con- spicuous, embodiments of the sinews of the revolt against the power- ful feudal armies. Both shields raised, black and white, those of Trung Nhi and Trung Trac stand out in the mêlées, ever close to one anoth- er, their lances directed towards the enemy. Francoise Barthes says that, whatever great battles the women may have waged or may wage, it is unthinkable ever to forget the two Trung sisters.

A shining black snake with carmine red rings lies coiled in the grass in the sun. Its body seems to be mineral, a sort of jet. If it is touched with the tip of a finger it barely stirs. It barely stirs even when it is picked up to be used as an ornament, when it is coiled lengthwise round the neck the chest the waist. Replaced on the ground it seems to go to sleep. In this connection someone recalls the existence of an ancient sect, the Ophidians, who used to worship snakes. She demonstrates one of their ritual gestures, one phase of which consists of kissing the snake. Then she puts her lips to the black scales.

News has arrived from the assembly that is compiling the dictionary. The example proposed to illustrate the word hate has been rejected. It concerns a phrase of Anne-Louise Germaine, The women have transformed hate into energy and energy into hate. It has been ubu.com

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ALIDA LUDWIGE OLINDA WILHELMINA GASPARDE REGINA MALVIDA DIOTIMA MADELEINE PHENARETE IVY RICARDA COSIMA NU-JIAO LAURENTIA LABAN AMABLE ubu.com

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adduced as a reason that the phrase contains an antithesis and there- fore lacks precision. The bearer of these tidings, who is called Jeanne Sbire, is hissed. The women surround her jostle her insult her. Jeanne Sbire weeps hot tears, saying she cannot help it. Then the women get angry saying that an antithesis is indeed involved and why has it not been suppressed, retaining the first part of the phrase which alone has any meaning. Then they chant at the top of their voices the famous song which begins, Let a hundred flowers blossom, a hundred schools compete.

Great gatherings assemble at dawn when a blue light is still visible over the roofs of the houses. The voices are sonorous and clear. There is a great migration. In the caravanserais steaming cauldrons are placed on the tables, bowls are filled from ladles, are handed round. There is a strong smell of coffee. It is noticeable in the street. It passes through the open windows. Some of the women move forward slowly in little groups along the avenues, they drag their feet, their faces are heavy with sleep. Others wait, standing in the square, they can be seen yawn- ing. The columns begin to march before day has yet broken. They are in uniform order. Their identical costume is tinged by the blue light of before dawn. The tramping is that of a troop that moves off, they fall into proper rank, they find their rhythm. Later the sun appears.

The women tell how the horses returned from Souame, grey, dirty, lame, riderless, walking slowly, pressed flank to flank. From time to time one of them lifts its head and shakes its mane. Not a neigh is heard. An unshod hoof scrapes the ground, turning over the pebbles. Some of the horses are wounded, the blood flows over their bellies. Or else they advance on three legs, the fourth is broken galled slashed. Those that still bear saddles have the stirrups banging against their flanks, ill-fastened. Most have lost them.

Someone speaks of the women who have gone as delegates to the opposing armies. These are young women who sit down decisively to parley. They wear the white costume of those who stand for peace. They make their way without a moment’s rest to the places assigned to them. The saliva on their tongues is thick with the dust of travel. The armies are invisible. Once a route is decided on no heed is paid to the days the enterprise takes. They are on the march. If the sun appears they keep their eyes fixed on it. Or else they look at the moon and the stars. They do not know when they will be able to rest their limbs and sleep shielded from the light, eyes closed. ubu.com

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It is learned that in the world of the Four Powers the women have sus- tained casualties. Several hundred of them have had their legs broken. For the time being they must lie in small invalid carriages. Those sec- onded to their care push them along the streets of the town. It is they who wash them and keep them alive. A debate is held to decide what is best to be done. It is a matter of despatching small clandestine groups to sustain the morale of the dissidents. Thus the Front as a whole will be in permanent liaison with the world of the Four Powers. As well as information and orders, advice encouragement and exhor- tation will not be spared.

The women say that they have been given as equivalents the earth the sea tears that which is humid that which is black that which does not burn that which is negative those who surrender without a struggle. They say this is a concept which is the product of mechanistic reason- ing. It deploys a series of terms which are systematically related to opposite terms. Its theses are so crass that the thought of them makes the women start laughing violently. They say they might just as well be compared with the sky the heavenly bodies in their general movement and disposition the galaxies the plants the stars the suns that which burns those who struggle bravely those who do not surrender. They joke on this subject, they say it is to fall between Scylla and Charybdis, to avoid one religious ideology only to adopt another, they say that both one and the other have this in common, that they are no longer valid.

They persuade Shu Ji to tell them the story of Nü Wa. Shu Ji relates how the mountain in Nü Wa’s country crumbled, how the sky began to tilt to one side, how the earth began to sink. It is then that Nü Wa undertook to remedy this state of affairs. She is seen hewing the rocks of every colour to repair the sky, cutting off the feet of a giant tortoise to set the world aright on the four cardinal points. Everything that lives in that country is in mortal danger because of the black dragon. Then Nü Wa wages a great battle against the dragon and eventually kills it. Shu Ji says that Nü Wa however has not yet reached the end of her difficulties. The waters that were released at the time of the cata- clysm cover the earth. Thus it is that Nü Wa sets fire to all the reeds of her kingdom until, completely consumed, they absorb the water with their ashes.

In recalling that Lei Zu is she who discovered silk the manner in which she arrived at this outcome is not mentioned. It may have resulted ubu.com

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OURIKA AKAZOME CYPRIS LEONTINE ANGELICA LIA RODOGUNE JASMINE KALI SIVAN-KI ZULMA CYANA GALERIA HELLAN AIMATA SAMARE JOSUE SAKANYA ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig from a series of observations she made herself. Or else some one of her followers may have bequeathed her the monopoly of this industry. Or perhaps the first success was obtained by a young peasant girl and Lei Zu learned of it. It may also be imagined that Lei Zu is an empress without followers and without pomp, that she has acquired by obser- vation experimental knowledge of the bombyx. Indeed it is written that after having discovered the silkworm Lei Zu brought their culti- vation and the manufacture of their silk to a fine art. As a first step Lei Zu discovers the material that can be extracted from the threadlike substance secreted by the bombyxes when they surround themselves with a cocoon. As a second step she realizes the need to produce arti- ficially great concentrations of bombyxes. As a third step she deter- mines the several operations essential for the production of silk thread: sorting the cocoons, asphyxiating the chrysalises, emptying the cocoons to obtain the raw silk, drawing the raw silk out into threads or else spinning it mechanically using a jenny furnished with spindles.

The women say that they could carry out great ceremonies of mourn- ing. For example they could bewail the death of Julie. One of them asks if she has been strangled and if this was done with a violet mater- ial. Another says that she was publicly hanged on a gibbet, her feet pro- truding beyond her long tunic, her head shorn in sign of infamy. They say that perhaps she was decapitated, the neck being severed from the head and letting a wave of blood escape from the carotid. It may also be that she was broken alive on the wheel in the public square. To her who asks the nature of her crime they answer that it was identical with that of the woman of whom it is written that she saw that the tree of the garden was good to eat, tempting to see, and that it was the tree requisite for gaining understanding.

When there are no high trees beside the avenues thickets of willows birches apples bushes of box hedges or even very tall flowers, the eye can trace their extent in its entirety. In whatever part of the garden one may happen to be, one can ascertain by turning completely around the geometric forms that govern the network of figures. If the system is rigorous one can combine multiple itineraries. The limits and the proportions of the figures are related to a hypothetical infini- ty in the same way as the diverse series of numbers.

The two armies confront each other. The embattled women stand motionless, awaiting the order to move forward. In their hands they hold kites the colour of their army. One lot is red, the others are blue. ubu.com

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VASA FABIANA BELISSUNU NEBKA MAUD ARETE MAAT ATALANTA DIOMEDE URUK OM FRANCOISE NAUSICAA PUDUHEPA KUWATALLA AGATHOCLEA BOZENA NADA ubu.com

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The kites are stationary, aligned vertically above their heads. The trumpets are sounded. They attack. All at once there is a confusion of red and blue kites, of red and blue bodies. The kites collide violently. Some escape with a great rustling. A red kite is motionless over the sea. A combatant runs along the beach trying to gain possession of it. A band of blue kites escape towards the dunes, they are pursued by red kites. Laughter and singing are heard. Some of the women, deprived of their kites, are stretched out in the middle of the battlefield, bleed- ing.

The women incite with their laughs and shouts those who fight in the grass. They fight until they bring each other down. Their thighs, their knees, are seen in motion. Their strength is based on the firm seating of the trunk on the pelvis. They have straight backs that bend vigor- ously and are lissome at the loins. Later, stiffly erect, they march towards the hills. They find closed villages, stoutly walled. Then, addressing themselves to the walls, they ask which of them possesses the greatest strength.

The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning.

To Hippolyta was sent the lion of the triple night. They say that it took three nights to engender a monster with a human face capable of over- coming the queen of the Amazons. The stern fight she had using bow and arrows, his desperate resistance when she dragged it far into the mountains so as not to jeopardize the life of her kin, they say they know nothing of these, that the story has not been written. They say that until that day the women had always been defeated.

The game consists of posing a series of questions, for example, Who says, I wish it, I order it, my will must take the place of reason? Or, Who must never act according to their will? Or else, Who is only an animal the colour of flowers? There are plenty of others such as, Who must observe the three obediences and whose destiny is written in their anatomy? The answer to all the questions is the same. Then they begin to laugh ferociously slapping each other on the shoulders. Some of the women, lips parted, spit blood. ubu.com

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To sleep they enter the white cells. These are hollowed out in the rock- face by hundreds of thousands. Their concentric openings are tan- gential. The women travel there rapidly, at full speed in fact. Naked, their hair covering their shoulders, they choose their places as they climb. It is possible to lie down in the cell, which resembles an egg, a sarcophagus, an O in view of the shape of its aperture. Several can stay there together gesticulating, singing, sleeping. It is a place of privi- leged sanctuary though not sealed off. The isolation of one cell from another is such that, even if one bangs with all one’s might against the ovoid wall, the sound of the blows is not perceived in the adjacent cell. When one is lying down in the cell it is impossible to discern the occu- pants of the other cells. Before the general retirement for the night confused murmurs of voices are heard, then, distinctly, the phrase, This order must be changed, forcefully repeated by thousands of voic- es.

The habitations are gem-studded multicoloured spherical. Some are transparent. Some float in the air and drift gently. Others are attached to dull steel pylons that look like stalks from a distance. The habita- tions are affixed at differing heights, their interposition varies. There is no symmetry in their arrangement. They are attached to the pylons at right angles by transverse shafts. The length of these shafts also varies. It is not possible at this distance to determine what allows the inhabitants to gain access to their houses. The pylons are very tall. Their, metallic structures with their clean and precise outlines are seen against the horizon. The spheres are suspended from them by the hundred thousand. Between the spheres are seen moving clouds, the sun or the moon, the stars. When the wind gets up the spheres all begin to move at once, soundlessly. From every point on the plain the women march towards the town. They wear identical costumes. These consist of black trousers, flared below, narrow at the hips, and white tunics that confine the bust. They are bare-footed or else they wear light sandals. Several among them march singing long interminably modulated phrases in a high-pitched voice, for example, Cry, is there gold elsewhere more celestial/the wasps of bullets are not for me.

There are there Elsa Brauer Julie Brunèle Odile Roques Evelyne Sabir. They stand before the great gathering of women. Elsa Brauer strikes the cymbals one against the other when she stops speaking, while Julie Brunèle Odile Roques Evelyne Sabir accompany her with long rolls on their drums. Elsa Brauer says something like, There was a time when ubu.com

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ANACTORIA PSAPPHA LETO OUBAOUÉ CHEA NINEGAL IPHIS LYDIA GENEVIEVE EUGENIA THEODORA WATI NOUT BETTE HETEPHERES GUDRUN VERONICA EMMA ubu.com

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you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laugh- ter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember. The wild roses flower in the woods. Your hand is torn on the bushes gathering the mulberries and strawberries you refresh yourself with. You run to catch the young hares that you flay with stones from the rocks to cut them up and eat all hot and bleeding. You know how to avoid meeting a bear on the track. You know the winter fear when you hear the wolves gathering. But you can remain seated for hours in the tree-tops to await morning. You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

They speak together of the threat they have constituted towards authority, they tell how they were burned on pyres to prevent them from assembling in future. They were able to command tempests, to sink fleets, to destroy armies. They have been mistresses of poisons, of the winds, of the will. They were able to exercise their powers at will and to transform all kinds of persons into mere animals, geese pigs birds turtles. They have ruled over life and death. Their conjoint power has menaced hierarchies systems of government authorities. Their knowledge has competed successfully with the official knowl- edge to which they had no access, it has challenged it, found it wanti- ng, threatened it, made it appear inefficacious. No police were power- ful enough to track them down, no paid informer so opportunist, no torture so brutal, no army so overwhelming as to attack them one by one and destroy them. Then they chant the famous song that begins, Despite all the evils they wished to crush me with/I remain as steady as the three legged cauldron.

The progression continues simultaneously with the completion of the cycle. But that is to say too much or too little. The women say that, to complete a cycle, a series of brilliant deeds or extraordinary and bale- ful events is required. Charlotte Bernard says that they are not con- cerned. Emmanuela Chartre says that it is no longer done to marvel at this kind of cycle. Marie Serge says that in any case the cycle may relate to myth and may not mention acts that have any semblance of reality. Flarninie Pougens says that for the women to be wholly engaged it is necessary to invent these. Then they laugh and fall backward from force of laughing. All are infected. A noise rises like the rolling of drums under a vault. The bricks of the ceiling fall one by one, uncov- ering through the openings the gilded panelling of lofty rooms. The stones of the mosaics fly out, the glass panes clatter down, there are shafts of blue red orange mauve. ubu.com

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NU-JUAN BAHISSAT VLADIA EMILY MEROPE DOMITIA ANNABEL SELMA MUMTAZ NUR-JAMAN OUADA ARTHIS ARIANA LEONTINE CAROL GURINNO GONGYLA ARIGNOTA ubu.com

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The laughter does not lessen. The women pick up the bricks and using them as missiles they bombard the statues that remain standing in the midst of the disorder. They set about bringing down the remaining stones. There is a terrible clash of stone against stone. They evacuate those among them who are injured. The systematic destruction of the building is carried through by the women in the midst of a storm of cries shouts, while the laughter continues, spreads, becomes general. It comes to an end only when nothing remains of the building but stones on stones. Then they lie down and fail asleep.

In Hélène Fourcade’s story, Trieu has deployed her troops at day- break. She is seated motionless on a white elephant. One by one the women, the captains, come to salute her. They hold out their bare hands before her, palms open towards the sky in token of loyalty. Then each of the armies marches past, heads turned towards the motionless Trieu. The last units execute a wheeling movement on the spot. The garments of the combatants are blue, without ornament. Trieu is dressed in red. When all are still and have placed their weapons at their feet Trieu removes the silk band that binds her head. Her black hair uncoils and falls abruptly over her shoulders. Then the combat- ants utter a great cry chanting the song, May the rice-fields rot/for those who invade them/day and night/we fight without truce. They say that it is better to die than to live as slaves. At this point Trieu starts forward at the head of a detachment.

They say that they leap like the young horses beside the Eurotas. Stamping the ground they speed their movements. They shake their hair like the bacchantes who love to agitate their thyrsi. They say, quickly now, fasten your floating hair with a bandeau and stamp the ground. Stamp it like a doe, beat out the rhythm needed for the dance, homage to warlike Minerva, the warrior, bravest of the god- desses. Begin the dance, step forward lightly, move in a circle, hold each other by the hand, let everyone observe the rhythm of the dance. Spring forward lightly. The ring of dancers must revolve so that their glance lights everywhere.

They say that they foster disorder in all its forms. Confusion troubles violent debates disarray upsets disturbances incoherences irregulari- ties divergences complications disagreements discords clashes polemics discussions contentions brawls disputes conflicts routs débâ- cles cataclysms disturbances quarrels agitation turbulence conflagra- tions chaos anarchy. ubu.com

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The women say that they have a concern for strategy and tactics. They say that the massive armies that comprise divisions corps regiments sections companies are ineffectual. Their exercises consist of manoeu- vres marches guards patrols. These afford no real practice for combat. They say that they do not prepare for combat. They say that in these armies the handling of weapons is not taught efficiently. They say that such armies are institutions. One refers to their barracks their posts their garrisons. One speaks of their transport their engineers their artillery their infantry their general staff. In this context strategy con- sists of making plans of campaign operational tactics of advance and retreat. Thus strategy is equivalent to tactics, both being short-term. They say that with this concept of war weapons are difficult to deploy, effectives cannot adapt to every situation, most of the time they fight over unfamiliar ground. They say that they are not noted for audacity. They say that they cannot fight with precision, they retreat or advance according to plans whose tactics and strategy are beyond them. They say that these armies are not formidable, their effectives being con- script, participation not being voluntary.

Their favourite weapons are portable. They consist of rocket-launchers which they carry on the shoulder. The shoulder serves as a support for firing. It is possible to run and change position extremely quickly with- out loss of fire-power. There is every kind of rifle. There are machine- guns and rocket-launchers. There are traps with jaws in ditches pitfalls hollows lined with rows of slicing bamboo-blades driven in as stakes. The manoeuvres are raids ambushes surprise attacks followed by a rapid retreat. The objective is not to gain ground but to destroy the greatest number of the enemy to annihilate his armament to compel him to move blindly never to grant him the initiative in engagements to harass him without pause. Using such tactics, to put an enemy out of action without killing him is to immobilize several individuals, the one who is wounded and those who bring aid, it is the best way to sow disarray.

The women say that, with the world full of noise, they see themselves as already in possession of the industrial complexes. They are in the factories aerodromes radio stations. They have control of communi- cations. They have taken possession of aeronautical electronic ballistic data-processing factories. They are in the foundries tall furnaces navy yards arsenals refineries distilleries. They have taken possession of pumps presses levers rollingmills winches pullies cranes turbines ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig pneumatic drills arcs blow-lamps. They say that they envisage them- selves acting with strength and happiness. They say that they hear themselves shout and sing, Let the sun shine/the world is ours.

Look at him, this cripple, who hides his calves as best he can. Look at his timid springless gait. In his cities it is easy to do him violence. You lie in wait for him at a street-corner one night. He thinks you are beck- oning to him. You profit by this to take him by surprise, he hasn’t even the reflex to cry out. Ambushed in his towns you chase him, you lay hands on him, you capture him, you surprise him shouting with all your might.

The women say that they could not eat hare veal or fowl, they say that they could not eat animals, but man, yes, they may. He says to them throwing his head back with pride, poor wretches of women, if you eat him who will go to work in the fields, who will produce food consumer goods, who will make the aeroplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will gov- ern? Then the women laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent.

He begins to cry. And they say no, they could not eat the lion dog puma lamb giraffe mouse ladybird blackbird rabbit-stew. They say, look at this cripple who hides his calves as best he can. They say that he is ideal quarry. They say they must eat to live. He persists in saying that man is devoid of fangs claws trunk legs for running. He persists in saying, why attack such a defenceless creature?

They say that most of the men are lying down. They are not all dead. They sleep. The women say of themselves that they leap like young horses on the banks of the Eurotas. Stamping the ground, they speed their movements. They shake their hair like the bacchantes who love to agitate their thyrsi. They say, quickly now, fasten your floating hair with a bandeau and stamp the ground. Stamp it like a doe, beat out the rhythm needed for the dance, homage to warlike Minerva, the warrior, bravest of the goddesses. Begin the dance. Step forward light- ly, move in a circle, hold each other by the hand, let everyone observe the rhythm of the dance. Spring forward lightly. The ring of dancers must revolve so that their glance lights everywhere. They say, It is a great error to imagine that I, a woman, would speak violence against men. But we must, as something quite new, begin the round dance stamping the feet in time against the ground. They say, rise slowly ubu.com

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twice clapping your hands. Stamp the ground in time, O women. Now turn to the other side. Let the foot move in rhythm.

The women make warlike gestures, approaching and retreating, danc- ing with their hands and feet. Some hold bamboo poles sorghum stems wooden batons the long ones representing lances and great hal- berds, the short ones double-edged swords or ordinary sabres. Dispersing by gates and paths they jostle each other impetuously. Their violence is extreme. They crash into each other with bravura. No one can restrain them. Each time these exercises take place several dozen of them are needed so that they may play together thus.

They stand on the ramparts, faces covered with a shining powder. They can be seen all round the town, singing together a kind of mourning song. The male besiegers are near the walls, indecisive. Then the women, at a signal, uttering a terrible cry, suddenly rip off the upper part of their garments, uncovering their naked gleaming breasts. The men, the enemy, begin to discuss what they unanimously regard as a gesture of submission. They send ambassadors to treat for the gates to be opened. Three of their number fall struck down by stones as soon as they are within range. The entire army hurls itself against the walls, with battering-rams flame-throwers guns scaling-lad- ders. A great tumult rises. The besiegers utter cries of rage. The women, modulating their voices into a stridency that distresses the ear, withstand the siege, one by one, with arrows stones burning pitch, not quitting their positions except to bring aid to someone or to replace a dead woman. Within, long processions come and go, some bringing pitch, others water to extinguish the fires. The combatants are visible above the wall, singing without pause, their mouths wide open over white teeth. Their cheeks still glow in their blackened faces. Some laugh out loud and manifest their aggressiveness by thrusting their bare breasts forward brutally.

The women say, the men have kept you at a distance, they have sup- ported you, they have put you on a pedestal, constructed with an essential difference. They say, men in their way have adored you like a goddess or else burned you at their stakes or else relegated you to their service in their back-yards. They say, so doing they have always in their speech dragged you in the dirt. They say, in speaking they have pos- sessed violated taken subdued humiliated you to their hearts’ content. They say, oddly enough what they have exalted in their words as an essential difference is a biological variation. They say, they have ubu.com

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OEDIPA PERNETFA MERCY GERMAINE DAPHNE CYNTHIA SHIRLEY NIOBE HARRIET ROXANA CAROLINE HULDA DAISY PRAHOMIRA MANYE FLORENCE SHADTAR ASTA ubu.com

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described you as they described the races they called inferior. They say, yes, these are the same domineering oppressors, the same masters who have said that negroes and women do not have a heart spleen liver in the same place as their own, that difference of sex difference of colour signify inferiority, their own right to domination and appropriation. They say, yes, these are the same domineering oppressors who have written of negroes and women that they are universally cheats hyp- ocrites tricksters liars shallow greedy faint-hearted, that their thinking is intuitive and illogical, that nature is what speaks most loudly in them, et cetera. They say, yes, these are the same domineering oppres- sors who sleep crouched over their money-bags to protect their wealth and who tremble with fear when night comes.

The women are on their cavorting continually rearing horses. They proceed without orders to meet the enemy army. They have painted their faces and legs in bright colours. The cries they utter are so terri- fying that many of their adversaries drop their weapons, running straight before them stopping their ears. The women are on the ridges that c6mmand the pass. In this strategic position which is all to their advantage they draw their bows and fire thousands of arrows. Then the army breaks ranks.

The men all begin to run in the greatest confusion, some go towards the exit from the pass, others try to retrace their steps. They jostle and collide with each other as they flee, they stumble over the bodies of the dead and wounded. Orders are no longer heard. Cries of despair panic shrieks of pain are heard. Many throw down their swords that hamper them in flight. Some climb on the hills making signs of sur- render, they are soon slaughtered. When the bottom of the valley has become a charnelhouse the women brandish their bows above their heads, they utter shouts of victory, they chant a song of death in which these words are heard, Vulture with the bald head/brother of the dead/vulture perform your office/ with the corpses I offer you/receive also this vow/never shall my arrow be planted in your eyes.

The Ophidian women the Odonates the Oögones the Odoacres the Olynthians the Oöliths the Omphales the women of Omiur of Orphise the Oriennes have massed and gone over to the attack. The convoys that follow them bring arms victuals clothes. They travel at night, rejoining the armies at daybreak when they withdraw after having given battle. Their most formidable weapon is the ospah. They hold it ubu.com

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VINCENTA CLOTILDA NICOLA SUKAINA XU-HU ANACHORA OLYMPA DELPHINA LUCRETIA ROLANDA VIOLA BERNARDA PHUONG PLANCINE CLORINDA BAO-SI PULCHERIA AUGUSTA ubu.com

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in position above their heads and rotate it at full speed by twirling the right arm as with a lasso that one spins before one or like the leather thong with bolos attached that one throws round the legs of wild hors- es to trip them. The ospah is invisible so long as it is not in action. When it is manipulated during battle it materializes as a green circle which crackles and emits odours. Thus the women, making it move at full speed in a given direction, create with the ospah a zone of death. No ray, no shot, no fulguration are seen to emanate from the ospah. The coalescence of the O’s is produced by the desperate combatants, full of courage audacious tough and unyielding.

The little girls have laid down their rifles. They advance into the sea and plunge into it, the sweat running down their necks, under their armpits, along their backs. Or else, stretched out in the sun, they talk very loudly. Some, unable to stay still, jump in the sand and jostle each other. One of them, quite naked, with tresses of hair over each shoul- der, standing in front of a group, recites at a stretch, Is the finest thing on the dark earth really a group of horsemen whose horses go at a trot or a troop of infantry stamping the ground? Is the finest thing really a squadron of ships side by side? Anactoria Kypris Savé have a bearing a grace a radiant brightness of countenance that are pleasanter to see than all the chariots of the Lydians and their warriors charging in their armour. Then the women applaud.

The women say that men put all their pride in their tail. They mock them, they say that the men would like a long tail but that they would run away whining as soon as they stepped on it. The women guffaw and begin to imitate some ridiculous animal that has difficulty in get- ting about. When they have a prisoner they strip him and make him run through the streets crying, it is your rod/cane/staff/wand/peg skewer/staff of lead. Sometimes the subject has a fine body broadened at the hips with honeyed skin and muscles not showing. Then they take him by the hand and caress him to make him forget all their bad treatment.

The women say, you are really a slave if ever there was one. Men have made what differentiates them from you the sign of domination and possession. They say, you will never be numerous enough to spit on their phallus, you will never be sufficiently determined to stop speak- ing their language, to burn their currency their effigies their works of art their symbols. They say, men have forseen everything, they have christened your revolt in advance a slave revolt, a revolt against nature, ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig they call it revolt when you want to appropriate what is theirs, the phal- lus. The women say, I refuse henceforward to speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of pos- session and non-possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world.

The women advance side by side in a geometric order of progress. The interval of a few yards that they maintain between them is invisible at a distance. The first rank that advances covers the width of the plain. The tall buildings crumble like card houses at their passage emitting a thick dust over which they march. The second rank of combatants marches some hundred yards behind the first, covering like that one the whole width of the plain. They are followed by another rank at the same distance, by yet another, until one can no longer distinguish their outlines as they blend with the horizon.

As far as eye can see there is no house standing. The combatants carry in both hands a small sphere which has a crateriform part that is directed in front of them at the level of their belts. At every obstacle that presents itself to their progress they project a beam of convergent rays the power of whose impact is signalled by a murky flash, a brief glare, which ensures that any object that may be in the field of the rays is instantly destroyed. They wear garments all of one piece, made of a kind of metal. Their faces, intermittently lit up by the spheres and their rays, resemble great insect heads with antennae and stalked eyes.

The women await their emissaries on their doorsteps, a smile on their lips. The have let down their hair, they have assumed the military cos- tume that leaves the body free in its movements. Within the houses they have poured out the dishwater and scattered the dirty linen. One of them, standing in the middle of the square, rotates slowly on her- self arms extended on either side of her body saying, The summer day is brilliant but more brilliant still is the fate of the young girl. Iron plunged into ice is cold but colder still is the lot of the young girl who has given herself in marriage. The young girl in the house of her mother is like seed in fertile ground. The woman under the roof of her husband is like a chained dog. The slave, rarely, tastes the delights of love, the woman never. ubu.com

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RAYMONDA ATALA ENRICA CALAMITA AMANDA COSIMA GARANCE REGINA NU-TIAO GELSOMINA SHOGUN ALICE OLUMEAI GYPTIS NU-TIAO BENJAMINA SELENE CURACA ubu.com

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They resuscitate those males who founded their celebrity on the women’s downfall, exulting in their slavery whether in their writings in their laws in their actions. For these there are got ready the racks the screw-plates rthe machines for twisting and grinding. The women stop their ears with wax so as not to hear their discordant cries. When they have soaked them in baths of water mixed with acid, when they have drawn twisted beaten them, they treat their skins according to the usual technique of tanning or else they have them dried in the sun without especial care or else they exhibit them with labels that record the name of their former proprietors or that recall their most striking catch-phrases. It forms a subject of unending humour among them. They continually cast doubt on the attribution of a particular phrase or name to a particular skin that they judge too old for that phrase from the chronological standpoint or on the contrary too recent.

The women say with an oath, it was by a trick that he expelled you from the earthly paradise, cringing he insinuated himself next to you, he robbed you of that passion for knowledge of which it is written that it has the wings of the eagle, the eyes of the owl, the feet of the drag- on. He has enslaved you by trickery, you who were great strong valiant. He has stolen your wisdom from you, he has closed your memory to what you were, he has made of you that which is not which does not speak which does not possess which does not write, he has made of you a vile and fallen creature, he has gagged abused betrayed you. By means of stratagems he has stultified your understanding, he has woven around you a long list of defects that he declares essential to your wellbeing, to your nature. He has invented your history. But the time approaches when you shall crush the serpent under your heel, the time approaches when you can cry, erect, filled with ardour and courage, Paradise exists in the shadow of the sword.

From pedal canoes in ambush behind the rocks the women attack the bearded strangers when they attempt a landing. They make their machines move backwards if the men abandon their intention, and hide as best they can. Relieving each other as often as is necessary not to reduce their speed of propulsion they operate their boats by means of cranks. One of these is situated at the front of the canoe, control- ling backward motion, the other at the rear controls advance. A vio- lent eddy of disturbed water from beneath the canoe comes inboard. The splashes leave white marks of salt on the bare copper-coloured breasts. They stay hidden so long as the strangers keep away from the coasts. They advance openly if the men show signs of approaching and greet them with clouds of arrows. ubu.com

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They exchange pleasantries about what is usually called the choice of husband. One of them cites Gyptis who for this procedure presented a cup to the solitary Euxène. Another mentions Draupadi who took five husbands. Of the first it is stated that Draupadi compared him to the apple of her eye, of the second it is stated that she compared him to the light of her life, of the third it is stated that she compared him to the treasures of her house, of the fourth it is stated that she com- pared him to a young acacia, of the fifth it is stated that she delighted to call him the rampart her strength. Someone recalls the Sarmatians, the drawers of the bow, the horsewomen, the throwers of javelins, who did not take a husband until they had killed at least three enemies. Another names those who greeted their wedding-day on horseback, equipped with shields with javelins and swords. One of them stands in honour of the women of Lemnos who all massacred their husbands and made themselves mistresses of the island. Then someone begins to sing, Towards you, my dear ones, my feelings will never change.

The women say, unhappy one, men have expelled you from the world of symbols and yet they have given you names, they have called you slave, you unhappy slave. Masters, they have exercised their rights as masters. They write, of their authority to accord names, that it goes back so far that the origin of language itself may be considered an act of authority emanating from those who dominate. Thus they say that they have said, this is such or such a thing, they have attached a par- ticular word to an object or a fact and thereby consider themselves to have appropriated it. The women say, so doing the men have bawled shouted with all their might to reduce you to silence. The women say the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speak- ing designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like many-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak. This is appar- ent precisely in the intervals that your masters have not been able to fill with their words of proprietors and possessors, this can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their discourse, in the zero, the O, the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and to overthrow them.

One of them relates the story of Vlasta. She tells how under Vlasta’s guidance the first female State was created. The young women of Bohemia joined Vlasta and her troops in Moldavia in their scores of ubu.com

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DEMETER CASSIA POPPAEA TAI-SI FATIMA OPAL LEONORA EMMANUELA BO-JI SHIRIN AGATHA KEM-PHET MELISADE IRENE LEOKADJA LAURA ubu.com

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thousands. The Carpathian fortresses appear on the mountain-tops with their walls of pink sandstone. In their courtyards after weapon drill the assembled women compose songs and invent games. Another of them recalls that in the female State men were tolerated only for servile tasks and that they were forbidden under pain of death to bear arms or mount on horseback. At the Bohemian ambassadors arriving in great anger to enjoin them to surrender they cock a snook and make a long nose and send them back, emasculated. Later they put many troops to flight and enter into a long war during which Vlasta’s warriors teach all the peasant women who join them how to handle arms.

The women say, whether men live or die, they no longer have power. They are seated in a circle. Some have undone their tunics because of the heat. Their breasts touch their knees. Their hair is twisted into innumerable strands. They say that they have instructed fast runners, bearers of news. Awaiting their arrival they sing, sitting in groups or squatting on their heels, anacyclic songs such as, If the slaves/unwill- ingly exhaust themselves, standing to insult/their hateful masters/they die but without/letting fall their weapons/too eager for the struggle/to fly and hide.

They say, Vile, vile creature for whom possession is equated with hap- piness, a sacred cow on the same footing as riches, power, leisure. Has he not indeed written, power and the possession of women, leisure and the enjoyment of women? He writes that you are currency, an item of exchange. He writes, barter, barter, possession and acquisition of women and merchandise. Better for you to see your guts in the sun and utter the death-rattle than to live a life that anyone can appropri- ate. What belongs to you on this Earth? Only death. No power on earth can take that away from you. And---consider explain tell yourself ---if happiness consists in the possession of something, then hold fast to this sovereign happiness---to die.

They say that they sing with such utter fury that the movement that carries them forward is irresistible. They say that oppression engen- ders hate. They are heard on all sides crying hate hate.

The women menace they attack they hiss the men they revile them jeer at them spit in their faces scoff at them provoke them flout them apos- trophize them mishandle them are abrupt with them they speak ubu.com

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VOLUMNIA YAO SHAGHAB OPPIENNE LUCY AUDE HEDWIG LEONIE AGNES TAMARA FRANCE AHON SORANA RUZENA SALLY SU-YEN KIUNG TERESA ubu.com

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coarsely to them execrate them call down curses on them. They are possessed by such utter fury that they boil with anger tremble choke grind their teeth foam blaze rage and fume leap vomit run riot. Then they call them to account admonish them put a knife to their throats intimidate them show them their fists they thrash them do violence to them acquaint them with all their grievances in the greatest disorder they sow the seed of discord here and there provoke dissension among them divide them ferment disturbances riots civil wars they treat them as hostile. Their violence is unleashed they are in a paroxysm of rage, in their devastating enthusiasm they appear wild eyed hair bristling clenching their fists roaring rushing shrieking slaughtering in fury one might say of them that they are females who look like women when they are dead.

Great blades with cutting edges like those of razors are arranged in quincunxes parallel to the ground at different levels around the camp. To anyone who arrives opposite them they appear like a series of bro- ken lines. At night they are invisible. Sentries keep watch behind the scythes so that no attack may interfere with their arrangements. The others sleep despite the shots despite the victims’ cries of pain and sur- prise which are heard time and again at different points. In the morn- ing working parties relieve the sentries and collect the portions of bod- ies divided by the blades in large baskets. These may be heads chests legs singly or attached to the pelvis an arm, according to the level at which the attackers have run into the blades. The collected bodies are buried in a large ditch which they fill and cover with a pile of earth. Then they plant their flags there in great number, some sow flowers there. Standing they chant a song of mourning for the men who have died in combat.

It is said of the army of Sporphyra that it advances like Koo, superb, ferocious, astride a tiger, beautiful in countenance. They say of the army of Wu that it is always on a war footing like Sseu-Kuan of the eleven heads, the many-armed, who bears an eye on each of her palms. The women of Perségame go in groups, sowing disorder and confu- sion, unleashing around them the desire for orgasm like cat-headed Obel. They say that some of the women infiltrate into the enemy troops, bodies painted blue and yellow, sowers of defeat like the cruel Seumes. From Apone the horsewomen have learned how to stay fast in the saddle and to look after their encampments. The women of Gathma declare themselves fitted to destroy the enemy like Segma the lion-headed, the well-named, the powerful, the drinker of blood. ubu.com

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They say they have the strength of the lion the hate of the tiger the cunning of the fox the patience of the cat the perseverance of the horse the tenacity of the jackal. They say, I shall be the universal vengeance. They say, I shall be the Attila of these ferocious despots, cause of our tears and our sufferings. They say, and when by good for- tune all women wish to rally to me, each alike shall be Nero and set fire to Rome. They say, War, rally! They say, War, forward! They say that once they have arms in their hands they will not yield them. They say that they will shake the world like thunder and lightning.

They have modelled their most formidable weapon on the metallic mirror that the goddesses of the sun hold up to the light when they advance on the forecourt of the temples. They have copied its shape and its power of reflecting light. Each of them holds a mirror in her hand. They hide behind the tall reeds, the tough plants of the swamps. They use the sun’s rays to communicate among themselves. When it is used as a weapon the mirror projects death-dealing rays. The women station themselves by the sides of the roads that traverse the under- growth, weapons at the ready, killing all those who pass, whether these be animals or humans. They do not die immediately. Then the women reach their prey at a bound and, giving the signal, joined at once by the others, they begin to dance while uttering cries, swaying to and fro, while their victim writhes on the ground, shaken by spasms and groan- ing.

To those who ask the meaning of the initials T C O B they answer, you cannot know the meaning. T C O B, they say you may seek it since you have the first letter of each word. They say, it can mean nothing to you, even written out in full. T C O B. They say, if I translate for you, The Conjuration of Balkis, what can you infer from that? They say that the uprisings have increased in extent and number. They say that in view of their spread the abbreviation can no longer be used in the singular. They say that the conjurations of Balkis can no longer be counted. They say that when the conspirators meet they make the sign of the circle by joining their index fingers and thumbs together in that shape. If the conspirators turn their palms outward to make the sign of the circle, thumbs joined below, indices above, it is because the news is good, the war is going well. If on the contrary they show the backs of their hands, indices below, thumbs uppermost, it is because they have somewhere suffered a reverse. ubu.com

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THEOPHANO CEZA OLGA VIRGILIA PORTIA XU HU ABAN CLEMENTINE ABRA HODE MARTHA JACINTHA MAGGIE URIA DOROTHY AGRIPPINA DIRCE NELL ubu.com

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The women cry out and run towards the young men arms laden with flowers which they offer them saying, Let all this have a meaning. Some of the women pulling quantities of heads off the flowers arranged in armfuls, throw them in their faces. The men shake their hair and laugh, moving away from the women and coming nearer again. Some run away and let themselves fall down limply, eyes closed, hands outstretched. Others are completely hidden by the heaps of flowers the women have thrown over them. There are roses tulips peonies lupins poppies snapdragons asters cornflowers irises euphor- bias buttercups campanulas. Everywhere on the sands there are petals and fragments of corollas that make white red dark-blue pale-blue ultramarine yellow and violet splashes. Some of the men say they are drunk. They are seen rolling about in the immense bouquets scattered sheaves broken wreaths. They seize the flowers in handfuls and press- ing them against their eyelids against their open mouths, they begin to utter soft hoarse sounds.

One of the women relates an old story. For example how Thomar Li the young girl with the high breasts was surprised with the handsome Hedon. They speak of the punishment meted out to them. They say that they picture them fastened to one another, limbs bound together, wrist to wrist, ankle tied to ankle. They say that they picture them when they are thrown in the river, without uttering a cry of supplication. They say, victory victory. They say how pleasing to them is their con- tact, how their limbs relax and soften, how their muscles---touched by pleasure---become supple and light, how in this wretched state, when they are marked for death, their bodies---unbound and full of calm--- begin to float, how the warm water, pleasing to the touch, carries them to a beach of fine sand, where they fall asleep from fatigue.

The young men have joined the women to bury the dead. Immense communal graves have previously been dug. The corpses are arranged one beside the other, bearing a circle drawn in black on their fore- heads. Their stiffened arms are bound against their bodies, their feet are tied. All the bodies have been mummified and treated with care for long preservation. The graves are not covered in with earth. Slabs are intended to seal them according to an arrangement that permits of their removal at any time. The women stand beside the graves, the men who have joined them by their sides, wearing like them the cos- tume of peace which consists of black trousers flared at the ankles and a white tunic that hugs the chest. At a given moment the women inter- rupt their discourse and turning towards the young men take them by the hand. Then they stay like this in silence, holding each other by the ubu.com

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OMPHALE CORINNA ELFREDA LU-HU MEI-FEI VICVAVARA QI-JI VIJAYA BHATIKARIKA LUDGARDE GERTRUDE DIANA ROGNEDE MALAN CLEOPATRA AMERIZ BATHSHEBA CLAUDIA ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig hand, looking straight ahead at the open graves.

They say that the event is memorable even though long in preparation and mentioned in diverse fashion by historians writers versifiers. They say that war is an affair for women. They say, is this not gratifying? They say that they have spat at the men’s heels, that they have cut the legs off their boots. They say, moreover, that although laughter is the pre- rogative of man, they want to learn how to laugh. They say yes, hence- forward they are ready. They say that the breasts the curved eyelashes the flat or broadened hips, they say that the bulging or hollow bellies, they say that the vulvas are henceforth in movement. They say that they are inventing a new dynamic. They say they are throwing off their sheets. They say they are getting down from their beds. They say they are leaving the museums the show-cases the pedestals where they have been installed. They say they are quite astonished that they can move.

The women descend from the hill carrying torches. Their troops advance, marching day and night. They say, where shall we carry the flame, what land set ablaze, what murder perpetrate? They say, no, I shall not lie down, I shall not rest my tired body before this earth to which I was so often compared, turned upside down from top to bot- tom, shall be incapable of bearing fruit. They light the pine-trees cedars cork-oaks olives. The fire spreads with great rapidity. At first it is like a distant murmur. Then it is a roar that swells and finally drowns their voices. Then they fly, faster than the wind, carrying fire and destruction everywhere. Their cries and their fury compete with the noise of the fire.

They say, you are speedy like Gurada the messenger, with the wings and feet of a swallow, who stole ambrosia and fire from heaven. They say, like Esée you can steal power over life and death, like her become universal. They say, you advance with the sun’s disc on your head, like Othar of the golden countenance who represents love and death. They say, in your anger you exhort Out, who upholds the sky and whose fingers touch the earth, to shatter the celestial vault. They say, conquered like Itaura, you readjust the two halves of your body, heav- en and earth, you stand erect and go shrieking, creating monsters at every step. They say, you leap on the corpses, eyes bloodshot, tongue lolling, teeth fanged, palms red, shoulders streaming with blood, car- rying necklaces of skulls, corpses at your ears, garlands of serpents round your arms, you leap on the corpses. ubu.com

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The women address the young men in these terms, now you under- stand that we have been fighting as much for you as for ourselves. In this war, which is also yours, you have taken part. Today, together, let us repeat as our slogan that all trace of violence must disappear from this earth, then the sun will be honey-coloured and music good to hear. The young men applaud and shout with all their might. They have brought their arms. The women bury them at the same time as their own saying, let there be erased from human memory the longest most murderous war it has ever known, the last possible war in histo- ry. They wish the survivors, both male and female, love strength youth, so that they may form a lasting alliance that no future dispute can com- promise. One of the women begins to sing, Like unto ourselves/men who open their mouths to speak/a thousand thanks to those who have understood our language/and not having found it excessive/have joined with us to transform the world.

It is evident that the women can go on no longer. They march by con- tinually holding on to their bending legs. Now some fall down. They are seen to weep. Their hair is seen falling the length of their bodies. They tear it out in handfuls and throw it down alongside themselves in masses. Marie-Laure Hibon weeps saying, where is my long hair, my fair curly hair? They march casting their hair beside them without, so it seems, the strength to trample it underfoot. Old women stumble along them, hopping and uttering little cries, look, they say, all that hair. Then they run here and there heaping up the balls of hair to make enormous masses, some sit on top and laugh saying all this hair. Others cannot manage to climb the hillock made of the hair they have collected. The women march holding on to their ever-bending legs, weeping it seems out of great fear and misery. Some fall down, no one seems them get up again. Sometimes an ululation is heard followed by other lesser sounds in concert. The ululations grow, suddenly it is as if two hundred ships in distress were calling for help in the night.

They say, hell, let the earth become a vast hell. So they speak crying and shouting. They say, let my words be like the tempest the thunder the lightning that the mighty release from their height. They say, let me be seen everywhere arms in hand. They say anger hate revolt. They say, hell, let the earth become a vast hell destroying killing and setting fire to the buildings of men, to theatres national assemblies to muse- ums libraries prisons psychiatric hospitals old and new from which they free the slaves. They say, let the memory of Atti1a and his warrior hordes perish from history because of his meekness. They say that they ubu.com

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HIPPOLYTA PETRONILLA APAKU EVE SUBHADRA LOLA VALERY AMELIA ANIKO CHEN-TE MASHA SEMIRAMIS THESSA OUR EURYDICE SE CATHERINE ubu.com

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are more barbarous than the most barbarous. Their armies grow hourly. Delegations go before them when they approach the towns. Together they sow disorder in the great cities, taking prisoners, putting to the sword all those who do not acknowledge their might.

They quote long verses, We are truly the dregs of this world. Wheat, millet, spelt and every cereal, it is for others we sow them, as for us, wretched ones/with a little sorghum we make ourselves bread. /The cocks fowls geese pullets/it is the others who eat them, as for us, a few nuts/we eat roots like the pigs./Wretched we are and wretched we shall be/we are truly the dregs of this world. They cite as a subscrip- tion to this quotation the phrase of Flora Tristan, Women and the peo- ple march hand in hand.

They say, take your time, consider this new species that seeks a new lan- guage. A great wind is sweeping the earth. The sun is about to rise. The birds no longer sing. The lilac and violet colours brighten in the sky. They say, where will you begin? They say, the prisons are open and serve as doss-houses. They say that they have broken with the tradition of inside and outside, that the factories have each knocked down one of their walls, that offices have been installed in the open air, on the esplanades, in the rice-fields. They say, it would be grave mistake to imagine that I would go, me, a woman to speak violently against men when they have ceased tot be my enemies.

Whether they are marching or standing still, their hands are always stretched far out from their bodies. Most often they hold them at each side at shoulder height, which makes them resemble some hieratic fig- ure. The fingers of their hands are spread out and in incessant move- ment. Spinning-glands are at work on each of their limbs. From their many orifices there emerge thick barely visible filaments that meet and fuse together. Under the repeated play of movement in the fin- gers a membrane grows between them that seems to join them, then prolong them, until eventually it extends beyond the hand and descends along the arm, it grows, it lengthens, it gives the women a sort of wing on either side of their body. When they resemble giant bats, with transparent wings, one of them comes up and, taking a kind of scissors from her belt, hastily divides the two great flaps of silk. The fingers immediately recommence their movement. ubu.com

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ATHENAÏS OREA CHARLOTTE BRUNEHAUT RACHEL ELMIRA RANAVALO ON-TA CALLIOPE THEOCTISTA PORPHYRA GOPA SCHEHERAZDE ZUO-WEN-JUN ENGUERRANDE BULLE MEDEA ubu.com

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The women have their backs to the city they defend and face the oncoming male attackers. Their invulnerable bodies, protected by the fire-proof material that clothes them, that no bullet can breach, stand rigid and immobile. From a distance they might be taken for great standing scarecrows whose empty sleeves are not stirred by the wind. The attackers approach, surprised by their immobility. The foremost are mown down by bullets while the women begin to utter fearful cries. The second wave of attackers retreats in confusion. Then the women launch themselves in pursuit and try to catch up with them.

They say, we must disregard all the stories relating to those of them who have been betrayed beaten seized seduced carried off violated and exchanged as vile and precious merchandise. They say, we must disregard the statements we have been compelled to deliver contrary to our opinion and in conformity with the codes and conventions of the cultures that have domesticated us. They say that all the books must be burned and only those preserved that can present them to advantage in a future age. They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what con- cerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.

On the squares where the trestle tables are set up they sing and dance and sing, Danson la Carmazgnole/vive le son/dansons la Carmagnole/vive le son du canon. Someone interrupts them to praise those males who have joined them in their struggle. Then, in the sunshine, a handkerchief on her head, she begins to read an unfolded paper, for example, When the world changes and one day women are capable of seizing power and devoting themselves to the exercise of arms and letters in which they will doubtless soon excel, woe betide us. I am certain they will pay us out a hundredfold, that they will make us stay all day by the distaff the shuttle and the spinning wheel, that they will send us to wash dishes in the kitchen. We shall richly deserve it. At these words all the women shout and laugh and clap each other on the shoulder to show their contentment.

The women say, shame on you. They say, you are domesticated, forcibly fed, like geese in the yard of the farmer who fattens them. They say, you strut about, you have no other care than to enjoy the good things your masters hand out, solicitous for your well-being so ubu.com

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les guérillères monique wittig long as they stand to gain. They say, there is no more distressing spec- tacle than that of slaves who take pleasure in their servile state. They say, you are far from possessing the pride of those wild birds who refuse to hatch their eggs when they have been imprisoned. They say, take an example from the wild birds who, even if they mate with the males to relieve their boredom, refuse to reproduce so long as they are not at liberty.

They say, without realizing what they were doing the men have con- structed stupas dagbas chortens in many places. They say, the men have multiplied the symbols that refer to a different conception. They say, how to interpret these monuments whose basic design is the circle in all its modalities? The principal building is a hemisphere. Paths encircle it at different levels. One follows them in the direction of the sun. Thus one passes at the four cardinal points before those women of the East who are in process of being born, one passes before those of the South who indicate the light and whose faces reflect it. At the West one passes by those who have triumphed and imposed their will, at the North one passes by those who compile all the legends. After passing by all these an incalculable number of times one arrives by an ascending path at the zenith, at those who record the deeds of those of the East South West North. Their register is an immense musical stave that instruments progressively decipher. This is what has been called the music of the spheres.

They say, if I relax after these great achievements I shall reel drunk with sleep and fatigue. They say, no, one must not stop for a single moment. They say, compare yourself to a slow fire. They say, let your breast be a furnace, let your blood become heated like metal that is about to melt. They say, let your eye be fiery, your breath burning. They say, you will realize your strength, arms in hand. They say, put your legendary resistance to the test in battle. They you who are invin- cible, be invincible. They say, go, spread over the entire surface of the earth. They say, does the weapon exist that can prevail against you?

They go to meet the young men, their groups mingle forming long chains. They take them by the hand and question them. They lead them away on to the hills. With them they climb the steps of the high terraces. They make them sit down by their side on the terraces. The men learn their songs during the hot afternoons. They taste their cul- tivated fruits for the first time. ubu.com

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TAN-JI OENANTHE PELAGIA LUDOVICA ELISABETH SOUA CUNEGONDE PAULINE WACO BRIDGET MOANA MELUSINE CHANDRABATI CECILE KISI KAIKEYI MU-GONG MELANIE ubu.com

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The men try to recognize the flowers the women point out to them in the flower-beds shrubberies meadows fields. The women choose names with the men for the things round about them. They make them look at the space which everywhere extends to their feet. It is a limitless prairie covered with flowers, daisies in the spring, marguerites in summer, in autumn white and blue meadow saffron. It is a green- blue ocean the colour of milk with ships passing or else empty. It is a field shorn of every edifice where as far as eye can see the corn grows the rye or the green barley, the orange-coloured rice. The women make them savour the mildness of the climate, identical throughout the seasons, unchanging by day and night.

The rounded shields protect them. Every weapon is shattered against them. Dart-filled bombs and grenades sink softly into their thick sub- stance. If they are at all defective they break at the first impact and fly into splinters like glass. A brightly-coloured cloud similar to a Bengal light then rises concealing the bearer of the shield from sight. It is at once replaced by another, passed from hand to hand. During the day the women hardly change their position. It is at night that great move- ments take place along the whole length of their defensive front, some bringing up victuals, others weapons. others still supplying fresh news to the entire front.

The young men signal to the women from a distance. They have iden- tical blue garments. Their faces are smooth and round. When they approach some of the women strike up with them the song in their honour. There can be distinctly heard the words, Fine martial faces and five-foot lances/on the parade-ground at daybreak/to those we name/there is no pleasure in the red costume/theirs must be the cos- tume of war.

Young women dressed in black and wearing masks appear on the scene dancing and singing. They are armed with clubs. They twirl these as they advance. Others follow them with rifles which they pile on the grassy ground. Some are bare-breasted. There is a general movement all around the field of arms. Some carry rocket launchers. They advance in their thousands. All have a long knife attached to their belt. They sing, The arms piled fanwise on the hills/no less bril- liant than the lances of the Punic wars/do not slumber.

A woman sings, shedding tears, My heart softens/when I see the ubu.com

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Spring return/Summer grow green again/the sweet air is a mortal poi- son/the flesh of your lips/is to my mouth/the sun and the snow. At a given moment, interrupting her song, she falls down, she writhes about, she is racked by sobs. At once other cries other sobs are heard. Behind the trees they discover a young man, prostrate, trembling in every limb, cheeks salt with tears, full of grace and beauty. Taking him in their arms, the women bear him to the side of the young weeping woman, applauding when they recognize each other and embrace. Then they express their satisfaction. They inform the young man that he is the first to have joined them in their struggle. They all embrace him. One of the women brings him a rifle, saying that she will teach him to handle it after the celebrations they prepare in his honour.

They run as fast as they can. Some have a rattle in their throats. Others pant from their efforts. Some fall and do not rise again. Then it is nec- essary to stop and carry them on the shoulders of four of their num- ber. They must run with them until, refreshed, they can once more move on as fast as possible. Shelter is still far off. One of the hardier ones begins to sing a song to restore their courage. She says, Do not hang your head/like one who is conquered. She says, Awake/take courage/the struggle is long/the struggle is arduous/but power is at the end of a rifle. All the women shout their enthusiasm with all their might.

Young men clothed in white overalls clinging to their bodies run in a crowd before the women. They wear red flags at their shoulders and heels. They move rapidly just above the ground, legs together. Motionless the women watch them come. Stopping at a distance and saluting they say, for you the victors I strip myself of my most favoured epithet which used to be like an adornment. Henceforth may you be named in my stead the thrice-great, woman trismegista, you are quick as mercury and highway robbers, skilful at thwarting plots, mistress of life and death, guardian of your allies’ welfare. Then the men sing the song of the robbers, The longhaired rebels are united in life and death/they do not attack solitary travellers/they do not attack the weaponless/but should an official or civil servant come/whether he be just or corrupt/they will leave him only the skin on his bones. The women, approaching the long-haired young men, embrace them with all their might.

The women say, truly is this not magnificent? The vessels are upright, the vessels have acquired legs. The sacred vessels are on the move. ubu.com

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URSULA OBI ATIGONE ANTIGONE AGNETHE NO/ SYMBOLS TEARING ARISE VIOLENCE FROM THE WHITENESS OF THE UNDYING BEAUTIFUL PRESENT WITH A GREAT DRUNKEN WING BEAT THE BODY RIDDLED TORN (INTOLERABLE) WRITTEN BY DEFAULT

ARISE NO/ SYMBOLS MASSED EVIDENT/ THE DESIGNATED TEXT (BY MYRIAD CONSTELLATIONS) FAULTY LACUNAE LACUNAE AGAINST TEXTS AGAINST MEANING WHICH IS TO WRITE VIOLENCE OUTSIDE THE TEXT IN ANOTHER WRITING THREATENING MENACING MARGINS SPACES INTERVALS WITHOUT PAUSE ACTION OVERTHROW ubu.com

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They say, will not the slope of the hills rebuff their assault? They say, henceforward the vessels empty of seed have shrunken loins. They move slowly at first then faster and faster. The women say, this is a sac- rilege, a violation of all the rules. They say that they move slowly at first then faster and faster, these vessels buried up to the neck and recep- tacles of the most diverse objects, human spermatozoa coins flowers earth messages. It may be asked, why these excesses? Must they not hold violence in abhorrence? Is not their structure fragile and will they not shatter at the first onslaught if they are not already in pieces from collision with each other? They say, listen, listen, they cry évohé, évohé, leaping like the young horses on the banks of the Eurotas. Stamping the earth, they speed their movements.

Moved by a common impulse, we all stood to seek gropingly the even flow, the exultant unity of the Internationale. An aged grizzled woman soldier sobbed like a child. Alexandra Ollontaï could hardly restrain her tears. The great song filled the hail, burst through doors and win- dows and rose to the calm sky. The war is over, the war is over, said a young working woman next to me. Her face shone. And when it was finished and we remained there in a kind of embarrassed silence, a woman at the end of the hail cried, Comrades, let us remember the women who died for liberty. And then we intoned the Funeral March, a slow, melancholy and yet triumphant air. ubu.com

89 synth 129 The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House Lorde 1

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House Audre Lorde

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.

It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women- identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women "who attempt to emancipate themselves ay perhaps too high a price for the results," as this paper states.

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power I rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.

Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being.

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency Audre Lorde 130 synth

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become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.

As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.

Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Why weren't other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist's paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don't love each other?

In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, "We do not know who to ask." But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps synth 131

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Black women's art our of women's exhibitions, Black women's work our of most feminist publications except for the occasional "Special Third World Women's Issue," and Black women's texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, which feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us -- white and Black -- when it is key to our survival as a movement?

Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.

Simone de Beauvoir once said: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting."

Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices

Prospero, you are the master of illusion. Lying is your trademark. And you have lied so much to me (Lied about the world, lied about me) That you have ended by imposing on me An image of myself. Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior, That s the way you have forced me to see myself I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie! But now I know you, you old cancer, And I know myself as well. ~ Caliban, in Aime Cesaire's A Tempest

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Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110- 114. 2007. Print. 132 synth synth 133

The Beautiful Warriors

CONTENTS

Preface ...... 1 Cornelia Sollfrank Translated by Valentine A. Pakis

Feminist Hacking...... 19 Resistance through Spaciality Sophie Toupin

Creating New Worlds ...... 35 With Cyberfeminist Ideas and Practices Text compiled by Spideralex Translated by Cornelia Sollfrank

Codes of Conduct...... 57 Transforming Shared Values into Daily Practice Femke Snelting 134 synth

The Feminist Principles of the Internet . 73 or the personal_collective story of imagining and making #feministinternet Text by hvale vale

Feminist Principles of the Internet – Version 2.0 ...... 83 Author: Association for Progressive Communication APC Publication date: August 2016

Viral Performances of Gender ...... 89 Christina Grammatikopoulou

Techno-Ecofeminism ...... 111 Nonhuman Sensations in Technoplanetary Layers Yvonne Volkart Translated by Rebecca van Dykes

Stirring the Embers ...... 137 Preliminary Critical Notes on Xenofeminisms Isabel de Sena

Bios...... 149 synth 135

PREFACE Cornelia Sollfrank

Translated by Valentine A. Pakis

“We have to become practiced in warfare. That means nothing less than fighting for certain worlds and against others – for particular ways of living and being in the world, and not others. And this is exactly what it means to revolt. To be for certain things and against others is a sort of “war of the worlds,” but it is war as part of a proposition for peace, a proposition that is not without danger. […] We are still able to change things, but the time to act is short. And we will know all too soon whether there can be peace at all.” – Donna Haraway

“There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” – Gilles Deleuze

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“Men and things exchange properties and replace one another; this is what gives technological projects their full savor.” –Bruno Latour

“The new planetary consciousness will have to rethink machinism.” – Félix Guattari

“Pick up again the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction. Perhaps this is the core of revolutionary process.” – Adrienne Rich

What relation do technology and gender have with one an- other? How are they mutually produced in ever-new configurations? Can they even be thought of as two separate categories? And is it not necessary to bring a series of additional agents into play in order to provide a more complete picture? This volume brings together a selection of current technofeminist positions from the fields of art and activism. Since the cyberfeminism of the 1990s, new ways of thinking and acting have proliferated, of- ten as a reaction to new forms and dimensions of exploitation and discrimination. Issues have expanded from a purely informational di- mension and its emancipatory potential into a material dimension. Questions of technology are now bound together with questions of ecology and the economy. Online and offline are no longer separate spheres, but have rather become a single continuum. Art may func- tion symbolically with images, metaphors, and narratives, but it also crosses and partially obscures the limits of activism. For its part, activ- ism is an expression of protest against technocapitalist excess – it is an effort to pursue new tools, instruments, and places to enable common activity, common learning, and common unlearning. Despite the great variety of existing positions, there is nevertheless something that binds them together; they all negotiate gender politics with reference to technology, and they all understand their praxis as an invitation to take up their social and aesthetic interventions, to carry on, and never synth 137

Preface // 3 give up. Those involved are diverse: activists and collectives working under pseudonyms, but also artists and other producers of knowl- edge both within and outside of academic disciplines. Their practices are networked, but often in the stratified, parallel universes of inter- national art scenes, academic theory and research (primarily in the global North), political activism (primarily in the global South), and the techno-underground. To gather such diverse views into a single volume is to traverse many territories and cross many borders – all to pursue the possibility of thinking and acting in common. The term technofeminism serves to designate these diverse practices but also – through their proximity in this book – to bring them into contact and encourage exchange. Coined in Judy Wajcman’s book of the same name,1 the concept denotes speculative and queer positions that – both in theory and in practice – question the coded relation between gender and technology. Wajcman locates technofeminism at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technology studies. In particular, technofeminism is interested in ex- amining how gender relations and the hierarchy of sexual difference influence scientific research and technological innovation and how the latter, in turn, influence the constitution of gender. Translated into technofeminist practices in everyday life, this means no less than struggling for a more just and livable world for everyone in today’s technoscientific culture. Throughout, Donna Haraway looms in the background. More than 30 years ago, we learned from her that there is hardly any chance of living outside of technologies – this was not something that she lamented but, on the contrary, always understood as an opportunity. Accordingly, her feminist critique of the technosciences did not lead to an anti-scientific or technophobic attitude. Rather, it called for a more comprehensive, robust, and true science; a science with clear points of view; and a reconceptualization of science and technology to serve emancipatory ends. Haraway made essential contributions to the deconstruction of scientific knowledge as historically patriar- chal, and she demonstrated that science and technology are close- ly linked to capitalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism. At the heart of her anti-essentialist approach is the critique of the alleged objectivity of scientific knowledge. Instead of understanding science

1 Judy Wajcman, TechnoFeminism (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004). 138 synth

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as disembodied truth, Haraway stresses its social aspects, including its potential to create narratives. According to Judy Wajcman, “For Haraway science is culture in an unprecedented sense. Her central concern is to expose the “god trick,” the dominant view of science as a rational, universal, objective, non-tropic system of knowledge.”2 This entails questioning dichotomous categories such as science/ideology, nature/culture, mind/body, reason/emotion, objectivity/ subjectivity, human/machine, and physical/metaphysical on the basis of their in- herent hierarchical functions. Especially relevant for technofeminist thinking is Haraway’s deconstruction of the “natural” as a cultural praxis. Her concept of “situated knowledge” can be regarded as a fem- inist epistemology that recognizes its own contingent and localized foundations, as well as the contingent and localized foundations of other forms of knowledge. Haraway’s concept of the cyborg offered a concrete conceptual tool for rethinking socialist-feminist politics in the age of technosciences.3 It became an icon for the dissolving bor- ders between the biological and the cultural, between the human and the machine, and thus a symbol for the queering of old dichotomies, for it was only beyond previously conceived boundaries that new forms of social and political praxis would be possible. The artificiality of corporality, the collective nature of the cyborg’s subjectivity, and its inherent politics of interconnectivity were essential inspirations for cyberfeminism.4 The conditions of digital, networked technologies inspired the cyberfeminism of the 1990s and fuelled it to proclaim undreamt-of techno-hybrid identities and thus to evoke a new and intimate rela- tionship between women and technology. Subsequent criticism of the dangerous essentialism of the early approaches by Sadie Plant and the VNS Matrix or of the insufficient political self-identification of the Old Boys Network fail to recognize just how effective the concept

2 Ibid., 83. 3 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, by Haraway (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149-181. 4 See Karin Harrasser, “Herkünfte und Milieus der Cyborg,” in Die Untoten: Life Sciences & Pulp Fiction (Hamburg: Kampnagel, 2011), http://www.untot.in- fo/65-0-Karin-Harrasser-Herkuenfte-und-Milieus-der-Cyborgs.html (accessed August 23, 2018). synth 139

Preface // 5 and the (political) imaginaries associated with it actually were,5 even though (or perhaps because) it kept away from any simplistic under- standing of politics but instead pulled out all the stops for queering. There was never a cyberfeminism or the cyberfeminism but rather a multitude of feminist, techno-utopian visions from a variety of dis- ciplines and with a wide range of content, and these visions found a platform with the Old Boys Network, where they could become visi- ble and develop in proximity to one another.6 After OBN discontin- ued its activities in 2001, there was no longer an overarching forum. The various practices retreated back to their respective contexts, which weakened their ability to reach broader audiences. Despite the vagueness associated with it, the concept of cyberfem- inism has continued to play (or is yet again playing) an important role in the search for new technofeminist approaches – be it as an object of nostalgic romanticizing, as an object of critique directed to- ward its inconsistent political strategies, or as a historical reference to what was then a new era of combining technology and gender. Accordingly, the new wave of interest in cyberfeminism, which be- gan around 2014, is heterogeneous as well. Alongside uncritical and nostalgic attempts to revive cyberfeminism without taking into ac- count the techno-material and techno-political conditions that have since changed,7 events such as the “Post-Cyberfeminist International” or the “1st ” festival have aimed

5 See Wajcman, TechnoFeminism, 63; and Helen Hester’s discussion of “political disidentification” in her essay “After the Future: n Hypotheses of Post-Cyber Feminism,” Res (June 30, 2017), http://beingres.org/2017/06/30/afterthefu- ture-helenhester/ (accessed August 23, 2018). 6 See Cornelia Sollfrank, “Revisiting the Future: Cyberfeminism in the 21st Century,” in Across & Beyond: A Transmediale Reader on Post-Digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions, ed. Ryan Bishop et al. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 228-47. 7 See, for instance, Sonja Peteranderl, “Die Pionierinnen des Cyberfeminismus sagen den Tech-Cowboys den Kampf an,” WIRED Germany (June 2, 2015), https://www.wired.de/collection/life/das-cyberfeminismus-kollektiv-vns-ma- trix-macht-eine-kampfansage; and Claire L. Evans, “We Are the Future Cunt: Cyberfeminism in the 90s,” Motherboard (November 20, 2014), https://mother- board.vice.com/en_us/article/4x37gb/we-are-the-future-cunt-cyberfeminism-in- the-90s (both articles accessed August 23, 2018). 140 synth

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to combine historical approaches with current practices and to for- mulate new theoretical positions on the basis of praxis. Meanwhile, an entirely independent concept of cyberfeminism has been devel- oped in Latin America, for instance, where cyberfeminist activists have explicitly defined themselves against their theoretical precursors and have based their understanding of the term exclusively on their own practices.8 Moreover, xenofeminism, which claims to designate a consistent political approach, can likewise be regarded as an effort to demarcate a clear position within (or perhaps away from) pluralistic cyberfeminism.9 The new interest in cyberfeminism is a good starting point for pro- moting urgently needed contextualizing engagement, for comparing the historical positions of the 1990s with their current iterations, and not least for examining the potential of the concept for approaches that have yet to be developed. What can the concept of cyberfemi- nism still accomplish today? Can it be adjusted to today’s changed conditions, or would it be more sensible to abandon it in favor of new concepts? In any case, it is necessary when using the term to provide some indication of how it is being understood. At any rate, the great techno-political transformations of recent decades require us to remove our cyber-glasses for a moment and look at the patch of earth where we are standing, and even though our gaze is directed toward the future, it is necessary for us to look around and see what is happening in our immediate vicinity, with other bodies, other beings, and the inorganic and organic environ- ment. Discourses such as new materialism and queer deconstruction are working to “queer” powerful dichotomies and, by including new agents, to change our understanding of the mechanisms that shape reality. At issue is the “agency of things,” that is, the influential effects of material that, though existing outside of language and independent of human volition and behavior, encompasses human beings as ma- terial reality – and not the other way around. Queer deconstruction advances the feminist deconstruction of power relations by exposing the mechanisms of “othering” and by expanding into new areas of inquiry: gender, sex, disability, nature, non-human species, machines, the socially and globally vulnerable, and other subalterns. How is the

8 See the contribution by Spideralex in this volume. 9 See the contribution by Isabel de Sena in this volume. synth 141

Preface // 7 other, that “is the ideological and cultural foundation for exploitation and oppression,” constructed?10 “Whoever helps to shatter these dual- istic hierarchies and move toward complex relations and interrelations among actors is already – one could say – acting in a queer/feminist or ecofeminist manner,”11 writes Yvonne Volkart, who proposes the term techno-eco-feminism to convey her new theory about the inter- play of ecological and technofeminist aspects. This new philosophical movement involves thinking about technology not only in conjunc- tion with (socio-)political and cultural, but also with material and ecological categories. Although certain figures of thought associated the term tech- no-eco-feminism with new materialism, and the methods of queer deconstruction may be new, their underlying idea of creating a con- nection between various ecologies – environment/ecology, the so- cial ecology, and the mental ecology – was already present in Félix Guattari’s writings from the 1980s.12 Among other things, Guattari’s “ecosophy” is an appeal to expand our notion of what ecologies con- tain and, by conceptually integrating previously separate spheres, to place something in opposition to the prevailing active and pas- sive destruction of the environment and the “reductive approach of scientism.” Genuine transformation is not possible without under- standing the inherent connections between these different spheres and without acknowledging that the construction of their separation is an instrument of power. Guattari attributed a central role to the then widely imagined potential of nascent interactive media – that is, what we would call the internet today – for he believed that they would liberate individuals from their passivity and enable new forms of collective action. The precise extent to which these new media are themselves embedded in the ideological, power-political, and materi- al conditions that created and configured them would only come to light with their global dissemination. And it is precisely these factors that the technofeminism of the early twenty-first century had set out

10 Quoted from Yvonne Volkart’s article in this volume. 11 Ibid. 12 See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000 [originally published in 1989]); and idem, “Remaking Social Practices,” trans. Sophie Thomas, in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 262-72. 142 synth

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to examine. Just as nothing can exist outside of technology, technolo- gy itself is always permeated by the conditions of its origination. As mentioned above, another important precursor to today’s tech- nofeminist positions is Donna Haraway, who not only paved the way with her early works but has also, with what she abbreviates as “SF” (which can stand for both “science fiction” and “speculative feminism”), spent the last thirty years gaining intriguing and inspiring perspectives from apparently hopeless, man-made catastrophe scenarios. In her most recent books, she focuses on what she calls the “Chthulucene” to de- velop the idea of an age of “sympoiesis” – an era characterized by the togetherness and cooperation of multiple species (humans included) – and thus she has not only contributed to the decentering of the subject, but has also supplemented certain new-materialist approaches to un- derstanding the material world of both human and non-human “na- ture.”13 Out of cyberfeminism, which has been concerned above all with the opportunities of deterritorialization and immaterialization, certain overarching, interlocking, and transversal positions have developed that are no longer content to operate simply with symbols and information in virtual space but are rather interested in integrating diverse spaces and qualities in an effort to improve life itself. Their differences aside, what all of these new transgressive, inter- sectional, and integrative movements have in common is an attitude of care or concern. In many ways, they are caring, worrying, ready to take responsibility, anchored in the here and now, and on the lookout for new types of relations. While searching for answers to global and local problems, engaging in scientific research, and devising techno- logical solutions, this attitude of care contributes to the establishment of a new form of knowledge, a knowledge that rejects objectivization and is interested not only in observations and representations but also in transformations – in forging relations with things, in being affect- ed, and thus in changing itself and the world in a process of co-trans- formation.14 Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fischer have defined caring

13 See Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2015); and eadem, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 14 See Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “Ein Gefüge vernachlässigter Dinge’,” in: Ökologien der Sorge, ed. Tobias Bärtsch et al. (Vienna: transversal texts, 2017, 137-88. synth 143

Preface // 9 as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair “our” world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”15 In light of technofem- inist praxis, caring requires us to understand technological webs not only as objects but also as nodes of social and political interest. It also means that we have to intervene in the production of knowledge, science, and technology. Here, care abandons its traditional territory of reproduction and begins to enter into a relationship with the complexities of technology and technoscience – and particularly their destructive aspects. The aim is to responsibly include everyone and everything involved in the becoming of things, to expand anthropocentric politics, and thus to do justice to the material meaning of caring. For this, it is necessary to invent new connections between humans and machines, namely connections based on relationships of care and concern. In his essay “Remaking Social Practices,” Guattari acknowledges that it can be difficult “to bring individuals out of themselves, to dis- engage themselves from their immediate preoccupations, in order to reflect on the present and the future of the world,”16 and he remarks that the collective impulses to do so are lacking. The positions pre- sented in this book are meant to provide these impulses. Each is com- plex in itself and linked to its own network of references, discourses, persons, and other agents. They are indicative of a diversity of (often marginalized) experiences that are reflected not least in their hetero- geneous formats and writing styles. Here, by way of summary, I can only relate a few of their highlights.

Technofeminist Positions Sophie Toupin describes feminist hacking as a dual expansion, though one might also call it a “double hack.” On the one hand, it adds a material dimension to traditional technofeminism, and on the other hand it expands the concept of “hacking,” which typically refers to

15 This definition, which Tronto and Fischer formulated together, is quoted here from Tronto’s book Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993), 103. 16 Guattari, “Remaking Social Practices,” 263. 144 synth

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technical categories such as software and hardware, to include “gen- der” as an area of application. This movement is made possible by understanding gender as technology. Gender is not thought of as something (biologically) given, but rather as something that is always being renewed by the heterogeneous cultural processes that make it mutable. Proceeding from formational cultural techniques makes it possible to steer conditions toward the production of the conditions in question, that is, toward the processes that lead to their production. The basis for this is an understanding of sex as technology, an un- derstanding that Teresa de Lauretis (inspired by Foucault) transferred to a “technology of gender” in the mid-1980s and thus contributed in an essential manner to freeing gender from the binary conception of sexual difference, replacing difference with heterogeneity, and re- placing naturally given bodies with complex political strategies for naturalization.17 “An understanding of gender and the human body as technology,” according to Toupin, “makes the praxis of hacking much more accessible because, for feminists, this is a more familiar point of entry.” What is essential is that feminist hacking entails a combination of technical competence, feminist principles, and socio-political en- gagement. Here, unlike the case in traditional hacker environments, technical competence is not something pursued for its own sake – or for the sake of recognition within the meritocratic hierarchies of hacker culture – but is rather a necessary precondition for promoting emancipatory aspects when developing or dealing with technology. Prominent feminist principles of the new hacker culture include col- lectivity in the form of common action, informal and formal transfers of knowledge on the basis of feminist pedagogy, and the production of visibility – and not in the sense of individual or collective positions, but rather in the sense of exposing hidden mechanisms of the techno- logical realm, of the “off-spaces” that are never in the picture and yet are constitutive for what is seen. Such things include the physical, eco- nomic, and material structures in which technologies are embedded. The foundation of this emancipatory and oppositional culture is a redefinition of the relation between online and offline spaces, which is in turn based on the production of its own new spaces and structures.

17 See Andrea Seier, Remediatisierung: Die performative Konstruktion von Gender und Medien (Berlin: LIT, 2007), 26-32. synth 145

Preface // 11 Spideralex has put together a collective document for this publica- tion. Through her activity for the Gender and Technology Institute, which trains physical and psycho-social security, for a variety of activ- ists, artivists, lawyers, journalists, and privacy advocates, she has had the opportunity to collaborate with a number of diverse groups and initiatives. For her text, she has chosen 24 positions that are repre- sentative of Latin-American cyberfeminism. The ideas of the groups/ persons/initiatives come to expression in the form of quotations, to which Spideralex has added comments of her own. The living con- ditions to which the activists refer in their remarks and their descrip- tions of quotidian violence are shocking testaments to multiple forms of oppression: They live in postcolonial countries and have limited access to education and careers; they live in political systems lack- ing freedom of speech and thus under the influence of sinister alli- ances between the drug mafia, the church, government corruption, and machismo – alliances that are especially predisposed to repress women and gender activists. Although attacks have been increasing in the global North as well – both in their frequency and intensi- ty18 – the manifold possibilities of digital communication seem to have strengthened Latin America’s macho culture in a particular way. Thus it is no surprise that the most important point of Spideralex’s collection is concerned with (cyber-)feminist self-defense. Above all, this means protection from violence, both online and offline. To this end, the strategies of these cyberfeminists include emotional, physical (martial arts), and technical support;19 the provision of safer spaces for raising awareness and for common learning; and collective self-care. The terms that recur frequently throughout the texts are “solidarity,” “sorority” (sisterly love), “commonality,” and “collectivity,” concepts that sound almost pathetic from a “comfortable distance,” that is, in hyper-individualized, alienated, neoliberal, and post-capitalist indus- trial societies where such words are flung around as empty formu- las and at best seem to appear in marketing campaigns for consumer products. Here, however, in light of the real threat to physical and mental integrity, they are once again filled with meaning. Thus this is not simply a matter of permanent struggle but of war – a war that

18 See Christina Grammatikopoulou’s contribution in this volume. 19 See https://gendersec.tacticaltech.org/wiki/index.php/Complete_manual (ac- cessed August 24, 2018). 146 synth

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Latin-American cyberfeminists are willing to engage in on all levels. Their understanding of cyberfeminism does not, as they repeatedly stress, derive from their artistic and academic predecessors from the global North, but is rather based on their praxis alone, a praxis that has arisen first and foremost from their threatening circumstances. That said, many of their practices and the concepts associated with them exhibit a striking similarity to current academic discourses about the expanded notions of ecology and care, as in the combination of ecofeminism and technofeminism or in the economies of open access, free software, and open content. Technology is no longer thought of as a separate sphere but rather as being embedded in material and ideological means of production. More than just a reaction to circum- stances, their fight will not come to an end until, with furious deter- mination, they actualize a vision of the future full of happiness and devoid of fear. The path in that direction is not straight, however, but will involve not only reflecting on but also transforming the material conditions in which they and their actions are embedded. A specific instrument for raising awareness of a given community’s culture of communication – of its marginalizing or discriminatory nature, for instance – is the so-called “code of conduct.” In her contri- bution to this book, Femke Snelting reflects on her own experiences in creating such a regulatory framework in the community of Libre Graphics Meetings, and she examines the origins, orientation, and specific features of this code in the case of certain free-software proj- ects. Among other important things, such documents are intended to promote inclusion and diversity, prevent assault and harassment as much as possible, implement conflict-resolution strategies to prevent escalation, and, in specific cases of misconduct, introduce punitive measures. When codes of conduct are treated as living documents and not simply as a way to transfer responsibility away from individ- uals, they can in fact counteract inappropriate and harassing behavior within the framework of a binding community, as is evident from a number of feminist hacker initiatives. The author identifies their fem- inist potential in the fact that working to produce such a document creates a platform for self-reflection where everyone involved learns to question his or her own behavior, to discuss and formulate common values, and to translate these values into everyday practices. This does not mean that a community will automatically become safer or more diverse – despite the existence of such codes of conduct in the world synth 147

Preface // 13 of free software, 97% of the developers are still white and male – but environments that have worked out a code of conduct have proved to be more acutely aware of (and actively opposed to) discriminatory and repressive behavior. A code of conduct can thus be seen as a sort of invitation for diversity. The area of free software is closely attuned to the power and influence of language; codes and programs, after all, are nothing but behavioral instructions, and the step of reflecting and drafting a code for one’s own behavior can of course be taken in many other areas of life as well. Especially in the case of temporary events and short-term projects, there is much need for self-reflection and for the establishment of consistent codes of conduct in order to foster safe and inviting conditions. The potential of these types of guidelines is thus far from exhausted. In the wake of the first German publication of the “Feminist Principles of the Internet,” the activist hvale vale tells her story of working on the project and provides insight into how the document was created. The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) undertook the initiative in 2014, when it invited more than fifty activ- ists (mainly from the global South) to Malaysia. After several meetings and a multi-year discussion process involving more than one hundred women and representatives of the queer community, seventeen prin- ciples were formulated by combining elements from the feminist hu- man-rights movement and the internet-justice movement. The foun- dations of these efforts were intersectionality and the assumptions that technology and the internet are not neutral and that the internet is not a tool but rather a space in which resistance is just as necessary as it is elsewhere. The co-created document is understood to be a work in progress – as a platform and a community – and anyone interested is invited to participate in the translation and distribution of the prin- ciples (or simply to “live by them”). In addition to demanding access and economic solidarity, they also focus on promoting informational and sexual self-determination: “They [the principles] are inscribed in the digital age. They come in and out of the internet and in and out of our bodies. They stand for feelings and pleasure, but also for justice and rights.” Like every collective gesture that claims to be universal- ly valid and yet is based on locality, embodiment, and diversity, the “Feminist Principles of the Internet” and their internal contradictions offer a productive basis for further work and further thinking. 148 synth

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In her text, Christina Grammatikopoulou investigates a series of contemporary art and protest phenomena, which she refers to as vi- ral performances of gender, and she classifies these performances ac- cording to the strategies that each has employed. The projects chosen for her analysis take place either exclusively online, where they test out social media as new milieus for performative interventions, or they operate in a combination of online and offline space in order to experiment with the mutually conditioned dynamics of viral dis- semination. The online performances address such themes as body positivity, sexual assault, and gender stereotyping by blurring the lines between true and false, between consent and manipulation. From her many examples, Grammatikopoulou extracts two fundamental con- cepts, which she refers to as “noise” and “virality.” Noise she defines as “a manipulative communication strategy […] which, through the conscious disruption or muddling of communication platforms, aims to obfuscate or falsify information or a message for its receiver or to spread false information.” The goal of the second strategy, virality, is to have content spread horizontally and as widely as possible by users themselves. For this to succeed, the content in question needs to have a certain “quality” (it may, for instance, be humorous, provocative, or simply catchy), but it also requires a feedback loop between bodies on the street and online images, which in turn attract more people onto the street. Grammatikopoulou positions all the various phenomena of contemporary feminism that she has investigated along a spatial continuum spanning from online to offline, a continuum which she refers to as “expanded space.” Her insightful classification of today’s feminisms is not, however, concerned with providing precise defini- tions of content, and thus the question of where and how transfor- mations have taken place is often left unanswered. Her goal is rather to bring to light irresolvable contradictions – ambiguities between activism and noise, between empowerment and self-objectification, between consumer culture and political concerns – in order, in the end, to claim that contemporary feminism has come to be defined by precisely that: the blurring of formerly clear boundaries and relations. Thus it is no surprise that many of the concepts and strategies that she has identified are also being employed in other political circles by anti-feminists of all sorts, a fact that raises, yet again, the old feminist question concerning the interplay between structure and content … synth 149

Preface // 15 In her contribution, Yvonne Volkart opens up a new dimension in the technofeminist debate. As indicated by the title of her article – “Techno-Eco-Feminism” – she attempts to integrate two antagonistic feminist approaches, ecofeminism and technofeminism, in order to create a transversal space for thinking and acting that is based on rela- tionality and is suited to the complex situation of the Anthropocene. Proceeding from the threatening scenario of humankind’s potential extinction, Volkart describes how the concerns of early ecofeminism have been reformulated by current techno-ecological trends and how these new concerns have inpired some of the most innovative ap- proaches to leading a participatory life in today’s “naturecultures.”20 Although the ecofeminism of the 1970s anticipated the central postu- lates of the debate about today’s ecological crises, its parallel treatment of the oppression of women in the patriarchy and the exploitation of nature (and the environmental destruction associated with it) often led to essentialist statements about the social relations between na- ture and gender. Especially as it was practiced in the United States, ecofeminism presupposed a positive relationship between women and nature (often with reference to women’s reproductive abilities), and thus blamed men and their use of technology for the suppression and exploitation of nature. The movement thus catered to controversy, beckoned to be rejected, and fostered a generally critical and dismissive attitude toward technology. Distancing themselves from this position, European ecofeminists emphasized early on a social-constructivist un- derstanding of gender and refrained from representing women as car- ing and men as destructive and exploitative. More recent queer ecol- ogies have taken this anti-essentialism further by deconstructing the “naturalness” of biological reproduction processes and the production of life. At the heart of this critique is not only the naturalization of

20 Coined by Donna Haraway, the term “natureculture” denotes the co-origination of nature and culture. According to Christine Bauhardt, it represents an inter- esting attempt “to dissolve the binary opposition of both constructs and give linguistic expression to their essential inner connection.” See Christine Bauhardt, “Feministische Ökonomie, Ökofeminismus und Queer Ecologies – Feministisch- materialistische Perspektiven auf gesellschaftliche Naturverhältnisse,” Gender Politik Online (April 2012), https://www.fuberlin.de/sites/gpo/pol_theorie/ Zeitgenoessische_ansaetze/Bauhardtfemoekonomie/Bauhardt.pdf (accessed August 26, 2018). 150 synth

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gender and heterosexuality, but also a concern about developing spe- cifically situated, “polychromatic” approaches to multispecies. Every reference to natural “givens” is cast into question. For such thinkers, “nature” is always preformed by the construction of a heteronorma- tive gender binary, and it functions as a generalizing, compensatory, and romanticizing antithesis to the use of technology in capitalism. As Bauhardt has summarized: “The queer perspective dissolves the unfortunate amalgamation of sexuality, nature, and gender in order to negotiate the social conditions of reproduction on a new basis.”21 Eco-techno-feminism rounds out this discourse by including technol- ogy – and techniques. As forms of biopower, capitalist technologies themselves produce life. For this reason, they can no longer be regard- ed, as they were in the 1970s, as instruments of liberation or oppres- sion distinct from bodies, material, and the environment. Unsullied nature does not exist, and there is nothing that can be called “the na- ture” or “the technology.” Rather, there are only specific movements, sedimentations, and interrelations in the manifold constellations of technocultures, capital, and material entities. Thus it is essential to expand our perspective to include the interactions of diverse sets of agents. Materiality, which has hitherto been neglected, has come back and been identified as having its own agency and influence.22 This act of further decentering the subject involves understanding material as living, artefactual, and relational. Volkart develops her theory of queer-feminist, techno-ecological relationality on the basis of contemporary works of art. In doing so, she illustrates that the ways of thinking and acting associated with these works derive from a feminist tradition, but that now, to the extent that they pose “questions about coexistence, about plant and animal rights, empathy and care, healing and repairing,” they have be- gun “to enter into dominant theoretical and artistic discourses.” Not least, this has also begun to affect everyday practices and activism. Thinking about social and ecological crises together – a long neglected process – is reflected in the desire for vitality, presence, affect, and re- lationality from which transformational power can emerge in the face of catastrophic scenarios.

21 Ibid. 22 See Karen Barad’s concept of “agential realism.” synth 151

Preface // 17 In the final chapter, Isabel de Sena initiates a long-overdue critique of xenofeminism by taking a closer look at some of its fundamental concepts. The concept of xenofeminism, which is directly associated with the Laboria Cuboniks collective and its manifesto, is a difficult one to penetrate because of the affective language and the high level of abstraction with which the group develops its theses. Active since 2014, and alternating between an artistic prank and a genuine polit- ical movement, the group has performed at numerous events in the art scene without yet invoking any serious objections to the content of its work, which, as de Sena demonstrates, in part is not just ex- tremely provocative, but also contrary to some of the basic principles of feminism. Here the author does what no one has done before: She takes the concepts and theses of the manifesto seriously and gets to the bottom of some of them. Although her piece is meant and formulated as just a preliminary commentary – and not as a fundamental critique – it quickly becomes clear that the many inconsistencies and contra- dictions festering beneath the shiny, futuristic surfaces of their argu- ments frustrate the xenofeminist demand for logic and reason. And not only that: Despite its many original and discussion-worthy ideas, it seems as though it would be difficult, if not impossible, to translate xenofeminism into a praxis of any sort. The critique formulated here hopes to instigate a dialog for the sake of transposing xenofeminism and thus making it connectable to other (techno-)feminisms of the 21st century. 152 synth

FEMINIST HACKING. Resistance through Spaciality

Sophie Toupin

Ayesha1 sees herself as a feminist hacker. Her Twitter handle is @FemHacking. Her influence on the net has been growing steadily for some time now. Unfortunately, a group of people decided that Ayesha was getting too much attention online, and made it their mission to silence and discredit her. An army of trolls attacked her for weeks, sending hurtful comments and messages to belittle her on Twitter. She has even received email threats against her physical in- tegrity. In response to this situation, Ayesha first contacted Twitter to report the online violence she was experiencing, and then blocked some of the people who were harassing her. She also used the “Block Together” function to share blocked troll lists with other users on

1 Her name and pseudonym on Twitter have been changed to avoid revealing the identity of the person.

19 synth 153

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Twitter, as well as the “Block Bot” function to block known stalkers on Twitter. Moreover, her research on how she can react to the nega- tive effects of trolls has led her to use Foxxydoxing, a script that helped her analyse the connections between her attackers on Twitter. Ayesha is not a neophyte of the web, nor of technology. She studied at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani and works as a freelance programmer. She is familiar with the different tools she can use to respond to an attack, as well as to protect her personal data. She is also one of the co-founders of a feminist hackspace, a space where queer and trans women meet to discuss feminist hacking, as well as to organize training workshops such as feminist encryption (femcrypts), cell phone jail breaking, mutual aid computer support, and other the- matic workshops of all kinds. Her extensive knowledge and concrete online actions have enabled her to make her self-defence against the trolls more effective. And she also thought about responding directly to trolls, but decided it might be too difficult to engage in this struggle on her own. During a meeting in the feminist hackspace she co-founded, Ayesha shared her experience of online harassment with the aim of finding other ways to solve the problem with the help of others. One of her colleagues advised her to subscribe to the Gender and Tech Institute (GTI) mailing list, which recently had announced the femi- nist project ZeroTrollerance, which aims to “re-educate” trolls. In ad- dition, the members of this list had initiated a solidarity action online by creating feminist bots, i.e. computer scripts that allow automated messages to be sent and trolls to be attacked collectively. The idea behind this action was also to generate public debate, thus drawing attention to this type of harassment. The above example is not an isolated case. Many active feminists who raise their voice on the Internet have become victims of online harassment. In response to this violence, feminists from different back- grounds are organizing collectively to address these situations. Thanks to their actions, these experienced technofeminists are creating new feminist resistance practices in the field of technology. Their collective thinking, years of activism and technical skills also lead to the creation of autonomous feminist infrastructures such as servers, discussion lists and bots. When they speak of “infrastructures,” they refer to software and hardware, but also spaces such as hackspaces as well as social and technical solidarity. By using the term “autonomous,” they express 154 synth

Feminist Hacking. // 21 their desire to rethink forms of resistance against a system of produc- tion and values that they categorize as capitalist, racist and patriarchal (Editor’s note, 2015). Although some self-identify as technofeminists, feminist hacktiv- ists, transhack feminists, makers or feminist geeks, they are increas- ingly referred to the generic term “feminist hackers,” i.e. hackers who engage in feminist hacking practices. The adjective “feminist” makes the difference to the conventional “hacker” by indicating a specific form of politicized practice. My interpretation of feminist hacking practice, as I present it be- low, is based on my own experience as a participant and/or co-orga- nizer of the spaces, as well as an activist teacher and researcher in some of the groups mentioned here. Thereafter, I turn my attention to fem- inist hackspaces that are an integral part of the new feminist hacking culture. Finally, this article aims to reveal some of the specificities of feminist hacking by proposing key principles of their resistance prac- tices and spatial effects, including the practice of working together, the politics of visibility, the co-production of knowledge, solidarity and awareness of the materiality of technology. I would like to point out that many of the ideas in this article are not the result of my unique observations, but rather of a co-produc- tion of knowledge through many virtual and physical encounters in which I have participated, and which have been spread over many years. These ideas are the product of a collective reflection on what feminist hacking means and what feminist hackspaces are. Whether the meeting spaces are physical or virtual does not play an essential role; what matters, in my opinion, is that the method of “doing it together” is emphasized; all those who, through their years of collabo- ration, dialogue, and countless contributions, have contributed to the common production of knowledge, discourse, and practice, should be recognized. Acknowledging co-production as part of the history is part of a feminist approach that credits women, queers and trans- gendered people for contributing their specific knowledge (Mohanty, 2003; Sandoval, 2000). However, I remain the sole author of this article and my interpretation as well as the emphasis on certain as- pects of this practice of resistance, are shaped by my own attitude and subjectivity. In doing so, I anchor this article in a more classical liter- ature review, as well as on documents created by feminist hackers. By making visible the co-construction of knowledge, I wish to highlight synth 155

22 // The Beautiful Warriors the symbiosis between practice and theory, in addition to recognizing that the reflections and discussions that are at the very root of feminist hacking practices are above all collective and always in motion.

Feminist Hackspaces Gabriella Coleman describes the hacker and hacking much more broadly. She defines it as “a technologist with a penchant for com- puting” and hacking as “a clever technical solution arrived at through non-obvious means” (Coleman, 2014: 1). Feminist hackers draw in- spiration from this broad definition as a starting point, but extend the concept by moving it away from technology and computer science (Nguyen, Toupin and Barzell 2016; Toupin, 2013, 2014;). Their idea is, first of all, to hack the concept of hacking itself and thus attract the attention of all feminists who have little to do with hacking in the technical sense. By understanding gender or the human body as tech- nologies as well, as entities that can be hacked, i.e. transformed, they are able to reach out to a group that would otherwise not be affected by the traditional notion of hacking. Considering gender or the human body as a technology (Sofia, 2000) makes hacking much more accessible by creating familiar en- try points for feminists. Since gender can be culturally shaped and reshaped by feminist hackers, digital technology can also be recoded in a feminist way. According to this conception, the values embedded in digital technologies as well as in gender can be reprogrammed. The anchoring of this practice in everyday life and the use of a familiar gender concept help to bring this practice within the reach of fem- inists and arouse their interest. Thus, the idea of feminist hacking has inspired many people to include body hacking or gender hack- ing. Forlano (2016), for example, identifies with the practice of body hacking and even compares herself to a cyborg to articulate how she takes care of her diabetic body. She is developing a feminist analysis of hacking through an auto-ethnographic account of her early years as a type 1 diabetic that forces her to use an insulin pump and a glucose monitor. She describes herself as a cyborg to emphasize her new hy- bridity, that is, her skin, bones and blood must constantly harmonize with sensors, tubes and other external devices to keep her alive. In recent years, the craze for body hacking, a practice that can sometimes be quite individual, has quietly given way to collective 156 synth

Feminist Hacking. // 23 responses to online violence, since the latter is omnipresent and re- quires an urgent response. Indeed, this type of intervention is emerg- ing as one of the leading practices of feminist hacking through the creation of feminist collective spaces, both virtual and physical. It is important to note that there are several feminist hacking currents influenced by different social, economic, political, geographical and historical contexts. This practice is also constantly in motion, consti- tuting and renewing itself temporally.2 The emergence of a new feminist hacking culture becomes visible through various resistance practices and is organized, among other things, through meetings at various fixed, changing, or spontaneously determined locations. In the United States, most feminist hackspac- es adopt an intersectional feminist perspective that emphasizes the interaction between gender and other identity variables such as race and social class when addressing inequality, oppression and violence (Toupin, 2013, 2014; Crenshaw, 1991; Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1983). Some are only open to women, queers and trans people, while oth- ers are open to all those who identify themselves as feminists. The question of who is allowed to self-identify as feminist, and therefore can become involved in feminist hackspaces, is therefore not uniform. Rather, it is the group constituting each feminist hackspace that de- fines its own policy of access and participation. At the root of femi- nist hackspaces is the desire to co-create so-called “safe” spaces where well-being (care) is central (Goldenberg, 2014; Toupin, 2014). This practice of well-being (Goldenberg, 2014) differs from more tradi- tional hackspaces that adopt an open space policy. The work of re- searcher Alison Adam (2003), on which Goldenberg (2014) is based, highlights the ethics of caring for women hackers that complicates hacker ethics as described by Steven Levy (2010).3 For Adam and

2 Because of this fluidity, it is difficult to define exactly what feminist hacking is. FemHack, a Montréal-based collective of feminist hackers, seeks to lay the foun- dation for feminist hacking by emphasizing the desire for autonomy, freedom, self-organization, and mutual help that feminist hackers share in their relation- ship to Internet technologies and knowledge. 3 Hacker ethics includes the importance of sharing, decentralization, openness and access to computers. In addition, this ethic argues that hackers should be judged for their hacking skills, not on criteria such as gender, age, race, or socio-econom- ic position. synth 157

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Goldenberg, it is essential to take into consideration gender, ethnic- ity and, more generally, the social privileges associated with different identities, as these have an influence on the future hacker. In addi- tion, feminist hackers are also called upon to take care of each other emotionally and physically to deal with harassment. As a complement to their understanding of the ethics of care and well-being, feminist hackers point out that the debate on questions of privilege and meri- tocracy within the so-called traditional hackspaces is too weak. Why are there very few people of colour or women in these so-called “open” spaces? Do these spaces reinforce a dominant informal culture? These questions are essential for feminist hackers, since they are intrinsically linked to their ethics on the one hand, and to a desire for aware- ness within the hacker culture on the other hand (Toupin, 2013). To demonstrate their point, feminist hackers cite Jo Freeman’s (1972) ar- ticle entitled “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” which warns against the idealization of open spaces. In her work, Freeman argues that the absence of formal structures in a group or space ultimately favours those who already have privileges (gender, class, sexual orientation, race, etc.) and facilitates the informal power of certain individuals or cliques. Rather than opting for an open space policy, feminist hack- spaces therefore establish very concrete guidelines for creating safe and emancipatory spaces of well-being, such as delimiting who can take part in feminist hackspaces’ activities. The fact that more and more temporary and/or mobile feminist spaces are emerging is due to a certain economic situation4 and can at best be understood as a complementary strategy for the creation of permanent spaces. These temporary feminist spaces have emerged, for example, within the very heart of the world’s largest hacker con- ferences such as the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) or the Chaos Communication Camp (CCC). They have also emerged from feminist tech meetings such as /ETC (Eclectic Tech Carnival) and the TransHackFeminist (THF!) convergences. All these gatherings in an ad hoc common place have made it possible to co-construct the practice of feminist hacking in a transnational way. This practice thus goes beyond the local or national level and allows identification with

4 Many feminist hacking collectives simply do not have the financial means to pay a monthly rent, which is why they opt for the mobile variant. Meetings can there- fore take place in a café, in an activist room or at one of their members’ premises. 158 synth

Feminist Hacking. // 25 transnational resistance practices and solidarity. At these meetings, the affirmation of a collective self is articulated and new feminist hacking approaches can emerge. Thus a sense of belonging to this new culture is developed, which is in the process of being created and, for the time being, is a marginal phenomenon. Feminist hacking thus provides a framework for analysis, a common vocabulary, and the encounters of feminist hackers strengthen their ties and their desire for a mutual project. These gatherings also emphasize the importance of a femi- nist hacking approach and make it possible, for example, to exchange possible strategies in the fight against (online) sexism and violence, to jointly produce knowledge and to experiment with different forms of feminist pedagogy. Projects such as feminist servers, which will be dis- cussed below, also emerged from these common meetings and desires for autonomous feminist infrastructure.

Transformative practices In this section, I look at the specificities of feminist hacking practice, highlighting some of its spatial effects. More specifically, I am interest- ed in the following aspects: doing it together, the politics of visibility, the co-production of knowledge and solidarity, and the materiality of technology.

The practice of “Doing it Together” The practice of “Doing it Together” is at the root of the feminist hack- ing approach, which has developed mainly as a learning pedagogy to enable novices, in particular, to gain confidence in their techni- cal skills, while reinforcing the idea of solidarity and co-production of knowledge. This learning pedagogy is not in opposition to Do It Yourself (DIY), but rather complements it. Doing things together is also a practice of resistance, because, in- stead of the heroic deeds of an expert, collectivity is emphasized. Of course, the predominant stories of hacker culture are fascinating, but they often revolve only around legendary figures and their computer exploits (Lapsley, 2013; Levy, 2010). As a result, other forms of dealing with technology do not receive enough recognition (Dunbar-Hester, 2016). In addition, the male representation of computer hacking in the press and popular culture creates a form of exclusion. By creat- ing new imaginary worlds that unfold across all physical and virtual synth 159

26 // The Beautiful Warriors spaces, with an emphasis on community, feminist hackers attempt to deconstruct and change old role models.

The policy of visibility The practices of feminist hackers are part of a strategy to create vis- ibility that increasingly pushes itself into public perception through the affirmation of a collective self–both in physical places and on the net. The politics of visibility also serve at “bringing to light the invis- ible infra/structures of power that render technological achievement possible” (Nguyen, Toupin and Bardzell, 2016:1). By promoting a different way of using technology, that is feminist and in resistance to patriarchy and capitalist exploitation, feminist hackers propose a real alternative to the status quo and thus practice a unique approach. For feminist hackers, technology is first and foremost political and by no means neutral (Winner, 1980). They also contradict the position that suggests that violence on the net is due to a few “bad apples” rather than acknowledging that it is part of systemic patriarchal practice. Moreover, feminist hackers no longer consider the Internet as a safe space, and argue that the struggle must take place not only at the discursive level, but also at the material level. Therefore, they try to shed light on what really are digital infrastructures: from the exploita- tion of minerals in conflict zones to unacceptable working conditions in production facilities to waste management in the technology sec- tor (for example, disposal or incineration of equipment in China or Ghana). Recognising the materiality of technology is integral to un- derstanding the life cycle of technologies. Emphasizing this material- ity underscores the impact of technology on the environment, social and neo-colonial relations between the countries of the southern and northern hemispheres. This feminist resistance was born in direct reaction to the fact that the Internet has become a centralized space for consumption, surveil- lance and control of dissenting voices by governments, private com- panies and anti-feminists. Although they recognize the importance of a “counter-public” (Fraser, 1990), especially at the discursive level, they do, however, attach increasing importance to the issue of materi- ality (Parks and Starosielski, 2015). Counter-publics such as feminist hackspaces or feminist discussion lists are spaces for the production of oppositional ways of understanding identities and interests that are 160 synth

Feminist Hacking. // 27 marginalized, not to say excluded, in public space. Since these count- er-publics gain a certain visibility on the Internet, those who contrib- ute to their dissemination are often exposed to anti-feminist attacks. The visibility policy of feminist hackers is as much about discourse as it is about the materiality of technologies. Speaking of the materi- ality of the Panama Canal, Ashley Carse (2012) uses the concept of (in)visibility to demonstrate that technology is political. He argues that “visibility is situated, reflecting an actor’s geographical location, cultural assumptions, and nature of his or her labor…” (2012: 543) Based on Carse, Brian Larkin (2013) specifies: “all visibility is situated and what is background for one person is a daily object of concern for another. The point is not to assert one or another status as an inherent condition of infrastructures but to examine how (in)visibility is mobilized and why.” (2013: 336) Feminist servers are a good example of how feminist hackers create visibility while at the same time pointing to their roots in discourse as well as in the materiality of technology. The following paragraph defines their main principles. A feminist server:

• Is a situated technology. She5 [the feminist server] has a sense of context and sees herself as part of an ecology of practice; • Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her to exist. • Is built on the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around her. • Opens herself to expose processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns. • Does not strive for continuity. All too often, the talk of trans- parency is a sign that something is being obscured (division of labor issue). • Avoids efficiency, user-friendliness, scalability and immediacy, as these could be traps.

5 The gender-neutral article for a computer server in English language has been subjected to a sex change in languages that distinguish between male, female and neutral articles; the use of the female pronoun here causes a similar irritation, which should additionally stimulate one to think about gender and technology. synth 161

28 // The Beautiful Warriors

• Knows that networking is actually an awkward, promiscuous and parasitic practice. • Is autonomous in the sense that she decides for her own dependencies. • Questions the conditions of service. • Treats technology as part of a social reality. • Wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible. • Does not confuse security with safety. • Takes the risk of exposing her insecurity while trying hard not to apologise when she sometimes is not available. (Snelting, 2014)6

These principles reveal a rooting in the concept of situated knowl- edges (Haraway, 1988) which emphasizes that what “count[s] as ra- tional accounts of the world are struggles over how to see” (Haraway, 1988: 375). Haraway suggests a feminist objectivity through this method. By challenging the idea of what objectivity means, it allows us to “see” differently and forces us to be responsible for the visions we embody in our actions and writings. Two feminist server projects were (re)started during the TransHackFeminist (THF!) 2014 convergence: the “Systerserver” project, initially launched by Genderchangers and Eclectic Tech Carnival (/etc.), and the “Anarchaserver” project, launched by the people involved in the THF! organization.7 The first server is to offer online website hosting services, while the second focuses on data host- ing. The Anarchaserver uses a media wiki for THF! documentation, and an application to host several WordPress sites. The mailing lists and IRC discussion channels of both servers are moderated to coor- dinate the different tasks that need to be done both conceptually and technically. For example, give root access to some administrators, dis- cuss issues surrounding the location of the physical server (in which data centre will it be located?), agree on a policy for access to virtual and physical servers, ensure that the initiative is well understood in the context of hacker groups, and teach how to manage a server.

6 Freely adapted by the author and by the editor. 7 Further feminist servers exist in Latin and South America. 162 synth

Feminist Hacking. // 29 The co-production of knowledge and solidarity The initiatives of feminist hackers promote collective learning, which aims to create new common resistance practices, but also transnation- al solidarity. Several examples illustrate the co-production of knowl- edge and solidarity that emerges from feminist hacking practices. The Gender and Technology Institute (GTI) was established in late 2014 with the aim of ensuring more online security for queer and trans women and at the same time establishing an international community of feminist hackers.8 It quickly developed into an interna- tional support network and became an important resource for social solidarity by contributing to a better understanding of and enabling collective responses to the various forms of violence. It is on a private discussion list that collective solutions on a wide range of topics are discussed, although online violence predominates in the discussions. A prime example is the discussion in response to the murder of Pakistani techno queer activist Sabeen Mahmud in April 2015, which led to the creation of a worldwide Feminist Hackathon Day (F3mHack). More than thirty activities were organized as part of this World Day, high- lighting the great solidarity between feminist hackers from all over the world and the transnational nature of these initiatives.9 At the TransHackFeminist (THF!) meeting there was ample op- portunity for the joint production of knowledge and solidarity. The convergence gave the opportunity for lengthy discussions on what transhackfeminism is. “The term ‘trans’ needs to be understood in a plurality of ways. Trans as a noun, a verb, and a prefix. Being in transition, in transformation, being transgendered, being transversal, transdisciplinary etc. … The term ‘hack’ refers to the more traditional act of doing, of taking things apart, of understanding things in a deep- er way. But it is also seen as an action and as a performance in order to hack patriarchy, capitalism and other systems of oppression, and by making those systems explicit.” (Editor’s note, 2015) The original theoretical and later practical anchoring of THF! comes mainly from a Spanish feminist movement that launched a transfem- inist uprising (The WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network, 2010) in 2010. Inspired by the Zapatista movement, this insurrection took

8 Another GTI was organised in June 2016 in Ecuador. 9 The 2015 version of the website is available here: http://web.archive.org/ web/20150524023518/https://f3mhack.org/index.php/en/ synth 163

30 // The Beautiful Warriors the form of a manifesto addressing issues of intersectionality, linking different forms of oppression while calling for transnational solidarity. At first, this uprising was a discursive intervention, but it eventually led to the emergence of the Pechblendas, a transfeminist hacklab,10 from which the THF! convergence later emerged. It is within this hacklab that the THF! convergence was born. The creation of many feminist hackspaces in the United States as well as the online violence against several Spanish feminists have reinforced the desire to come together, to join forces, and to take stock of the movement and con- tributions of feminist hackers through the THF! It must be said that within the THF itself, a multiplicity of voic- es and visions of feminist hacking has emerged, demonstrating that this type of feminist convergence and hackspace promote plurality in general. However, even the THF! has not been without its share of ideological clashes and other inconsistencies due to the encounter of different “cultures” and ways of doing things among feminists, queers and trans people. To ease these tensions, the principles of solidarity and affinity between feminist hackers were promoted in addition to participation in concrete and partly independent collective projects. The example of the two feminist servers illustrates this dynamic. The two examples of the GTI and the THF! are rooted in what Mohanty (2003) describes as a pedagogy of feminist solidarity that emphasizes the complexities, singularities and interconnection be- tween women’s communities, so that power, privilege, willingness to act and to dissent are made visible (2003: 243-244). This type of fem- inist solidarity acknowledges the different historical, socio-econom- ic, cultural and geographical realities so that it becomes possible to communicate in a more complex way about the resistance practices of feminist hackers.

The materiality of the technology The creation of common spaces and places raises awareness of the materiality of technology, and helps to understand where these tech- nologies come from, with an emphasis on their manufacturing, of- ten based on the exploitation of female, indigenous, southern or

10 In the short history of hackspaces, hacklabs have come to be regarded as more politicized and more strongly anchored in the social movements and above all in the occupation movement (Maxigas 2012). 164 synth

Feminist Hacking. // 31 colonized labour force and through the exploitation of natural re- sources (Nakamura, 2014; Parks/Starosielski, 2015). In other words, feminist hackers want to emphasize the importance of linking the intangible appearance of the digital age with its significant effects on all social spheres, the world of work and the environment. The “digital world” is therefore not distinct or separable from the “real world;” rather, these two worlds are interconnected. By creating an awareness of the materiality of technology, feminist hackers shed light on the new digital spirit of capitalism embedded in the highly controlled and secret infrastructures of algorithmic governmentality, mass sur- veillance, and the extraction of minerals and rare metals, essential to the very existence of our digital devices. The materiality of technology makes it clear that the feminist strug- gle against violence cannot be located only on the Internet. Although violence often manifests itself online and can spread rapidly through the mechanisms of the network, it is also reflected in forms of pro- duction based on the exploitation of labour and natural resources. The resistance practices of feminist hackers therefore extend conventional technofeminism through a more holistic approach. Although this ap- proach is becoming more and more widespread, most of the projects are still in their initial stages.

Conclusion The practices of feminist hackers are a convincing example of resis- tance rooted in a socio-political redefinition of the relationship be- tween online and offline spaces, thereby generating an emancipatory culture of resistance. By creating physical spaces (such as hackspaces and feminist convergences such as the THF!) and digital spaces (such as invitation-only mailing lists, collective accounts on Twitter, etc.) to address sexism, online violence and all other forms of discrimination, their projects bring about social change. This social change in turn is reflected in the desire to create new spaces where there is room for a variety of new practices and the values they represent. Feminist hacking is an expression of our time; an era of precarious- ness, which through the anthropocene, that is, the impact of human beings on their environment, will even be amplified. Paying attention to the materiality of technology and to technological production cy- cles increases the awareness of our technological footprint and the synth 165

32 // The Beautiful Warriors responsibility we have for the world and its beings. According to this conception, feminist hackers do not necessarily encourage perfect mastery or control of technologies as an end in itself – an attitude they would describe as masculine. Rather, they are concerned with mastering technology in order to stop violence and, beyond that, to create conditions that make it possible to develop new imaginaries for their lives and the lives of their communities.

Bibliography Adam, Alison (2003) “Hacking into Hacking: Gender and the Hacker Phenomenon,” ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, Volume 33, Number 4: 1-15. Carse, Ashley (2012) “Nature as infrastructure: Making and managing the Panama Canal watershed,” Social Studies of Science, Volume 42, Number 4: 539-563. Coleman, Gabriella (2014) “Hackers,” The Johns Hopkins Encyclopedia of Digital Textuality, http://gabriellacoleman.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Coleman- Hacker-John-Hopkins-2013-Final.pdf. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991) “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, Volume 43, Number 6: 1241-1299. Dunbar-Hester, Christina (2016) “Geeks,” in Benjamin, P. (Ed.): Digital Keywords, Princeton: Princeton University Press: 149-157. Forlano, Laura (2016) “Hacking the Feminist Disabled Body,” Feminism and (un) hacking, Journal of Peer production, Volume 8. Available at http://peerpro- duction.net/issues/issue-8-feminism-and-unhacking/peer-reviewed-papers/ hacking-the-feminist-disabled-body/ Fraser, Nancy (1990) “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, Volume 8, Number 25/26: 56–80. Freeman, Jo (1972) “The tyranny of structurelessness. The Second Wave.” Available at http://struggle.ws/hist_texts/structurelessness.html Goldenberg, Anne (2014) “Hacking with Care: Attention, bien-être et politique de l’ordinaire dans le milieu hacktiviste,” Magazine DPI. Available at http:// dpi.studioxx.org/fr/hacking-care-attention-bien-%C3%AAtre-et-politique-de- l%E2%80%99ordinaire-dans-le-milieu-hacktiviste Haraway, Donna (1988) “Situated Knoweldges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives, 2nd ed., eds. McCann, C. and Kim, S. New York, Routledge: 370-383. 166 synth

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Lapsley, Phil (2013) Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell, Grove Press. Larkin, Brian (2013) “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 42: 327-343. Levy, Steven (2010) Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, O’Reilly Media. Maxigas (2012) “Hacklabs and Hackerspaces – Tracing Two Genealogies,” Journal of Peer Production, Volume 2: 1-10. Available at http://peerproduction.net/issues/ issue-2/peer-reviewed-papers/hacklabs-andhackerspaces/ Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003) Feminism without borders: decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity, Durham: Duke University Press. Moraga, Cherríe and Anzaldua, Gloria (1983) “This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color,” Kitchen Table, New York: Women of Color Press . Nakamura, Lisa (2014) “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture,” American Quarterly, Volume 66, Number 4: 919-941. Nguyen, Lilly, Toupin, Sophie and Bardzell, Shaowen (2016) “Feminist Hacking/ Making: Exploring New Gender Horizons of Possibility,” Special Issue of the Journal of Peer Production, Feminism and (un) Hacking, Volume 8: 1-16. Parks, Lisa and Starosielski, Nicole (2015): Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Sandoval, Chela (2000) Methodology of the oppressed, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Snelting, Femke (2014) A feminist server. Available at http://esc.mur.at/de/werk/ feminist-server Sofia, Zoe (2000) “Container technologies,” Hypatia, Volume 15, Number 2: 181-219. N.D.: “THF! Convergence Report” (2015). Available at https://transhackfeminist. noblogs.org/post/2015/01/25/a-transhackfeminist-thf-convergence-report/ The WhoreDykeBlackTransFeminist Network: Manifesto for the Trans-Feminist Insurrection (2010). Available at http://anarchalibrary.blogspot.ca/2010/10/man- ifesto-for-trans-feminist.html Toupin, Sophie (2014) “Feminist Hackerspaces: The Synthesis of Feminist and Hacker Cultures,” Special Issue on Shared Machines Shops, Journal of Peer Production, Volume 5: 1-9. Toupin, Sophie (2013) “Feminist Hackerspaces as Safer Spaces?,” DPI magazine. Available at http://dpi.studioxx.org/fr/feminist-hackerspaces-safer-spaces Winner, Langdon (1980) “Do artifacts have politics?,” Daedelus, Volume 109, Number 1: 121-136. synth 167

CREATING NEW WORLDS With Cyberfeminist Ideas and Practices

Text compiled by Spideralex

Translated by Cornelia Sollfrank

Voices (listed in order of their appearance in the text): Donestech, Inés Binder, Anamhoo, Acción Directa Autogestiva (ADA), Laboratorio de interconectividades y Comando Colibri, Gendersec, Florencia Goldsman, Hacks de Vida, acoso.online, EnRedadas, Derechos Digitales, Ciberfeministas Guatemala, Sula Batsú, La Imilla Hacker, Fundación Karisma, Empoderamiento de la mujer, Cl4ndestina, Luchadoras, Lucía Egaña, Chupadatos, Anamhoo, Kéfir, AnarchaServer, Vedetas What follows is a compilation of various texts by cyberfemi- nists and feminists who do not regard themselves as cyberfeminists. Combining quotes from compañeras with one’s own thoughts seems

35 168 synth

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to me the best way to allow everyone to speak equally. The process of compiling this text gives me a sense of freedom. Compiling means putting together something new from what already exists, linking parts or excerpts from various texts and documents. But it is also the conversion of program code into executable code. All forms of fem- inism should circulate freely and inspire new actions, and cyberfem- inists contribute to that by opening up new ways of disseminating information and knowledge. Sometimes I use the first person when speaking, but generally I assume a “we.” Little to nothing of what we say here is “purely” sub- jective. Almost everything circulates within the construction of col- lective practices and ideas. The stuff our dreams are made of is an incessant summoning, reading, inspiring, quoting and studying each other, conspiring and fighting together, supporting each other (and sometimes annoying and forgiving each other). As if it were a “scene.” We report from our own galaxy – with its people, collectives, and networks; with its vocabulary, codes, and languages. Situated knowledge from Latin America and beyond. All those who speak here are witnesses of violence and speak of it – vio- lence that emerges from the criminal alliance of patriarchy and cap- italism. Through sisterly love (sorority) and collaboration, we create responses to this violence; we document it, try to mitigate and thus counteract it; and last but not least, we create a feminist infrastructure among all of us. This text describes postcolonial and cyberfeminist theories and practices. It is not only about the existing, contemporary technolo- gies, but also about those that would be desirable and helpful but do not (yet) exist. All of the positions represented here deal with devel- oping speculative fictions and ideas with transformative power that should not only stimulate collective actions, but also the invention of new feminist technologies.

Intro-succión1 Feminist theories of technology (teorías feministas de la tecnología, TFT) are the expression of a series of diverse and controversial social

1 The author plays here with the similarity of the Spanish terms Introducción [intro- duction] and Intro-succión, which in English would mean “sucking in.” synth 169

Creating New Worlds // 37 and political movements, philosophies, and practices. What they all have in common is the goal of combating sexism and androcentrism, especially with respect to technology. Decolonial forms of feminism, on the other hand, focus on the contextualized realities of certain places and their inhabitants. They specifically address the approaches of women, gender dissidents (disidentes de género), non-binaries, and LGTIQs and examine their specific interactions with technology. They focus on intersectionality and criticize the ethnocentric, Western, and universalizing perspectives of many traditional TFTs. Their emphasis is to show that women constitute the main source of cheap or slave la- bor in the technology sector – be it in the extraction of raw materials, production, quality control, services, or writing software. In this sense, Inés Binder asks the following question: “Can we build a postcolonial cyberfeminism that takes up the critique of cy- berfeminism from the global North but, beyond that, problematizes the precariousness of infrastructures, inequality in income distribu- tion, or racism in the Latin American region?2 Perhaps one of the first common, meaningful ideas of Latin American cyberfeminism emerged from the community radio en- vironment. Inés tells us that this movement “...originated precisely here, because it placed emphasis on various demands closely linked to social movements (for example, those of alternative radio stations, citizen radio, mining radio, educational radio, guerrilla radio, popular movement radio, etc.). Although most of these radio projects were not involved in the debates about a free internet, many of them share the basic principles of cyberfeminists: freedom of expression in the broadest sense, plurality, diversity, the defense of human rights, the understanding of communication as a right and not as a commodity, the insertion of counterhegemonic discourses into the columns of the system, etc. We have even agreed to build our own infrastructure in the form of antennas and transmitters, hardware hacking, free net- works, etc., and to make them more accessible.”

2 María Inés Binder, [ciberfeministaslatam], “Identidad y agencia colectiva del movimiento ciberfeminista en América Latina” [Identity and Collective Agency in Latin America’s Cyberfeminist Movement], Masters thesis in political science at the University of Salamanca, 2017. Available in Spanish: https://donestech. net/noticia/ciberfeministaslatam-investigacion-sobre-identidad-y-agencia-colec- tiva-del-movimiento 170 synth

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“We see the potential to challenge the various dimensions of power in both analog and digital communication technologies; that is why we are here, that is why we have started exactly in these places. The motto of the alternative radio station FM La Tribu is ‘Apagá La Tribu y hacé tu radio’ [Turn off La Tribu and create your own radio station], and today we are doing just that.”3 But, as Inés also reminds us, sharing practices does not always mean sharing concepts, motivations, or visions: “Understanding that concepts are charged with meaning that require interpretation, putting cyberfeminism into practice necessarily entails dispute. This is the case with Latin American cyberfeminists who approached cy- berfeminism through practice and not through immersion into the- oretical discussions. In this sense, for the participants of [cyber fem- inistslatam], cyberfeminism is a concept that encompasses a range of practices – from the use of technology as a tool for feminist activism, curbing sexist attacks online, and fighting the digital gender divide to creating and managing their own infrastructures based on feminist principles.”4 And while we accept these divisions, our story will focus on com- mon perspectives, the places where voices and ideas nourish each oth- er, where we resonate and vibrate together like water molecules. As Anamhoo points out: “I believe that the differences in our practices are not ideological differences. We are simply in different places from where we read and create a dialectical sense of diversity. Sometimes we are very far away from each other and then again very close as far as practices and attitudes are concerned. We walk together, one with the other, looking at each other, never in parallel lines but connected, like in a net.”5 In this sense, and as an almost intuitive response to this hos- tile world, we begin our story with initiatives that build self-de- fense projects.

3 Email correspondence between Inés Binder and Spideralex. 4 Ibid. 5 Email correspondence between Spideralex and Anamhoo, “Many thanks for your contribution and the revision of the text.” synth 171

Creating New Worlds // 39

Feminist Self-Defense To begin with, a statement by Acción Directa Autogestiva, ADA (Self- Managed Direct Action): “First of all, we would like to point out that self-defense is not the same as feminist self-defense. The latter consists not only of practicing a martial art, but also of creating safe spaces, collective self-care and affective networks, and of thinking about vio- lence in all its forms and developing counter-strategies. “Only when we can name what oppresses us, denounce it, point it out – name it again, and, most importantly, express our own desires, our dreams, our emotions, can we build something from ourselves. What is not named does not exist. ... Based on the fact that we find ourselves in a system that attacks women and everything feminine, the urgent need arises to survive and defend our life but also our joy, our self-determination, our freedom – and our collectivity. “Feminist self-defense means staying in motion and leaving behind victimization, helplessness, and fragility. It means taking away power from these figures of thought and empowering oneself to undermine the patriarchal symbolic order. Our movement is based on collectiv- ity, sisterhood, and connectedness. It means building a community and thus breaking through the isolation that patriarchy exposes us to in different ways, every day. It is not an easy task, but our existence depends on it. And, as we said before, we are certain that together we are stronger. “Self-care is another fundamental axis of feminist self-defense. For centuries we have been deliberately deprived of the knowledge about our body and how it functions (now there are different move- ments that oppose it, such as Gynepunk in Barcelona, the midwife movement in Mexico, and the great movement for safe abortion in Latin America);6 we were educated to care only for others; we have been formed in a culture of submission and sacrifice, causing us to always remain in the background. That is why when we say “no ag- gression without a response,” it is part of our self-care as well. And so

6 As an example of cyberfeminism and supporting networks, we refer to the fol- lowing research: A. Hache, M. Sanchez Martinez, “Cuerpos de mujeres en cam- pos de batallas digitales” [Women’s Bodies on the Battlefield of Digital Media], Tactical Tech, 2017. Available at: https://tacticaltech.org/media/projects/ CuerposMujeres.pdf 172 synth

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we understand self-care as a form of resistance, as a counter-model to self-abandonment; a cry that says: “Here we are, and we want to live!” This movement serves our recovery and the protection of our spaces. It is about regaining our physical and mental strength, re-appropriat- ing the spaces taken from us, and being able to use them freely and safely; hence the slogan: ‘The street and the night belong to us.’”7 How do you work on feminist self-defense from a holistic perspec- tive? How do you combine care and self-care, and how can you make better use of the power that comes from the diversity of interconnect- ed worlds? El laboratorio de interconectividades (The Laboratory for Interconnectedness) explains it this way: “We developed a strategic methodology of hybridizing martial arts techniques, feminist self-defense, and digital collective care. In this process, we do not distinguish between online and offline, and we work holistically, as a political commitment to the life of each and every one of us. We reconnect with our intuition, explore our bodily and spatial limits, and diagnose our daily habits in order to commu- nicate, organize, and act more confidently and autonomously with each other.”8 Feminist self-defense, as practiced in Latin American cyberfemi- nism, helps to break through the loneliness and reject the death im- posed by the system. It calls for living life out of love and joy, keeping one’s feet on the ground, standing firmly, and at the same time look- ing at the horizon, ready for the call to create other possible worlds. The situated reflection leads to a joint understanding that one can no longer think of the world as if it were marked by clear boundaries between online spaces and physical spaces. Everything is connected. Effects are greater than causes, and feedback loops have become the norm. Everything can have an impact. Everything can become rela- tional: algorithms, objects, infrastructures, bodies, senses, emotions, data, and metadata. But you can only partially protect your life, your body, your location, your contacts, your sensitive personal data, or

7 ADA, Acción Directa Autogestiva, “Queda todo,” March 2017. Available at: http://saberesyciencias.com.mx/2017/03/12/queda-todo/ 8 The Autodefensas Hackfeministas [Self-Defence of Feminist Hackers] is an ac- complice of the Laboratio de Interconectividades and Comando Colibri. Available at: https://lab-interconectividades.net/autodefensas-hackfeministas/, and video at: https://lab-interconectividades.net/video-autodefensas-hackfeministas-oax/ synth 173

Creating New Worlds // 41 the content of your communication. There is no way to protect every- thing, and we all have a subjective perception and contextual security needs that change over time. We are at a stage in the history of the planet where many possible multiverses open up. At the same time, there are numerous complex questions about how we can meaning- fully combine gender and intersectionality with our needs for privacy and security. There is a place on the internet called Gendersec,9 and some com- pañeras tell us how “this word refers to structural and systemic vi- olence that is disproportionately directed against women and girls and other non-binary and dissident gender identities in all areas of production, access, use, development, management, and recycling of digital and electronic technologies. Actions in the face of existing vi- olence include mutual strengthening and cooperation, solidarity and hacking, and emotional and technical assistance. “In recent years, the internet has become an important place for women and gender dissidents to make their struggles visible, to build networks, and to develop affinities. The development of the cen- tralized, commercial, hyper-monitored internet has led to dissident anonymous selfie actions being banned by commercial companies such as Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter. They force users to leave their Zapatista woolen mask or the gorilla mask of the Guerrilla Girls in the closet. These developments are not accidental but the re- sult of a neo-conservative, openly misogynistic agenda, including the disproportionate proliferation of hate groups, fanatical-religious and conservative movements that trample on human rights. They seem to

9 Gendersec is the wiki of the Gender and Technology Institute, which is coordi- nated by the Tactical Tech Collective; so far, three training programs have been implemented in Latin America in connection with Gendersec. The project is aimed at women and transgender people, activists, and human rights defenders who focus on the production of knowledge about privacy and security, as well as the implementation of care measures. The wiki documents the training activi- ties carried out, more or less detailed (agendas, resources, motivations, feedback, and other measures). There are resources, codes, and manuals on digital security practices and tools for training and learning with others. Available at: https:// gendersec.tacticaltech.org 174 synth

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be literally occupying the internet to carry out their violent attacks and macho practices against TODAS.10 “The right to be left alone has disappeared. There is no freedom of expression, only different degrees of privilege when it comes to shout- ing more or less loudly. The various forms of cyberfeminism resist the exodus from ICT11 as a territory of action and create new mindscapes and narratives as well as hybrid and unexpected alliances with many other struggles.”12

On the Move Florencia Goldsman describes these struggles as follows: “Latin American forms of cyberfeminism are diverse and feed on the restlessness of women and sexual dissidents who aim at politi- cizing the internet. They focus on practices of (digital) security and anonymity, on the streets as well as on the internet, and see this as a necessary response to the increasing militarization of our environment and our bodies. An important aspect of these forms of cyberfeminism is the continuous exchange of experiences, knowledge, and tools in self-organized workshops... “Action has become the central political practice, and with it an awareness of inequality across the continent: while some are already technology experts, others are just beginning to learn. In any case, cyberfeminists are expanding their networks and trying to become more involved in complex and often inaccessible technology debates. We take Latin American forms of cyberfeminism as a political trea- sure trove for the exploration of further possibilities for freedom of expression on an internet that is becoming increasingly misogynistic. We are radicalizing our political practices and denounce paternalism, persecution, state, and corporate surveillance. Finally, we use the am- plifying power of the internet to diffuse multiple narratives, to live dissent and creatively achieve more autonomy.

10 “TODAS” [everyone], here explicitly the plural version of the female form. 11 ICT is the acronym of the term “Information and Communications Technology.” 12 The following quotes stem from a Gendersec working group on technolo- gies of domination and have been published in a book by Ippolita that is currently only available in Italian: http://www.meltemieditore.it/catalogo/ tecnologie-del-dominio/ synth 175

Creating New Worlds // 43 “Exploitative companies are trying to siphon off the wealth from rivers, mines, and other natural resources in our territories, and they are in cahoots with the repressive governments of our continent. That is exactly where cyberfeminism becomes active. Everywhere, women and LGBTIQ activists fight with all sorts of means: They send out press releases from cyber cafés, use their mobile phones for politi- cal organization, borrow technical equipment, or protect themselves from the confiscation of their own infrastructure by governments (as has happened in Honduras, Nicaragua, and other countries).”13 Political, social, economic, ecological, and technological contexts are constantly changing. And while everything around us moves quickly, our common struggles open up new avenues. The tactical use of ICT and the internet is creating new opportunities, but it also harbors unexpected risks. The lack of adequate measures against increasing gender-specif- ic violence – by the operators of social platforms and by the state – has made it necessary to launch initiatives such as Acoso.online. The initiatives are “the necessary response of heterosexual women and LGBTIQ people who experience online violence on a daily basis. The digital publication of non-consensual pornography is NOT the only form of gender-based violence online. “As you will see on the website, there is no ideal solution. Therefore, the goal of the project is not only to use the currently existing tools, but also to develop a critical sense of what could be done beyond that. In order to bring about real change, we need to use strong leverage:

• Private internet platforms: They must provide new policies and new tools. They must not only develop a better under- standing of the complexity of non-consensual pornography and the situation of victims, but also seriously respond to their users in Latin America.

13 Marta Florencia Goldsman, “#libertad para belen: twitter y el debate sobre el aborto en la argentina” [#Freedom for Belen: Twitter and the Abortion Debate in Argentina], 2018. Dissertation submitted within the scope of the post- graduate program “Comunicação e Cultura Contemporâneas” at the Faculty of Communication in Bahía–UFBA as partial prerequisite for obtaining the teaching degree, with Prof. Dr. Leonor Graciela Natansohn. Available online in Spanish: https://repositorio.ufba.br/ri/handle/ri/25970 176 synth

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• State: Justice and police must stop re-victimizing people who have suffered from gender-based violence. New laws are re- quired. The executive and legislative branches must take the problem seriously and no longer use it as a pretext for internet censorship. • Our Communities: Zero Tolerance of Gender Violence on the internet. The spread of non-consensual pornography is simply unacceptable and no one should have to press charges and go to court in order to gain their rights. We demand com- prehensive social ostracism. • Technology: We must adopt a critical stance toward the digital technology we use. It is important to understand its functional logic as well as the business models behind it and, not least, our own role in dealing with it. As long as we do not do that, we cannot really expect much from either industry or the state.”14

This is a cyberfeminism based on action and self-organized practic- es of mutual support and solidarity. Networks of women and gender dissident women are created to be there for one another and to work together against violence. Sorority! But there is always a lack of time. And there is always a lack of re- sources: a lack of money, education, support, political will, and a lack of the recognition of achievements as well. In this sense, the compañeras of Hacks de Vida (Hacks of Life) remind us that “it is shocking to listen to people who assist victims of gender-specific violence on the internet; the helpers are confronted with it in their own environment, in their partnerships, and in famil- iar safe spaces where they recognize each other. It is moving and raises many questions, because the care of people exposed to gender-based violence is largely voluntary, informal, and unpaid work. “The fact that the supporters are feminist activists who are experi- enced with technology contributes to their really being able to help; they understand what can be done to remedy the violence. And it is important to point out that the ethical and moral commitment of the organizations and collectives in which these people work often does not get the recognition it deserves, either materially or otherwise.

14 Acoso initiative online: https://acoso.online/pornovenganza/#acerca synth 177

Creating New Worlds // 45 “In order to coordinate a common approach to gender-based vio- lence on the internet, it is essential to better explore the phenomenon and to create the vision of a feminist future without pain and violence. The self-organization of autonomous community spaces, offline meet- ings, femhacks, and hackmeetings strengthens women and creates safe spaces for learning, sharing, and healing.”15

Being Together in Free Spaces Florencia Goldsman stresses the importance of physical encounter – the encounter of cuerpas16: “It is about meeting others17 to spin a new world of fiber optics. For cyberfeminists, meetings are an essential part of their activities; workshops, for example, in which we learn how to use a Tor browser, or how to encrypt our emails.18 Adult education and autodidacticism play an important role. The many experiences of personal and online encounters give rise to small initiatives, such as the production of manuals, combat kits, and self-defense instructions, which are the basis of Latin American cyberfeminist production.” In these temporary encounters in physical space, there is a kind of agreement between the compañeras, a mutual recognition of one an- other, which helps to escape the feeling of isolation. This is how they can share their experiences and views, organize workshops and con- certs, work with sound, celebrate lady parties, hold cryptoparties and hackmeetings, but also write, tell stories, make films and maps, and thus contribute to building a collective memory: creating, reviving, reinterpreting, spreading, supporting, listening, informing, commu- nicating, circulating. In this context, the history of EnRedadas – Tecnologías para la Igualdad [Networking – Technologies for Equality] also seems

15 Estrella Soria and Luisa Ortiz Perez, “Enfrentan violencias de genero en América Latina” [Facing Gender Violence in Latin America], 2018. Available in Spanish at: https://archive.org/details/DocumentoHacksdeVida_201803 16 Linguistic intervention in Spanish: The male form cuerpo has been turned into cuerpa [female form], meaning the bodies of females. 17 In the Spanish version, the author uses three forms: otras/otros y otres, in order to include all possible gender combinations of “others.” 18 There is a list of 135 activities on the Gendersec website: https://gendersec.tacti- caltech.org/wiki/index.php/Category: Activities 178 synth

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interesting, as they strive to make these connections and networks visible. They refer here to an organization that performs a thematic mapping showing the importance of mirror games for the creation of echoes and resonances: “For the fourth consecutive year, the Chilean NGO Derechos Digitales has produced the summary “Latin America in a Glimpse,” an account of the most relevant events in Latin America in the field of technology and human rights. We are honored to have been included and invited to present it. “This issue of ‘Latin America in a Glimpse’ explores the problem- atic and difficult relationship between gender, feminism, and the Int and presents the work of various women’s groups working on this issue from this part of the world. In total, 29 initiatives from 15 Latin American countries are featured, initiatives that our friends from Dereko’s Digitales find ‘powerfully inspiring.’ “Among them we have included four initiatives from Central America: our outstanding FemHack, an event in which the other three initiatives from our region included in the report also partic- ipated: Ciberfeministas from Guatemala, Chicas Hacker from El Salvador, and TICas from Costa Rica. The question is how we, as Latin American women, see and live technology and the world of the internet. What we are experiencing is that in many feminist proj- ects the question of technology is not given much importance, and in most virtual communication spaces our feminist positions are strong- ly rejected. As cyberfeminists, we move in both areas and actually encounter resistance and rejection everywhere.”19 And in that same text, more cyberfeminist experiences on the in- ternet are shared from a Latin American perspective:

“The internet, that medium that promised us horizontal relations, mutated into a privatized, ultra-concentrated and

19 EnRedadas, “Resistencia y sororidad: nuestra forma de estar en internet” [Resitance and sorority: our way of using the internet], 2017. Available in Spanish at: https://enredadasnicaragua.blogspot.com.es/2017/12/resistencia-y-sorori- dad-nuestra-forma.html synth 179

Creating New Worlds // 47 hyper-supervised environment, from which we women are once again being excluded.” – Cyberfeminists Guatemala

“We women must create alternatives to the business model on which the digital industry is based. We believe that another digital economy is possible, and that we women have the responsibility and the opportunity to propose an alternative.” – Kemly Camacho, Sula Batsú

“When we talk about networks today, people only think of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. And we are interested in disputing this term, because networks are much more than that: they are connections between women, dialogues, bodies.” – Lulú Barrera, Luchadoras

“The net is our loudspeaker and our balaclava.” – The Imilla Hacker

“It is clear that macho violence on and off the internet prevents us women from enjoying and exercising our rights fully.” – Amalia Toledo, Karisma Foundation

“Knowledge and access to technology is still predominantly masculine and elitist, which corroborates that women, mainly those with limited resources, continue to be excluded from the digital world.” – Carla and Fernanda Sánchez, Empoderamiento de la mujer

“We want to (re)appropriate technologies, use them in a feminist and autonomous way. This means having control over what devices and software we use, but it also means being 180 synth

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able to experiment, to make mistakes, and not to be afraid of entering digital spaces.” – Narrira Lemos and Steffania Paola, Cl4ndestina20

Our network consists of interconnected spaces and personal en- counters that are generally intentional and desired. But meetings are not always possible – we do not necessarily live in the same city, often not even in the same country, sometimes not even on the same con- tinent. The internet can bring us very close, yes, but it is even bet- ter to meet cuerpa- to-cuerpa. The presence of the others gives us the feeling of ecstasy, makes us float. Meeting gives us power and energy, facilitates processes, and intensifies networks of trust and cooperation. Sometimes we converge in our disputed territories, the street, the net- works, and the servers, and other times in places where we can create spaces of security, confidence, and relaxation. At times, we can meet in spaces where we find safety, trust, and relaxation, but at other times we have to venture out into contested territories, be it on the street or the internet.

Battle Zones The Luchadoras (fighters) offer a perfect place for encounters. They know perfectly well how to connect digital and urban presence in such a way that they reinforce each other. They define themselves as “a feminist collective that initiates processes of political, personal, and collective transformation in both digital and physical (public) space and creates spaces for encounters in which women’s knowledge, strength, and power are valued, in which stories can be told and dis- seminated, and in which a feminist-critical appropriation of technol- ogies can be pursued. “For the future, we imagine a world in which women, youths, and girls can play with the potential of their personal and collective strengths in joy and freedom in both physical and digital spaces. So what can we do to achieve this? “We tell stories of women warriors: We believe in the transformative power of storytelling to combat gender stereotypes and sexism that prevail

20 Ibid. synth 181

Creating New Worlds // 49 in traditional media and make women feel either guilty or victimized. We tell stories of women who are capable of action, who live and/or fight for freedom and dignity. It is true that we live in the midst of a permanent war on women here in in Mexico, but we are the ones who are committed to life. In Luchadoras we honor everyday revolutions, stories that exist but usually remain untold. We believe that broadening the narratives expands the limits they have wanted to impose on us. It is our way of spreading what is possible – and that everything is possible! “We work for #InternetFeminista: The internet is a public and a political space, and ICTs are tools of feminist struggle, for example by giving us access to information and claiming our rights, or by giving us means to communicate and organize ourselves. But technologies are also permeated by gender inequality, and online violence against women is growing. Through surveillance and social media conversa- tions, we are also experiencing an increase in violence that has spread from the offline to the online world.”21 Fanzines can also develop at these face-to-face meetings, such as, for example, “Necesito privacidad para la autonomía de mi deseo” [“I need privacy for the autonomy of my desire”]. It is the result of conversations held in a digital self-defense workshop for feminists. This fanzine stands for the desire to share some of the questions that were raised as well as possible avenues of escape – beyond that particular encounter: “Within the framework of legal regulations, which are not least also shaped by the requirements of the market, our bodies are no longer ours. Many countries enact abortion laws just as if the bodies that can reproduce were part of the (re-) productive capital of the state, a civic body so to speak, and feminists who insist on the slogan “my body belongs to me,” i.e., on the opposition of mine and yours, may seem anachronistic – without really being so. But the problem is not that we should not be the sole and absolute owners of our bodies, but that others claim this exclusive ownership of our bodies. A political fantasy can therefore be to form associations that collectively manage knowledge, resources, and desires. The resistance lies in defining one’s borders oneself rather than leaving it to the state, church, or multinationals.”22

21 Luchadoras, available at: http://luchadoras.mx/que-es-luchadoras/ 22 Lucía Egaña, “Me falta privacidad,” [I lack privacy], in Necesito privaci- dad para la autonomía de mi deseo. Available at: https://archive.org/details/ FanzineNecesitoPrivacidad 182 synth

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We see ourselves as a union of interconnected cuerpas, as a growing movement that creates unstoppable waves and entirely new allianc- es. Cyberfeminists who are also abortionists, defenders of the earth, hip-hoppers, anti-militarists, ecologists, artists, sex workers, research- ers, poets, healers, accountants... As life on this planet struggles not to disappear, we are creating new worlds – with speculative fiction, with radical narratives, ances- tral stories, mitopoiesis, myths, and memes; autopoiesis (self-preser- vation and self-creation) and simptopoieisis (doing and becoming in harmony with other species).23 But we will still have to traverse territories in which our bodies do not belong to us; the internet: another territory to be defended; a loop, a vortex. It is as if we were always reacting; once again the feeling of losing the body, this time on the digital battlefields. Traced, monetized, discretized, objectified, analyzed, monitored, controlled, punished, violated. Chupadatos shares with us that “as a precarious worker, as a free- lancer, I have the dream of money appearing in my account with the same regularity as menstruation – every 28 days (or less). Menstruating is a very important task for the world, and now that they have discov- ered how to make money directly with it, it would be very good if the money would reach the pockets of those who really do the hard work of ovulation and bleeding.” In the particular case of applications aimed at controlling cycles and fertility, the perspective of unpaid work goes back to the historical lack of recognition of women’s sexual, reproductive, and affective work. In “Quantify Everything: A Dream of a Feminist Data Future,” Amalia Abreu criticizes the logic and contemporary methods of quan- tifying life, pointing out that the advocates of this model are most- ly middle and upper class men who voluntarily disclose their data. And it is precisely the same people who determine what is to be mea- sured and how. Although there are no fixed rules for this type of practice – it can be by means of agile applications or methodologies – worldviews are

23 Talk: Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Utrecht University, “On a feminist partial healing of this earth ... we always be- come with each other, we are simpoietic, not autopoietic, we are making with each other.” Video documentation available at: https://vimeo.com/210430116 synth 183

Creating New Worlds // 51 undoubtedly at play, visions that define what and why is to be mea- sured, or who is to be measured and how. 24 We create sanctuaries where we can go to breathe; we try to make them safe and keep them alive; refuges, places of retreat, and com- munities that create and maintain them. The same thing happens on the internet, where it takes the form of feminist servers, expression through the electromagnetic spectrum, community radios, and free internet connection networks. We continue to tell our stories, which resonate stronger every day, in order to preserve our freedom, to be able to decide for ourselves when we come and when we want to go, when and how we want to express ourselves in a large, beautiful, and decentralized internet; an internet where there is techno-diversity and networks of support and solidarity.

Sorry for the Inconvenience, (Feminist Infrastructure) Under Construction Then Inés asks: “What distinguishes a cyberfeminist from a feminist who uses cyberactivism as a strategy? In general terms, cyberfeminists take a critical look at technology, understanding how it is permeated by the ideology of those who develop it: a capitalist and heteropatri- archal vision of the world. “For example, the belief in the circulation of information in distribut- ed networks, transparency, the collective and horizontal construction of knowledge in the hands of a community and not of actors for profit, can be translated into an individual practice such as the use of free operating systems (90 percent of those interviewed use them, of which two thirds do it exclusively) or the formation of non-hierarchical networks.”25

24 Natasha Felizi and Joana Varon, “Menstruapps – ¿Cómo convertir tu menstruación en dinero (para los demás)” [Menstruapp – How Can You Turn Your Menstruation into Money (for Others)], 2016. Infographics by Diana Moreno, Natasha Felizi, and Joana Varon. Available at: https://chupadados.codingrights.org/es/ menstruapps-como-transformar-sua-menstruacao-em-dinheiro-para-os-outros/ 25 María Inés Binder, [ciberfeministaslatam], “Identidad y agencia colectiva del movi- miento ciberfeminista en América Latina” [Identity and Collective Agengy in the Latin American Cyberfeminist Movement], 2017. A masters thesis in political science at the Univeristy of Salamanca. Available in Spanish: https://donestech.net/noticia/ciber- feministaslatam-investigacion-sobre-identidad-y-agencia-colectiva-del-movimiento 184 synth

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And as Laurence Rassel comments on the relationship between feminism and open source software in an interview with Donestech26: “In French, an operating system is called ‘système d’exploitation,’ so the least we can do as feminists is to own our own exploitation system and be able to modify it!” And Anamhoo develops this idea in the following way: “If we assume that virtual space is currently subject to entrepreneurial logic, one tactic could be to use the power of consumers, but if we remain conventional consumers, we will always have to play under the terms of patriarchy. We want a ‘violet revolution’, and any revolution has to think about its infrastructure; return to the independent servers, the alternative social networks, which are by no means obsolete strategies. We need safe and free ways to express ourselves, we need economic and labor resources, and we need authentic networks to ensure a sustainable collaboration. “If you still think that this is just an illusion, you need to look at proj- ects like possibleworlds.org, rhizomatica.org, tv cherán7, or transhack- feminismo, where you can learn to administrate a feminist server. We still have a long way to go when it comes to building an infrastructure with social and feminist technologies, but at a micro-scale and in a decentral- ized way these possible worlds already exist as seeds of the future.”27 Part of this feminist future are attempts to change the client-server dynamics, to write code that undoes the vertical structure of the con- trol panel and gives more autonomy to those who inhabit it, to make words fly like butterflies, to navigate in a world of possible systems and to create friendly ways of managing our needs, Kéfir,28 Vedetas,29

26 Documentary: “Código Lela: el día que me enrollé con las tecnologías,” [LelaCode: The Day I Hooked Up with Technology], Donestech, 2007. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlyFAaDsugg. See also the project LelaCoders, Interviews with cyberfeminists and hackers. Available at: http://vim- eo.com/lelacoders. 27 “Oficina Antivigilancia,” Anamhoo [Anti-surveillance Office], “Infraestructura para una revolución violeta” [Infrastructure for a Violet Revolution], 2016. Available at: https://antivigilancia.org/es/2016/09/ infraestructura-para-una-revolucion-violeta/#sdfootnote6anc 28 See https://kefir.red/ 29 See https://vedetas.org/ synth 185

Creating New Worlds // 53 Codigo Sur,30 Maddix,31 Cl4ndestina,32 Systerserver,33 Matriar. cat,34 Anarchaserver,35 Rhizomatica,36 Palabra radio,37 Pi-node,38 Tetaneutral,39 Framasoft,40 any many others … Kéfir, for example, introduces itself as follows: “A transfeminist cooperative of free technologies for activists, human rights defenders, journalists, social organizations, collectives, artists, tightrope dancers ... It is committed to co-creating digital neighborhoods where we can feel confident, express ourselves, and act without fear. We provide holistic support for the appropriation of digital technologies in com- munity processes: from consulting to the facilitation of learning spac- es, collaborative workflows for groups, online learning, and digital collective care... “We maintain and take care of autonomous and free infrastruc- ture on the internet. We offer a digital ecosystem based on mem- bership: email accounts and mailing lists (encryptable), web hosting (CMS, static sites), free statistics, online archives, applications for collaborative work and calendars, voice calls, discussion and decision making forums, live streaming, project management, and e-learning platforms.”41 Feminist servers exist as an idea, a distributed conversation, and a set of political practices that are taking place within a group of fem- inists and transfeminists interested in creating an autonomous infra- structure. The aim is to secure data and projects and to make accessi- ble, preserve, and manage the experiences of feminist groups from a feminist perspective. There will be no feminist internet without auton- omous feminist servers managed responsibly by their communities.

30 See https://codigosur.org/ 31 See https://maadix.net 32 See https://clandestina.io 33 See https://systerserver.net/ 34 See http://matriar.cat/ 35 See http://anarchaserver.org/ 36 See https://www.rhizomatica.org/ 37 See https://palabraradio.org/ 38 See http://p-node.org/ 39 See https://tetaneutral.net/ 40 See https://degooglisons-internet.org/ 41 See https://Kéfir.red/ 186 synth

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It is about regaining control and autonomy over our data, nar- ratives, and collective memories; about having access to tools, social networks, and online services managed by feminist technology collec- tives or cooperatives. And, of course, it is also about advancing social and gender justice in technological environments. To achieve these goals, we need to continue discussing the following questions: What is the purpose of running a Feminist Server? What makes a server autonomous and feminist? Where are possible (socially sustainable) models for these servers? How do we build the necessary trust to de- velop cooperative approaches to managing these spaces of resistance and transformation?

Giving Back We conclude this compilation of texts with some reflections by Florencia Goldsman on contemporary forms of cyberfeminism in Latin America: “A social cyberfeminism must necessarily include the vindication of the connection of different geographical regions and not just those regions that are thought to be more developed. … “Latin American forms of cyberfeminism constitute a network of technology activists and other active people spread across a vast continent marked by disasters, violence, emergency situations, and unequal access to ICT. In our perception as active participants in this movement, discourse arises directly from practices – not from the ab- stract theorization of forms of cyberfeminism. “At present, there are still large number of open questions: How can we use technologies in a liberating way? What new instruments do we need to develop to emancipate ourselves? We work on these questions by discussing and writing together while still using spaces and tools that are determined by androcentric logic. “The dream of a Latin American feminist internet has a neces- sary critical potential, but at the same time we recognize that there are already numerous initiatives with the capacity to act together and transform – without necessarily defining themselves as cyberfeminist. “For Latin American social cyberfeminism, practiced both by women and feminists in particular, the creative appropriation of public-private technology scenarios is crucial; this in the only way to synth 187

Creating New Worlds // 55 develop liberating ideas, to exercise the right to information and com- munication, and to make visible the demands of feminism.”42 With all these ideas in mind and all the multiverse thinking that is yet to be discovered and produced, and knowing that this network is a galaxy that is creating new worlds, we say goodbye with the following proposals from the compañeras Kéfir and Vedetas: “Our actions are not guided by the desire for more people, more women, more bodies to connect with digital technology. We accept that some will not have access to it – and may not even want to .... But we bring together different identity struggles (female, black, trans, non-binary) with a historical Latin American burden, that of being servidoras [servants/servers]. Against the background that we have never experienced social and economic justice, this is our way of re- sisting; the possibility of transgressing boundaries, of forming new al- liances, and of being “servants” in a more technological sense, masters of technologies and of knowledge generated by ourselves – rather than merely reflections of what we are observing. “Could a different design and logic create spaces that are not spac- es of violence? What happens if we radically change the notion of gender, which implies that women do not create technology? What changes would we strive for at the collective level once we understand that we are not just consumers at the service of private companies? What happens when we interfere in the deepest depths of Net archi- tecture? It is not just about gender-specific violence online, but also about designing and programming the platforms and structures that connect us. The internet could cease to be a male domain if we ques- tion the power structures that are invisible at first glance. “It sounds utopian and far away, but in the end we are only turn- ing back to the beginnings of the internet. We can imagine another world and also another internet, one in which we have equal rights in relation to technology; a network in which privacy and the total con- trol of our data are fundamental principles for building safe spaces; in

42 Marta Florencia Goldsman, “#libertad para belen: twitter y el debate sobre el abor- to en la argentina” [“#Freedom for Belen: Twitter and the Debate on Abortion in Argentina], 2018., Dissertation written as part of the post-graduate program Comunicação e Cultura Contemporâneas at the faculty for communication at the Federal University of Bahia. 188 synth

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which the same principles of autonomy apply to technology and to our bodies: our spaces, our rules, our freedom.”43

43 See https://fermentos.Kéfir.red/aco-pele/ and https://www.genderit.org/ node/5078. synth 189

CODES OF CONDUCT Transforming Shared Values into Daily Practice

Femke Snelting

Codes of Conduct are the rules of behavior that a communi- ty agrees upon. Such documents explicitly or euphemistically ac- knowledge the possibility of harassment, and sometimes provide guidelines for the course of action in case an incident would occur. Codes of Conduct have become default practice in Free/Libre and Open Source communities worldwide, to the point that nowadays it would be hard to find a project without one in place.1 Projects as diverse as FreeBSD, Python, and the Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) have formulated pro- tocols to address the on- and off-line behavior of their communi- ty members.

1 Geek Feminism Wiki, “Conference anti-harassment/Adoption.” http://geekfem- inism.wikia.com/wiki/Conference_anti-harassment/Adoption

57 190 synth

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In 2013, The Python Foundation asked the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM), a community I contributed to at the time, to im- plement a Code of Conduct. The responses on the LGM mailing list ranged from expressions of fear that such a code might give future participants the impression that terrible things had happened, to peo- ple finding it hard to believe that Libre Graphics Meeting, an event they had always considered to be comfortable and convivial, would need a Code of Conduct to begin with. Some insisted aggressively that such codes were a preemptive response to political correctness or that “Free societies rely on open and sometimes heated public de- bates.” Again, others worried about how the Libre Graphics Meeting Code of Conduct might contradict local laws, or wondered how neg- ativity could be avoided: “Personally, I would like to see language that talks of ‘respect’ (a positive term) rather than ‘anti-harassment’ (a neg- ative term).”2 After four days of intense mailing list traffic, several people including myself volunteered to formulate a code, if only be- cause the Python foundation had made the presence of such a docu- ment a requirement for sponsorship. For me, Codes of Conduct were part of a feminist project that confronts systemic oppression through the work of articulation. In the spirit of Jo Freeman’s “Tyranny of Structurelessness.”3 I considered them a way to make discourse pos- sible on sexism, racism, able-ism, and other forms of exclusion that operate in our communities. I joined a workgroup consisting of mem- bers from The Gimp Project, the World Wide Web Consortium, and a project that then was known as Valentina, to work on a draft and to seek consensus around it. The Libre Graphics Meeting Code of Conduct was finally adopted in 2015, but the long and confusing process that got us there left many questions unanswered. The invitation to contribute to this publication was a welcome opportunity to work through some of the issues and challenges that Codes of Conduct present F/LOSs communities with. I started by tracing a genealogy of their appearance in the context of F/LOSs. It is an incomplete account that will hopefully invite further discus- sion and history writing. The essay continues with a close reading of

2 CREATE mailinglist, “Code of conduct,” January 2014. https://lists.freedesktop. org/archives/create/2014-January/thread.html#4712 3 Freeman, Jo. “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” http://www.jofreeman.com/ joreen/tyranny.htm synth 191

Codes of Conduct // 59 eight actual documents from Python, GNOME, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Django, KDE, Debian and, of course, the Libre Graphics Meeting. Paying attention to the phrasing of “diversity,” “conflict” and “enforce- ment” in these documents shows how their ambitions are as dissimilar as the communities that formulate them. Now that the adoption of Codes of Conduct is ubiquitous, it seems even more important to (re-) open a conversation on their feminist potential.

The context of conduct FLOSs communities are particularly sensitive to the ways words can be made flesh, both as code and as law.4 The object of interest that its developers and users gather around is source code, a specific form of language, which is made executable through regulation. The world- ing power of language is also present in the legal invention of open content licensing. By creatively turning conventional copyright law upside down, these licenses make the re-using, distribution, and de- velopment of source code possible. While the regulatory frameworks of code and law are at its base, FLOSs communities are epistemically and culturally complex environ- ments. The often-quoted statement “We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code,”5 illustrates that the general spirit is anti-establishment and meritocratic. But as the projects gained in size and age, various practices of governance de- veloped in the shape of bespoke guidelines such as the Debian Social Contract and other idiosyncratic norms, if necessary supplemented with conventional institutional forms such as the GNOME founda- tion, the Django Software Foundation, and the Python Foundation. FLOSs communities have also remained predominantly white, male and Anglophone. The widely-discussed results of a large-scale

4 “We understand the internal perspective of legal regulation – for example, that the restrictions the law might impose on a company’s freedom to pollute are a product of self-conscious regulation, reflecting values of the society imposing that regulation. That perspective is harder to recognize with code. It could be there, but it need not. And no doubt this is just one of many important differences between.” Lessig, Lawrence. Code is law. Basic books, 2006 5 Clark, David D. “A Cloudy Crystal Ball – Visions of the Future.” Presentation given at the Internet Engineering Task Force, 1992 192 synth

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surveys held in 2003 and 2013 helped grow awareness of the fact that Free, Libre, and Open Source communities were even less diverse than commercial software environments.6 In the meantime, reports of harassment kept surfacing. It confirmed FLOSs communities as hostile environments where figureheads such as Richard Stallman considered it funny to make so-called “EMACS virgin jokes,”7 where a bug-report on the presence of rote sexism in a software manual was flooded with misogynous comments,8 and where using de-feminized IRC nicknames became a necessary strategy for many women.9 This culture of oppressive behavior embarrassed the professional ambitions of certain projects and deeply troubled others. It is in this paradoxical context of uncomfortable governance, of do-ocracies with a legal leaning and of normalized misogyny that Codes of Conduct emerge as the medium of choice for regulat- ing behavior.

A genealogy of codes Codes of Conduct come in many flavors, even if they repeat similar formulas, and go under the same name. They roughly express three in- terconnected but different goals: to affirm the inclusivity and diversity of FLOSS communities, to facilitate the mediation of disagreements, and to prevent and respond to cases of harassment. Some codes read as motivational mission statements, where conduct is linked to the values of the project in question. Others are more like organization- al documents that emphasize the importance of efficiently resolving conflicts in order to ensure a productive environment. Again, others are explicitly formulated as anti-harassment policies.

6 “Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study.” International Institute of Infonomics University of Maastricht, The Netherlands; Berlecon Research GmbH Berlin, Germany, 2002 and “FLOSS survey 2013.” Libresoft, 2013. 7 Garrett, Matthew. “RMS and virgins,” 2009 https://mjg59.livejournal. com/113408.html 8 Lena. “Bug 155385 – complaint about geli(8) manpage.” FreeBSD Bugzilla, 2011 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=155385 9 Meyer, Robert, Cukier, Michel. “Assessing the Attack Threat due to IRC Channels” Conference paper: Dependable Systems and Networks, 2006. synth 193

Codes of Conduct // 61 These different modes of address seem to reflect the diverse prac- tices that implicitly or explicitly influenced the formulation and (imagined) function of Codes of Conduct in the context of FLOSS. Historically, the term “Code of Conduct” appears in relation to the changing international business practices in the early 1990s. In the aftermath of state de-regulation and the globalization of capital, trans- national companies were pressured by NGOs and trade unions to vol- untary adopt Codes of Conduct. In the absence of state control and international legal frameworks, this would, at least in theory, regulate the impact of global enterprises on social and environmental condi- tions.10 It is no surprise that the de-politicized mix of managerial and motivational language of these business codes rings through in docu- ments adopted by projects such as Ubuntu and Python. Both projects operate in a US-based entrepreneurial environment. A second influence is the informal tradition of “netiquette,” which circulated in the early days of the Internet. Reiterating the way “eti- quette” functions as a framework to govern social interactions through behavioral norms, netiquette established a loose set of conventions, which facilitated friction-free interaction over networks.11 Common- sense advice such as “Remember that the recipient (of your e-mail) is a human being whose culture, language, and humor have different points of reference from your own,” has found its way into many Codes of Conduct. In some codes, for example the one for GNOME and Ubuntu, you can recognize the ambition of traditional oaths such as The Order of the Engineer or the Hippocratic Oath that medical students pledge before entering professional life. In a similar fashion, Ubuntu requires new contributors to electronically undersign their Code of Conduct as part of a rite of passage into the Ubuntu community. Last but not least, Codes of Conduct are influenced by feminist and LGBTQ activism for Safe Spaces, as well as anti-oppression practices that address racism, sexism, homophobia, and trans-phobia

10 Jenkins, Rhys. “Corporate Codes of Conduct: Self-Regulation in a Global Economy.” UNRISD Programme Papers on Technology, Business and Society, 2001. 11 The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), “Netiquette Guidelines.” https:// tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855 194 synth

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head on.12 Their intersectional approach to privilege and power can be found in the language and methods of certain Codes of Conduct, such as the one adopted by FreeBSD. This influence can be partially traced back to the persistence of the US-based Ada Initiative that, in the period 2011-2015, actively interfered with the internal politics of many FLOSS projects in order to make sure they would adopt effec- tive Codes of Conduct. The first code in the context of FLOSS appeared in 2004. Debian and Ubuntu contributor Benjamin Mako Hill allegedly typed up “one of the key innovations that Ubuntu pioneered in free software communities” over lunch.13 In the rationale for this casual innova- tion, Ubuntu explains that the code is the foundation for all of their governance practices and should “help people participate in decisions regarding the Ubuntu community and distribution.”14 Due to its ear- ly arrival in a widespread community, and maybe because of the ex- clusively positive terminology it uses, this document has served as a template for many codes to follow. It took almost ten years before the adoption of CoCs spread wid- er. From 2008 onwards, contributors to The Geek Feminism Wiki actively documented harassment in the context of FLOSS, the tech- nology industry, gaming, and fandom. They were joined by the Ada Initiative in 2011, and their combined efforts have no doubt had an important influence on the sense of urgency that especially US-based projects must have felt.15 Ada Initiative founder Mary Gardiner ex- plains: “Had you asked me in 2003 for troublesome incidents in Free Software... I don’t know that I would have been able to give you ex- amples of anyone doing anything much wrong. A few unfortunate comments about cooking and babies at LUGs, perhaps. Things start- ed to change my awareness slowly.”16 In 2014, a growing number of

12 Fithian, Lisa, Oswald Mitchell, Dave. “Theory: Anti-oppression” in: Beautiful Trouble, OR books, 2012. 13 Mako Hill, Benjamin. “Updating the Ubuntu Code of Conduct.” https://mako. cc/copyrighteous/updating-the-ubuntu-code-of-conduct 14 “Governance.” Ubuntu website. https://www.ubuntu.com/community/governance 15 “Timeline of Incidents.” Geek Feminism Wiki. http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/ wiki/Timeline_of_incidents 16 Gardiner, Mary. “Why we document.” Geek Feminism Blog, 2009 https://geek- feminism.org/2009/08/19/why-we-document synth 195

Codes of Conduct // 63 conference organizers and speakers began to pledge that they would stop contributing to events without a Code of Conduct in place,17 and both the Python and the Django foundation demanded all proj- ects they sponsored to adopt a Code of Conduct. By this time, social and financial pressure had aligned to normalize Codes of Conduct even for the most reluctant communities.

Gaining strength from diversity Reading through the Codes of Conduct of seven major FLOSS com- munities (Python, GNOME, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Django, KDE and Debian) and the Libre Graphics Meeting, it is striking how many of them open with a diversity statement:

“The Python community is made up of members from around the globe with a diverse set of skills, personal- ities, and experiences. It is through these differences that our community experiences great successes and continued growth.” (Python)

The TODO Group, an initiative that developed the influential Open Code of Conduct, believes that the adoption of a code helps “set the ground rules for participation in communities, and more importantly helps to build a culture of respect and improve diver- sity.”18 With the majority of FLOSS contributors being white, male, and from the affluent North,19 this imagined “diversity” is still sad- ly at odds with reality. Explicitly articulating diversity in a Code of Conduct can be part of a strategy to change the culture from within and might have an effect on diversification in the long term. It is also

17 #cocpledge https://twitter.com/cocpledge 18 TODO. “Open Code of Conduct” https://github.com/todogroup/ opencodeofconduct/tree/13611b3023881dbf5a2914e73873dea178e160fc 19 Demby, Gene. “Why Isn’t Open Source a Gateway For Coders Of Color?” Code Switch, December 2013 https://www.npr.org/sections/ codeswitch/2013/12/05/248791579/why-isnt-open-source-a-gateway-for- coders-of-color. Dryden, Ashe. “The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community.” https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor- and-the-oss-community 196 synth

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fair to say that Ubuntu, Debian, and Python have not only adopted a Code of Conduct, but also initiated multiple activities and policies to address gender disparity in their communities.

“We gain strength from diversity, and actively seek participation from those who enhance it. This code of conduct exists to ensure that diverse groups collaborate to mutual advantage and enjoyment. We will challenge prejudice that could jeopardise the participation of any person in the project.” (Ubuntu)

However, such hopeful diversity statements run the risk of obscur- ing the systemic problems operating within and around these projects. The insistence on being already inclusive might make it harder to re- port incidents that would contradict such claims: “Diversity provides a positive, shiny image of the organization that allows inequalities to be concealed and thus reproduced.”20 Other uses of the term “diversity” address differences within the relatively homogeneous but internationally distributed communities of FLOSS, where proud autodidacts, opinionated computer scien- tists, engineering students, hobbyists, and professionals gather. To communicate in many flavors of English across varying social and cultural backgrounds can be challenging:

“Diversity is one of our huge strengths, but it can also lead to communication issues and unhappiness. To that end, we have a few ground rules that we ask peo- ple to adhere to.” (Django)

“We accept that people have differences of opinion, that they communicate those in various ways, and that social norms may vary across cultures. Sometimes the impact our behaviour has on others isn’t immediately apparent to us.” (Libre Graphics Meeting)

20 Ahmed, Sarah. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012. synth 197

Codes of Conduct // 65 The acknowledgment of “communication issues” hints at the cost of conflict that can paralyze development more than anything. It be- comes clear that Codes of Conduct not only express a desire for di- versity but also propose ways to manage the flow of collaboration in order to secure a productive environment:

“Debian contributors have many ways of reaching our common goal of a free operating system which may differ from your ways. Assume that other people are working towards this goal. Note that many of our con- tributors are not native English speakers or may have different cultural backgrounds.” (Debian)

“The FreeBSD Project is inclusive. We want the FreeBSD Project to be a venue where people of all backgrounds can work together to make the best oper- ating system, built by a strong community.” (FreeBSD)

Conflict resolution for healthy communities Techno-ideological conflicts in FLOSs environments can be relent- less. These “disagreements” prove hard to resolve on the basis of mer- itocratic values such as technical excellence, effort, or achievement alone. Because conflicts can paralyze projects for long periods of time, it became important to develop practices that prevent the costly re-negotiation of core aims as much as possible.21 It is telling that even Linus Torvalds, notorious for testing the limits of conduct him- self,22 decided to merge a “Code of Conflict” into the Linux Kernel documentation:

“In a project the size of Debian, inevitably there will be people with whom you may disagree, or find it dif- ficult to cooperate. Accept that, but even so, remain

21 Mateos-Garcia, Juan, Steinmueller, W. Edward. “The Institutions of Open Source Software: Examining the Debian Community” in: Information Economics and Policy Volume 20, Issue 4, December 2008, Pages 333-344 22 Corbet, Jonathan. “How to enforce Debian’s code of conduct.” lwn.net, September 2012 https://lwn.net/Articles/611317/ 198 synth

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respectful. Disagreement is no excuse for poor behav- ior or personal attacks, and a community in which people feel threatened is not a healthy community.” (Debian)23

In the “‘socially-light’ and ‘intimacy-averse’”24 on-line environ- ments of IRC channels and mailing lists, a disagreement can easi- ly turn into a development-crippling flame-war. In their respective codes, the Django and KDE project carefully formulate their idea of constructive conduct in such case:

“Disagreements, both social and technical, happen all the time and Django is no exception. It is important that we resolve disagreements and differing views con- structively. Remember that we’re different.” (Django)

“Disagreements, both political and technical, hap- pen all the time. Our community is no exception to the rule. The goal is not to avoid disagreements or differing views but to resolve them constructively.” (KDE)

Dealing with the consequences All documents but one (Debian has published a separate diversity statement) highlight the diversity and inclusiveness of their respec- tive communities, and all but one (FreeBSD) pay attention to how disagreements should be dealt with. The prevention of, and response to harassment receives much less attention, arrives at the end of the documents and is often not present at all. The priorities of the Ada Initiative clearly lie elsewhere. According to them, an effective Code of Conduct includes, first of all, “Specific descriptions of common but unacceptable behavior (sexist jokes,

23 Linux Kernel Documentation Code of Conflict https://www.kernel.org/doc/ html/v4.10/process/code-of-conflict.html 24 The institutions of Open Source Software: Examining the Debian Community, Mateos-Garcia, Juan, Steinmueller, W. Edward. “The Institutions of Open Source Software: Examining the Debian Community” in: Information Economics and Policy Volume 20, Issue 4, December 2008, Pages 333-344 synth 199

Codes of Conduct // 67 etc.)” and, additionally, “reporting instructions with contact infor- mation, information about how it may be enforced, a clear demarca- tion between unacceptable behavior (...) and community guidelines such as general disagreement resolution.” According to a survey on the Geek Feminism Wiki, not many Codes of Conduct fulfill these first three requirements:

“Overall, we’re good to each other. We contribute to this community not because we have to, but because we want to. If we remember that, these guidelines will come naturally.” (Python)25

The insistence of the Ada Initiative on enforceable mechanisms of responsibility comes down to two basic elements: listing unacceptable behavior takes away the burden from someone reporting harassment to define the nature of harassment itself, and clear guidelines will guarantee that in case something happens, those who report incidents can trust that they will be heard. When it comes to enforcement, some codes assume that guide- lines lead to better conduct naturally. Others explicitly state that their Code of Conduct will not be enforced:

“GNOME creates software for a better world. We achieve this by behaving well towards each other. Therefore this document suggests what we consid- er ideal behavior, so you know what to expect when getting involved in GNOME. This is who we are and what we want to be. There is no official enforcement of these principles, and this should not be interpreted like a legal document.” (GNOME)

The phrase “this should not be interpreted like a legal document” points to the complicated relation that these codes have with the law. It seems, at least partially, related to the reluctance to summon exter- nal governing bodies, unless absolutely necessary:

25 “Code of conduct evaluations.” Geek Feminism Wiki http://geekfeminism.wikia. com/wiki/Code_of_conduct_evaluations 200 synth

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“If you believe anyone is in physical danger, please no- tify appropriate law enforcement first.” (FreeBSD)

Communication on mailing lists happens between geographically dispersed participants, so it is not always clear which local laws apply. For conferences, it might be that the legal situation of a host country does or does not cover the terms specified in the code. In many cas- es, anti-discrimination statements reiterate international and national agreements as if they are community-specific values:

“To achieve the goals of the Code of Conduct, the or- ganizers of the Libre Graphics Meeting will check be- fore the selection of a location is made, if local laws are compatible with the CoC.” (Libre Graphics Meeting)

Whenever a Code of Conduct includes a clause with reporting instructions and ways the code may be enforced, this comes down to assigning specific community members as “community liaison” or “Code of Conduct Committee.” They are charged with information gathering, deciding whether a violation was committed, and carrying out a sentence if applicable. This can be a private or public repri- mand, a permanent or temporary ban, a request for public or pri- vate apology or a process of mediation. As a consequence, the way community-members relate to each other radically changes. Not en- forcing a Code of Conduct that promises to do so is alienating for those experiencing or reporting a violation. But when some volunteer members become responsible for policing others, this can create dif- ficult and destabilizing situations for everyone involved: reporters of harassment, perpetrators of violations, and liaisons alike. There is no easy way out:

“We will do our best to respond within one week to the person who filed the report with either a resolu- tion or an explanation of why the situation is not yet resolved. Once we have determined our final action, we will contact the original reporter to let them know what action (if any) we will be taking.” (FreeBSD) synth 201

Codes of Conduct // 69 “The contact person(s) will take appropriate mea- sures when necessary, such as removing someone from the premises or channels.” (Libre Graphics Meeting)

Only two of the eight documents that I worked with demarcate unacceptable behavior. Django lists desired conduct first (be respect- ful, considerate, collaborative, open, patient, generous, assume peo- ple mean well, take responsibility...) before arriving at the following definition:

“Violent threats or language directed against another person. Discriminatory jokes and language. Posting sexually explicit or violent material. Posting (or threat- ening to post) other people’s personally identifying in- formation (“doxing”). Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms. Unwelcome sexual atten- tion. Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior. Repeated harassment of others. In general, if someone asks you to stop, then stop.” (Django)

Such dictionaries of harassment are painful to write and read. But as intersectional activist Lisa Fithian warns us, the discomfort comes with facing oppression and is a necessary part of the process:

“Comments that reinforce systemic oppression relat- ed to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion. Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment. Deliberate misgendering. Deliberate use of “dead” or rejected names. Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behav- ior in spaces where they’re not appropriate. Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g. textu- al descriptions like “*hug*” or “*backrub*”) without consent or after a request to stop. Threats of violence. Incitement of violence towards any individual, in- cluding encouraging a person to commit suicide or to 202 synth

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engage in self-harm. Deliberate intimidation. Stalking or following. Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment pur- poses. Sustained disruption of discussion. Unwelcome sexual attention. Pattern of inappropriate social con- tact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others. Continued one-on-one com- munication after requests to cease. Deliberate “outing” of any private aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse. Publication of non-ha- rassing private communication without consent. Publication of non-harassing private communication with consent but in a way that intentionally misrep- resents the communication (e.g. removes context that changes the meaning). Knowingly making harmful false claims about a person.” (FreeBSD)26

The feminist potential of Codes of Conduct Now that many FLOSs projects have adopted Codes of Conduct, the attention for these documents rapidly diminishes. The Ada Initiative closed in 2015, the Geek Feminism wiki is currently in archive mode, and TODO announced that it “will not be continuing work on the open code of conduct.”27 The Code of Conduct adopted by the Libre

26 Fithian, Lisa, Oswald Mitchell, Dave. “Theory: Anti-oppression” in: Beautiful Trouble, OR books, 2012. 27 Ada-Initiative. “The Ada Initiative closed in October 2015 but we en- courage you to continue supporting women in open technology and cul- ture by continuing and building on the Ada Initiative’s work.” https:// adainitiative.org/2015/08/announcing-the-shutdown-of-the-ada-initiative/ Geek Feminism Wiki. “The Geek Feminism Wiki is effectively in archival mode. New accounts are restricted from editing due to vandalism, and we do not have the volunteer labor available to whitelist new accounts and mon- itor activity” http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Geek_Feminism_Wiki TODO. “Update: We will not be continuing work on the open code of conduct.” http://todogroup.org/opencodeofconduct/#Open+Code+of+Conduct synth 203

Codes of Conduct // 71 Graphics Community in 2015 has never been evaluated, adjusted, or discussed afterwards. Obviously there are a lot of questions to ask about the ways in which these codes really function. Do the communities that adopt them indeed diversify? Did the amount of disagreements diminish, and were they dealt with more constructively? Are there fewer inci- dents of harassment to report? And have communities gotten better at handling incidents? I think there is feminist potential hidden in the meticulous but con- fused wordings of Codes of Conduct. The process of formulating them provided a much-needed platform for community-wide conversations on harassment and mechanisms of exclusion. Codes that contain explicit ex- amples of harassment have made people reflect on their own contribution to the pervasiveness of oppressive behavior, even if reluctantly and awk- wardly. They have opened up the possibility to identify and call out such behavior and have made it clear that there exists relentless resistance to do so as well. When it comes to enforcement, I wonder about the way proj- ects seem to agree on trusting dedicated community members with the task. It means essentially a move of containment that makes it very hard to address these issues beyond individual perpetration. We might learn from radical feminist hacker-initiatives how to build collective spaces that allow us to address systemic oppression together. Without collective attention and experimentation, Codes of Conduct risk producing a sense of already-safe and already-diverse environments where diversity work is efficiently outsourced to the document. We need to keep activating these tools to articulate con- cerns and to create communities of conduct that can operate with difference, that can keep conflict in the room, and that are ready to work through mistakes. We should abandon these documents. They deserve our persistent interaction and intervention.

Bibliography This text is based on a close reading of the following Codes of Conduct:

• FreeBSD https://www.freebsd.org/internal/code-of-conduct.html • Debian https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct • Ubuntu https://www.ubuntu.com/community/code-of-conduct 204 synth

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• Libre Graphics Meeting https://libregraphicsmeeting.org/lgm/ public-documentation/code-of-conduct/ • KDE https://www.kde.org/code-of-conduct/ • Django https://www.djangoproject.com/conduct/ • GNOME https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/Foundation/ CodeOfConduct • Python https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ synth 205

THE FEMINIST PRINCIPLES OF THE INTERNET or the personal_collective story of imagining and making #feministinternet

Text by hvale vale

Intro Creation, except in religious stories, is never an act of loneliness or solitude. Creation is the transcendence of the personal in a voluntary recognition of the shared purpose of a journey.

I could have said this using one word: feminism. But then I would have spent far more time explaining what feminism, and which feminists I might mean by that. So, I thought, let’s start from co-creation and pleasure before going into the long, arcane labor of building communities, opening/discovering paths takenby ac- tivists in their local, embodied resistances, push-backs, and hopes for a diversity-welcoming world.

73 206 synth

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Feminist principles are born in and from the political thinking of an incredible group of 52 activists from various realms: women’s rights, sexuality, digital/internet rights, and intersectional feminism. The personal and collective space of r_existence1 is overwhelming- ly what in international development jargon is called the “Global South,” meaning the entire world except the Northern-Western- white-capitalist-male: North America, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand. Having said that, since each North needs to have a South to threaten, among those 52 feminists there were activists born and coming from the abovementioned North. Beyond traditional geography, the most prominent territorial dimension of feminist principles is the internet. Understanding the internet and its digital, virtual dimension as intrinsically the same s_ place2 in hosting our lives, is essential to understanding the “why” of the Feminist Principles of the Internet. The internet hosts a continuum of our bodies, not a fractured or fragmented projection of data bits. The internet is in fact just another dimension of the world we all live in. As such, it flourishes with exclu- sions, exploitations, misogyny, sexism, racism… and flourishes with creation, passion, and of course, hacking. So, the story of the Feminist Principles of the Internet is a story of co-creation: the perpetual, collective, and passionate hacking. I will try to tell this story from the beginning, as I know it.

Questions from Cornelia Sollfrank Answers by hvale vale

CS: You have been involved in the process of writing up the Feminist Principles of the Internet. First of all, could you please explain what these principles are, or give a general description/overview.

HV: The Feminist Principles of the Internet are a compass to help us move through the uncharted and wild territory of the InternetS (we’ll

1 Neologism coined by the author, combining the words “resistance” and “exis- tence,” indicating the attitude of resisting through everyday life. 2 Neologism coined by the author combining the words “space” and “place.” synth 207

The Feminist Principles of the Internet // 75 come back later to the plural), and at the same time, the drawing of that territory, i.e. the chart itself. The Feminist Principles of the Internet are a political and analyti- cal framework. They offer a perspective that comes from the lived ex- perience of “women and queer persons in all our diversities.” A read- ing that embeds the theoretical and the programmatic in a nutshell. As co-creation, it changes through the experiences, reflections, and conversations of the persons that participated and have become part of them. The current version of the Feminist Principles of the Internet (FPIs) consists of 17 principles, which can be grouped into five broad areas/sections: Access, (Principles 1, 2, and 3); Movements and Public Participation, (Principles 4, 5, and 5); Economy (Principles 7 and 8); Expression (Principles 9, 10, and 11); and Embodiment (Principles 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17). The first, Access, comprises of multiple dimensions: from connec- tivity, cables and last miles, to devices, content, and the ability to ac- cess information, but also to produce and share it. It speaks of auton- omous infrastructures, decentralized networks owned by people, and of the many potential InternetS against the one-size-fits-all-internet promoted by corporations. The principles regarding Movement and Public Participation rec- ognize the internet as a place and a space of public discourse, and as such, our space of resistance and transformation. A space of resis- tance against the oppressive and discriminatory social norms, but also a space of power and creativity used to connect and build movement from the very local to the very global. It states that technology is a given in our movement building and calls for understanding the ma- chine and reclaiming it down to the code. This concept is then expanded and explained throughout the prin- ciples regarding Economy and Open Source, which touch upon the economic model and its roots. It envisions an economy based on sol- idarity and denounces the exploitative nature of the various venture start-ups. It talks about collective intelligence, the right to see, build, and change the code, but also about a different concept of security – one that is centered on people rather than states. The next thematic area under the theme Expression introduces counter-narratives and bodies as expression that counters the tradi- tional discourse of freedom of speech based on ideas and words. It 208 synth

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touches on pornography, but also “harmful” content and links it to agency, consent, labor, and power. The last set of principles is all about Embodiment and like the rest, is entrenched in feminist analyses, its practices, and the multiple discriminations it contends with. Each and every principle is based on intersectionality and these last six principles complete the framework. Consent: Yes means yes, and no means no – there isn’t any room for a blank yes; no predatory tick that can be made, and that stands for consent regarding unclear and constantly changing terms of use. The principle of Consent is theorized and practiced by feminism to explain gender-based violence. It has to be explicit, meaningful, and informed. The next one focuses on the intersection of data and priva- cy, far preceding the GDPR (the EU’s General Data and Protection Regulation). This is followed by Memory as the cornerstone of build- ing and growing personal and collective stories, and echoing the many archives and the incredible efforts that bring visibility to all voices and all personal stories. The last three principles regarding Anonymity, Children and Youth, and Online Violence close this thematic area. Their sequence is not accidental. The Feminist Principles project aims at dismantling patriarchy. This entails heteronormativity, gender iden- tity, sexual taboos, and social norms that are enforced online through the powerful algorithm full of internalized and undisclosed bias. Each of the principles recognizes the challenges and does not give black and white, or binary solutions. Instead, they call for agency and recognition of diversity. That’s why online violence appears last. The bodies that are targeted, our bodies, are targeted because of the ways in which they-are-not. Online violence is the product of a misogynistic, patriarchal, mor- alistic world and because of this, access to the internet is prevented – a vicious circle of cause and effect. The principles are by their nature short statements. They mention the change, how the world would look like with, and on, a feminist internet. They are a vision. When reading or using them, there is no need to take them as an indivisible block. They come from activists, from the women’s rights, sexual rights, and internet rights movements. They came into existence as an act of freedom and with the intention to give form to the shared desire for a feminist internet in our practices of resistance and transformation. synth 209

The Feminist Principles of the Internet // 77 We have all experienced the mainstream assumption of the neu- trality of the internet/technology, invariably used to invalidate any request for participation, accountability, transparency, and response that linked the internet to issues of gender, sexuality, class, race, dis- ability, and so on. The invisibility cloak that was covering all our bod- ies was the norm of the internet/technology. We need to look at the principles as an exercise of naming the territory called “the internet” from a feminist perspective. And I say “territory” because we did not look at the internet as a tool, but as a space, a place not unlike the other places and spaces in which ac- tivists and feminists invest their lives to achieve change, justice, and transformation. We also wanted to build an instrument to help dismantle the as- sumptions coming from the “neutral” minds and bodies. A chart that would call out this embodiment as part of the patriarchy and its “as- sumption of neutrality” as the “absence of self-reflection on genders, sexualities and power.” So the Feminist Principles of the Internet are part of the “herstorical” production of a feminist manifesto that sig- nifies knowledge and a political stand. As such they are short, dense, affirmative, and open. A clarification: I use “we” as an open-ended collective of people. The experience around the FPI was and is collective, and what I am describing here is how I came to be a part of it, who called me in, and why I feel strongly about the FPI. The FPI were and are a process started in 20143 and the current version was finalized in 2016.

CS: How did the idea emerge to create such a document, who was involved in producing it and could u please describe some milestones of this process?

HV: The first version of the FPI was drafted in Malaysia in April 2014, during “Imagine a Feminist Internet,” an event attended by more than 50 activists organized by the Association for Progressive Communication (APC). The conveners of the Feminist Principles of the Internet were the incredible, visionary intersectional feminists and activists from the Women’s Rights Program4 of APC in 2014.

3 See https://www.genderit.org/articles/plain-sight-sexuality-rights-and-internet- india-nepal-and-sri-lanka 4 See https://www.apc.org/about/people/staff 210 synth

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The following year another meeting took place and in 2016 the current version of the FPIs was published. The FPI version 1.05 and 2.06 are the result of many conversations, in many languages, held locally and globally. Reflections and knowledges that feed back to each other in an environment of trust. Trust in the conveners, trust in the process, trust in the persons holding the process, trust in the community. If I have to think of the start, I cannot give a precise date. I know that the FPI are the result of many years of advocacy and knowl- edge-building by activists and feminists engaged at the intersection of many networks and movements: women’s rights, sexual rights and digital rights movements that wanted to articulate their actions, strat- egy and politics and build a language that recognizes the issue of pow- er7 and could be used to enhance the transformative power of internet and technology. An open call for an internet of rights, pleasure, and social justice. An internet that would recognize the discrimination it produces and expand and work to end it. An internet focused and centered on people, their realities, and diversity. From this desire, the politics of solidarity, embodiment, and trust have emerged. My story is just one version of what happened, and for people that want to know more I would suggest they look at the Feminist Internet online platform, or browse the internet to reach out to activists and friends.

CS: How big was the group involved in the discussion and production process, and what are the contexts and backgrounds of the people involved?

HV: More than 100 people participated in drafting the current version of the FPI during the two global meetings in 2014 and 2015, but many more used, critiqued, translated, and tested them into the form they have now. Last year, a third global assembly with approximately 80 activists moved from “Imagine a Feminist Internet” to “Make a

5 See https://www.genderit.org/sites/default/upload/fpi_v3.pdf 6 See https://feministinternet.org/en 7 See https://www.genderit.org/feminist-talk/panel-power-politics-and-agency- imagineafeministinternet synth 211

The Feminist Principles of the Internet // 79 Feminist Internet”8: that is, movement-building in the digital age, be- cause as I said, the feminist internet proceeds by iterations.

CS: You are using the first person plural, “we,” in the document. Who can consider themselves to belong to this “we” and who does not?

HV: The principles speak to different realities: age, disabilities, sexual- ities, gender identities and expression, socioeconomic locations, po- litical and religious beliefs, and racial markers. So I would say, anyone who senses the “we” as part of the self is part of it! Whoever is willing to engage in the transformative power of feminism. The catch is that it is inclusive, not exclusive, candid about privilege. So I would say the “we” is open, is the self/selves that need to reflect and make the move toward it.

CS: What were the most interesting/challenging aspects in the process of discussion?

HV: Putting together movements, politics, practices. Acknowledging the diversities and the privileges. Staying open and flexible, but also firm and clear. For me, the FPI talk about power. The power we chal- lenge and dismantle and the power we have, we share, we transform. Conversations about power are always challenging. Usually, we - the “we” I refer – see power used against us, but power asks for an inti- mate reflection. It is about understanding the place from where each of us speaks. The interesting part – and I think the fascination of the FPI – is that they are embodied by the people and this makes them absolutely fascinating and constantly evolving. To capture a vision of the world (the #feministinternet) in 17 principles is quite an exer- cise. The smile, the focus, the care, the passion enfolded in a welcom- ing-of-each-and-everyone-ethic is what makes the FPIs special. They come from the lived experience of many activists. They are not a theo- retical exercise, but they embed theory – a lot. They are a community and a platform. They are inscribed in the digital age. They come from and to the internet, and from and to our bodies. They are emotions and pleasure, but also justice and rights.

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CS: What is it that you have learned personally while working with the others on the document?

HV: Well, the Feminist Internet was a blast, and in my best political feeling, the best feminism I have ever practiced. The joy, the pleasure, the intimacy, the commitment, the passion that permeated the first meeting was the same that I felt in many other moments, instances, places. It sits with very specific people, activists I knew or met and resonated with, whether it was a digital story-telling workshop or a conference, or an internet governance forum. In any of those places, I was not alone and we had a very similar language, same sense, and same politics. So, when the #feministinternet meme surfaced, it just resonated and kept growing, and I sense it was a turning point. I ar- rived at the first Imagine a Feminist Internet with no expectation but full commitment. I only knew that it would be a place of joy. I did not become an activist to suffer, but to transform. I was convened, but felt like one of the conveners, and it is really special when the ones being hosted feel as if they are hosting also. There are many conventions and often they regard the branding as intrinsic. The FPIs did not, because the embodied feminist queer politics of the people that worked to run the #ImagineaFeministInternet, at Women’s Rights Program of APC, is so strong that it is far beyond the little greedy gardens of the many initiatives preoccupied with their status rather than transformation. The FPI are one of my vital spaces for co-creation. My learning is from being one of many, knowing how each and every contribution is essential – just as listening is essential and living is essential, and continuing is essential. And as a feminist, I’d like to thank the people that brought me there to transform.

CS: Where and how (locally and online) did the discussions take place? Was there a moderator involved or was the process self-organized?

HV: The conversations are continuous. The principles belong to any- one and we encourage people to use them locally, online as well as of- fline. This form embraces talks, workshops. They are there to help the discussion of issues related to our lives and the internet/technology and to help explore how they relate to specific contexts and realities. We know of some conversations, but there are many that just happen, and we/I learn about them casually. I would say that as a co-creation synth 213

The Feminist Principles of the Internet // 81 exercise, it is important to share the learning and the reflection be- cause in this way the Feminist Principles continue to grow, transform themselves and anyone who is interested and feels part of this con- versation. To help this two-way communication, it is best to visit our website, there are some suggestions and a contact email.9 Anyone, in- dividually or as a collective, can contribute to a principle. People can register and contribute through stories, ideas, and actions. Or, one can host a City Conversation “to adapt, localize and grow the FPI’s” in a sort of spiral learning that always comes back to itself, but at a dif- ferent level, similar but never the same, enriched and transformed by a repetition articulated locally and as a result of this diversity. The aim – and I will quote from the platform – is: “(...) to build a cross-move- ment interaction between sexual rights, women’s rights and internet rights activists, to strengthen participation in internet policy process- es, as well as deepen discussions specifically around privacy, the right to information and freedom of expression from a feminist and gender justice perspective.”

CS: How important is it to you to have the document available in many languages and how to do you make the document known? (For example, in the academic/art context that I am active in, nobody has heard of the document before.)

HV: The simple fact of translation generates reflection, conversation, discussion, and knowledge. There are more than 6,500 languages in the world. Very few people speak some, but for example Mandarin Chinese, is spoken by close to 850 million people in the world. So, yes, languages are important. We are aware that due to their position of power, English and Spanish have a huge base of secondary speak- ers. So we used English and Spanish as bridge languages, being aware of the intrinsic colonialist, imperialist pattern embedded in them. We invite people to translate the Feminist Principles of the Internet into their own languages, because during the process of translation inconsistencies and specificities will emerge. The current thematic area of “Embodiment” was previously “Agency,” which is a concept that doesn’t translate directly into many languages. I remember our own process while translating into BCS (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian).

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So, languages are part of the conversation as explicitly mentioned in Principle 2: “Access to information - We support and protect unre- stricted access to information relevant to women and queer persons, particularly information on sexual and reproductive health and rights, pleasure, safe abortion, access to justice, and LGBTIQ issues. This includes diversity in languages, abilities, interests and contexts.”

CS: Whom does the document address? Ideally, what would you like to achieve?

HV: Anyone who recognizes herself/himself/themselves as a feminist and anyone who wants to engage in pleasure, play, and the disman- tling of patriarchy. synth 215

FEMINIST PRINCIPLES OF THE INTERNET – VERSION 2.0

Author: Association for Progressive Communication APC

Publication date: August 2016

Available at: https://www.apc.org/en/pubs/ feminist-principles-internet-version-20

Preamble A feminist internet works towards empowering more women and queer persons – in all our diversities – to fully enjoy our rights, engage in pleasure and play, and dismantle patriarchy. This integrates our different realities, contexts, and specificities – including age, dis- abilities, sexualities, gender identities and expressions, socioeconom- ic locations, political and religious beliefs, ethnic origins, and racial markers. The following key principles are critical towards realizing a feminist Internet.

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Access

1. Access to the Internet A feminist Internet starts with enabling more women and queer per- sons to enjoy universal, acceptable, affordable, unconditional, open, meaningful, and equal access to the internet.

2. Access to information We support and protect unrestricted access to information relevant to women and queer persons, particularly information on sexual and re- productive health and rights, pleasure, safe abortion, access to justice, and LGBTIQ issues. This includes diversity in languages, abilities, interests, and contexts.

3. Use of technology Women and queer persons have the right to code, design, adapt and critically and sustainably use ICTs and reclaim technology as a plat- form for creativity and expression, as well as to challenge the cultures of sexism and discrimination in all spaces.

Movements and public participation

4. Resistance The internet is a space where social norms are negotiated, performed and imposed, often in an extension of other spaces shaped by patri- archy and heteronormativity. Our struggle for a feminist Internet is one that forms part of a continuum of our resistance in other spaces, public, private, and in-between.

5. Movement building The internet is a transformative political space. It facilitates new forms of citizenship that enable individuals to claim, construct and express selves, genders, and sexualities. This includes connecting across terri- tories, demanding accountability and transparency, and creating op- portunities for sustained feminist movement building. synth 217

Feminist Principles of the Internet – Version 2.0 // 85 6. Decision making in Internet governance We believe in challenging the patriarchal spaces and processes that control internet governance, as well as having more feminists and queers at the decision-making tables. We want to democratize poli- cy making affecting the internet, as well as diffuse ownership of and power in global and local networks.

Economy

7. Alternative economies We are committed to interrogating the capitalist logic that drives technology towards further privatization, profit, and corporate con- trol. We work to create alternative forms of economic power that are grounded in principles of cooperation, solidarity, commons, environ- mental sustainability, and openness.

8. Free and open source We are committed to creating and experimenting with technology, including digital safety and security, and using free/libre and open source software (FLOSS), tools, and platforms. Promoting, dissemi- nating, and sharing knowledge about the use of FLOSS is central to our praxis.

Expression

9. Amplifying feminist discourse We claim the power of the internet to amplify women’s narratives and lived realities. There is a need to resist the state, the religious right and other extremist forces that monopolize discourses of moral- ity, while silencing feminist voices and persecuting women’s human rights defenders.

10. Freedom of expression We defend the right to sexual expression as a freedom of expression issue of no less importance than political or religious expression. We strongly object to the efforts of state and non-state actors to control, surveil, regulate, and restrict feminist and queer expression on the 218 synth

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internet through technology, legislation, or violence. We recognize this as part of the larger political project of moral policing, censorship, and hierarchization of citizenship and rights.

11. Pornography and “harmful content” We recognize that the issue of online pornography has to do with agency, consent, power, and labor. We reject simple causal linkages made between consumption of pornographic content and violence against women. We also reject the use of the umbrella term “harmful content” to label expression on female and transgender sexuality. We support reclaiming and creating alternative erotic content that resists the mainstream patriarchal gaze and locates women and queer per- sons’ desires at the center.

Agency

12. Consent We call for the need to build an ethics and politics of consent into the culture, design, policies, and terms of service of online platforms. Women’s agency lies in their ability to make informed decisions on what aspects of their public or private lives to share online.

13. Privacy and data We support the right to privacy and to full control over personal data and information online at all levels. We reject the practices of states and private companies that use data for profit and to manipulate on- line behavior. Surveillance is the historical tool of patriarchy, used to control and restrict women’s bodies, speech, and activism. We pay equal attention to surveillance practices of individuals, the private sec- tor, as well as state and non-state actors.

14. Memory We have the right to exercise and retain control over our personal history and memory on the internet. This includes being able to ac- cess all our personal data and information online, and to be able to exercise control over this data, including knowing who has access to it and under what conditions, and the ability to delete it forever. synth 219

Feminist Principles of the Internet – Version 2.0 // 87 15. Anonymity We defend the right to be anonymous and reject all claims to restrict anonymity online. Anonymity enables our freedom of expression on- line, particularly when it comes to breaking taboos of sexuality and heteronormativity, experimenting with gender identity, and enabling safety for women and queer persons affected by discrimination.

16. Children and youth We call for the inclusion of the voices and experiences of young peo- ple in the decisions made about safety and security online and pro- mote their safety, privacy, and access to information. We recognize children’s right to healthy emotional and sexual development, which includes the right to privacy and access to positive information about sex, gender, and sexuality at critical times in their lives.

17. Online violence We call on all internet stakeholders, including internet users, policy makers, and the private sector to address the issue of online harassment and technology-related violence. The attacks, threats, intimidation, and policing experienced by women and queer persons are real, harm- ful and alarming, and are part of the broader issue of gender-based violence. It is our collective responsibility to address and end this. 220 synth

VIRAL PERFORMANCES OF GENDER

Christina Grammatikopoulou

Over the past decade feminism has become a ubiquitous term, appearing in debates regarding gender equality, sexism entrenched in everyday culture, and the right to make choices for one’s own body but also as a glittery brand used to promote products and services. Whether this popularization of a radical activist movement has led to an advancement of its causes is yet to be evaluated. However, we can begin to understand feminism’s impact by considering its manifesta- tions in politics and visual culture that have been put into the spot- light during the last 10 years. In this essay, I discuss the work of artists who express feminist issues, focusing on how they use “virality” and “noise” as communicative strategies. In order to put their work into context, I examine how, through its new strategies, feminism gains ground within connected and disconnected spaces, but also how the same strategies can be turned against it – be it through open attacks

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90 // The Beautiful Warriors against feminist manifestations or the abusive appropriation of the term feminism. In any case, the artists presented below seem to be aware of the contradictions emerging in the conflict area between ac- tivism, trolling and marketing, and use exactly these contradictions as an integral part of their work. The selection criteria of the material are both generational – fo- cusing on “digital natives,” who were brought up after the expansion of the Internet – and thematic, i.e. choosing works that deal with topics central to contemporary feminism, such as sexual assault, body positivity – the idea that all bodies are beautiful, regardless of age, shape and race – and gender stereotypes. The sources come mainly from online articles that deal with the separate issues discussed here – regarding feminism and troll culture – as there have been very few academic studies of these phenomena to this date. The inherent difficulty of defining and criticizing such artworks and actions is embraced as being representative of the argument of communicative “noise” that is central to this text. Noise, in this con- text, defines the interception and confusion introduced deliberately across communication platforms in order to make a message less clear to its recipients. Such noise can be the result of the nature of online platforms, where constant content updates are essential and new in- formation needs to be added, regardless of its accuracy or relevance. Often enough, there is deliberation behind it, as fake news is present- ed alongside facts and ideas that are met with trolling. Central to the approach of this text is to understand the “Expanded Space” as a novel space that defines the consequences and reception of the artworks. The everyday experience of most people now takes place within this continuum of online and offline spaces, whereby the digital networked space, experienced through the permanent use of computers and mobile communication tools, constantly trans- forms the experience of physical space. The understanding of space that goes along with this implies not starting from two separate poles of connectivity, not thinking in categories of online and offline, but understanding space as a sum of all possibilities: physical, expanded, virtual, mixed, and hybrid. The latest buzzword for this understand- ing of space, most often seen in business and marketing, is “phygital.” For the purpose of this essay I choose, however, to employ the rather descriptive term “Expanded Space” is preferred. I intend to empha- size the openness and the development potential of this space and to 222 synth

Viral Performances of Gender // 91 express the fusion of the physical and the digital driven by new tech- nologies. As the artists and activists integral to the argument made in this text are too young to remember a pre-internet world, it would be natural to assume that, for them, the continuity of these spaces is a given, especially compared to the previous generations, for whom connectivity gradually came to form part of their everyday experience. Below, I refer to contemporary feminism and feminist art, which pref- erably materialize in this Expanded Space where both connected and disconnected experiences intersect and mutually influence each other. Borrowed from biology, the term “virality” refers in media culture to the communication of any idea, image, video, or meme to which numerous users react. A viral post is shared horizontally – i.e. it is not sent directly from a source to a large number of users but rather from a source to users who then re-share it millions of times, thus allowing the post to reach a far greater number of people. It is also important to emphasize that virality is generated by the audience, and this means that as many people as possible must find the “story” in- teresting if they are to share it. For this reason, different types of tricks are often employed to generate virality: News stories are presented in an exaggerated way, include visually well-staged protests, or humor- ous memes. In other words, virality can serve a variety of purposes, from raising awareness to trolling or click baiting. It can express and reproduce existing power structures, but also transforms them in un- expected ways. One of the biggest challenges in dealing with the wide spectrum of contemporary feminism is to understand its true dimensions and to evaluate the significance and interdependencies of its various man- ifestations. In this regard, it could be helpful to begin on a small scale before proceeding towards larger contexts and concepts. Accordingly, my essay begins with artistic works in which themes and contradic- tions characteristic of contemporary feminism are expressed in differ- ent ways. A more comprehensive overview of the conditions, forms of expression, and potentials of contemporary feminism will then be developed, illustrating the connection between online and offline pro- tests. Finally, the focus will be shifted towards how viral tactics are used by marketing experts and anti-feminists – in similar ways, but each for very different purposes – thus generating noise that is often heard louder than feminist voices. synth 223

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Feminist Performances of Gender Contemporary feminist artists are performing within a space where women’s bodies become subject to presentation, optimization, mon- etization, criticism, and even attacks. It is a space extended by digital networked technologies where the potential to be seen and to interact with the audience is significantly amplified. The works often enter into dialogue with art history or reflect aspects of digital culture. More specifically, they question the traditional images of women, created by and for the male gaze, as they adhere to or subvert the poses and expressions of women that are widespread throughout art history and the media. The feminist performance artists examined here have con- trol over how they present themselves to the gaze of others. They are both subjects and objects of their work, and manifest both their in- teriors – experience and knowledge, and their exteriors – bodily and aesthetic forms. The reception of their works reflects the duality of the artist as simultaneously the object and subject of representation: In endless commentaries, the appearance of both the work and the artists are the objects of criticism and praise, One of the best-known artworks that emerged as an act of protest is Carry That Weight (2014/15) by Emma Sulkowicz. The endurance performance denounced the rape of the artist by one of her fellow students during her studies at Columbia University and the subse- quent dismissal of the case by the authorities. For nine months prior to graduation – the average length of a pregnancy – the performer carried a mattress around Campus, mostly alone, unless someone of- fered to help. Thus, Sulkowicz brought a personal experience, which was to be concealed, into the public space and symbolically showed her burden through the real weight of the mattress. The work quickly aroused great media interest, especially online, where it was received in an extremely polarized way: Artnet, the New York Times, and vari- ous feminist platforms praised it as one of the most important works of art of the year, while critics accused it of victimizing women. As the performance went viral, media attention shifted from the artwork to the story behind it. In social media, the work and the artist became the subject of violent attacks: Men’s rights activists launched a smear campaign against the artist, while the alleged rapist accused Sulkowicz of harassment. 224 synth

Viral Performances of Gender // 93 The memory of the rape is re-enacted by the artist in Ceci n’est pas un viol (2015), an online performance that consists of a video, an introductory text by the artist, and a comments section. In con- trast to the symbolic character of the Mattress Performance, here we have a representation of the events that traumatized the artist depicted on film, in a quality resembling the aesthetics of surveillance camera footage. This puts the viewers in the position of a police officer or a jury member examining the evidence before they make up their mind about what might have happened that day – a position that many so- cial media users assumed anyway once the story went viral. The online space of the performance was open to trolls enraged about the first performance, giving them the opportunity to consume the image of the artist’s body and post hateful remarks. In fact, the comments were an intended part of the performance. They show how rape victims who talk about their traumatic experiences are subjected to further humiliation. Without the artist’s initial questions regarding the work and the visitors’ comments, it would be easy to confuse the video with any online pornographic material. Providing only a few initial questions, the artist maintains a distanced approach throughout the performance, further highlighting the rage of her critics. This puts into perspective the artist Ann Hirsch’s statement that “[…] whenever you put your body online, in some way you are in conversation with porn.” Hirsch’s Playground (2013) also plays with sexuality and memory, but her work is even more nuanced. The live performance is set in the late 1990s, in a fictitious chat room in which two protagonists, a 12-year-old girl and a 27-year-old man, meet and “fall in love.” The work is based on the artist’s real experience of an online relationship with a much older man when she was in her ear- ly teens. For her even then, when the distinction between “real life” and “digital life” was much clearer, virtual communication felt very real. However, as the conversation evolves from a casual encounter to ever more intimate confessions, one could ask whether the emerging emotions reflect the course of the relationship or, rather, arise primar- ily from the artist’s imagination. Now an adult, the artist reflects on her past, alternating between her lived experience and the classifica- tion of that experience from today’s perspective. The result is a critical view of a relationship with unequal dynamics, in which the sexual awakening of the teenager involved with an older man is presented as problematic. synth 225

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Hirsch is particularly interested in online popular culture and the ways in which women might inhabit it. In her Scandalishious project (2008), she presented herself as “Caroline,” a “hipster college fresh- man” that published videos of herself dancing, reciting poems, and divulging personal thoughts on her YouTube channel. In this project, the artist tries to combine the two most ubiquitous clichés found on the Internet: A woman who dances in front of the camera and shows her sexuality, and a woman who simply speaks to the camera – and thus to the audience – without any sexual connotations. Thus, Hirsch alludes to the ancient stereotype of women being seen as either sinners or saints. “Caroline” became a huge success with online audiences who were unaware that the videos were in fact an online performance, and thus perceived her just as any other YouTuber, lefet comments, and responded to her videos. By adopting such a volatile character, Hirsch explored hidden sides of her personality and connected with people who reacted to her performance in a multidimensional way. Amalia Ulman is another artist who slips into different roles and integrates them cleverly into her social media stream, leaving the im- pression that they are in fact her own personal development. The per- formance Excellences & Perfections (2014) unfolded over four months on her Instagram account. She began publishing images of herself as an attractive girl who has just moved to L.A. and dreams of becom- ing famous. Her photos were the embodiment of what is commonly understood as “cute”: pastel colors, perfectly styled food, and stuffed animals. Soon, she became overly sexualized as a “sugar-babe” that underwent breast-enlargement surgery, attended pole-dancing classes, and lived a lavish lifestyle paid for by her “sugar daddies.” Then it was time for redemption, and Ulman’s persona was reborn as a “wellness goddess.” As she was changing her identity, her followers’ comments were changing, too: Critics warned her that she would not be taken seriously in the art world if she was showing off her body on social me- dia, while others congratulated her on her transformation. Eventually, she posted a final picture of a rose, with the caption: “The End.” The reception of Ulman’s performance shows that a woman flaunting her own image is always perceived as narcissistic, but she is sometimes forgiven if she does it for a greater good – in this case, for the sake of art. Once it became clear that the post were all part of a performance, the work was shown at renowned art venues (Tate Modern, Whitechapel Art Gallery) and received enthusiastic reviews. 226 synth

Viral Performances of Gender // 95 By switching between three personality types in such a short time, Ulman not only irritated her followers, but also emphasized the influ- ence and mechanisms of social media; at the same time, the invent- ed personas gave her the opportunity to experience new situations. Among others, the work raises the question of how “social media in- fluencers” become popular and how they display their lives alongside sponsored content and products. These online celebrities often take on different personae to address specific topics and target groups such as vegan food, fitness, fashion, lifestyle – maximizing their reach and number of “likes.” They produce carefully curated images of perfec- tion, unattainable beauty, and lifestyle. In this sense, Ulman’s perfect- ly selected and manipulated Instagram photos, made to look as some- thing that they are not, are not much different from any other social media profile that is created to gain maximum amount of popularity and become commercially successful. Online popularity is also the focus of Nuria Guiu’s interest. Combining her dual capacity as a performer and an anthropology researcher, she presents an interesting discourse regarding the pow- er of “likes.” After researching the topic of body language on the Internet, she selected the movements that gathered the most “likes” on YouTube – from pop music to yoga – for her dance performance Likes (2018), and used them as elements of her own choreography. The performance evolves slowly, alternating between dance and paus- es to communicate with the audience, in order to explain where her movements come from and what they mean. But as the rhythm rapid- ly intensifies, the dancer performs the fragmented movements almost breathlessly, and without speaking gradually unites them into a raging motion sequence; she sweats and fights until she finally discards her clothes and reveals her body. Guiu’s performance shows how social media visibility is linked to prestige and economic power, and what efforts are required to maintain the necessary pace. The performance ends with the image of naked female body. It is also one that is most frequently clicked on, increasing the number of “views” and the relat- ed income. At the same time, such image attracts the largest numbers hateful comments due to its strong sexual connotations. For the Danish artist Maja Malou Lyse, who posts sex-positive self-portraits on her Instagram page, the female body is the starting point of her artistic work – both as image and embodied experi- ence. However, while advocating body positivity, she admits in the synth 227

96 // The Beautiful Warriors captions that she also tends to select the images where she looks slim- mer, recognizing the impact of beauty standards on women. At first glance, her Instagram posts are not much different from other pret- ty Instagrammers that post selfies, apart from the fact that they are accompanied by politically charged comments against rape culture and capitalism. Apart from that, the artist’s aesthetics are very close to those of the porn industry: voluptuous looks, sexy underwear, sex toys, and revealing poses. However, she subverts the viewer’s expecta- tions by showing aspects of the female body that the male gaze prefers to ignore, such as body hair, menstruation, live streaming of her cer- vix, and DIY gynecology objects. The latter is also the focus of Lyse’s project How to Stay out of the Gynecologist’s Office (2016), which revives the self-help gynecology ideas of 1970s feminist groups. In a series of workshops, the artist and the participants share their bodily experiences and exchange knowledge through talking and self-examination. On her Instagram, Lyse provides a starter kit for gynecological self-examination and encourages women to explore their own vaginas. This process of self-discovery should in- tensify the bodily experience and promote autonomy through newly acquired self-knowledge. At the same time, Lyse addresses the power relations inherent in the patient-doctor relationship – where the patient is often viewed in a fragmented and objectified way. The artists discussed above reflect on a variety of topics that relate to experiences of women in the Expanded Space. They are not afraid to use stereotypes of femininity in their aesthetics – from beautiful poses to pink colors – in order to make a comment on the image of women in the media. Admittedly, they all belong to a limited de- mographic group – they are all young, beautiful in the traditional sense, white and cis-gender (with the exception of Sulkowicz, who is of multi-ethnic descent and identifies as non-binary). And yet, their works, and the ways in which they are received, reflect a broad femi- nist struggle combining elements of protest and performance.

Feminism in the Expanded Space of Digital Networks: A Fourth Wave? Feminism is often seen as progressing in waves – something that can be traced back to 1960s journalism. It is true that this vision 228 synth

Viral Performances of Gender // 97 implies fragmentation, which does not reflect the fact that feminism is a movement with a unique goal – gender equality – that it aims to work through different strategies relating to the needs of different social groups and eras. However, adopting this traditional division can be helpful for making comparisons and that is why I will partially apply it here. Each wave of feminism has focused on different facets of gender equality: the right to vote and education; inequalities in the workplace and reproductive rights; intersectionality and fight against sexual as- sault. In this sense, what has been characterized as the “fourth-wave feminism” could be seen as an evolution of the third-wave that chal- lenged misogynist rhetoric in the media and popular culture, while addressing diverse experiences of being a woman – in terms of class, origin, and sexual identity (the word “woman” is used in this text to define anyone that identifies as one, similarly to the references to the “female body.”) Fourth-wave feminism recognizes that multiple lay- ers of oppression may coexist, meaning that a middle-class cisgender woman faces different challenges than a POC refugee or a transgen- der woman. While the first and second waves largely addressed issues relevant to middle and upper class white women, the struggle is now “glocal,” i.e. in different dimensions, from local to global, and can re- late to universal, as well as very specific problems. However, there are also conflicting issues that stem from the feminists’ differing political approaches: There are activists who follow a solidarity and anti-capi- talist stance that favors a collective fight against inequalities and take aim against the political systems breeding these inequalities. On the other hand, there’s an individualist and liberal-capitalist viewpoint that mainly aims towards breaking the glass ceiling and putting more women in places of political and economic power. What differentiates the fourth-wave from the previous ones, however, is not its focus but its medium. Like a magnifying glass, the internet has highlighted existing in- equalities and multiplied the battlegrounds for equal rights. In the early days, the internet was heralded as a non-hierarchical, democratic space where people would be able to define their life conditions and identity, liberated from the existing restrictions based on race, gender, and the phenomena of social exclusion. Driven by this vision, and understanding the rising significance of communication technology, the Cyberfeminists of the early 1990s such as VNS Matrix sought to synth 229

98 // The Beautiful Warriors enhance women’s relationship with technology – they believed in its inherent transformative power. However, this techno-determinism did not persist. It soon became clear that social and ideological constructs are entrenched in technology. By the late 1990s, Cyberfeminists such as the Old Boys Network moved towards more comprehensive un- derstandings of technology by seeking multiple perspectives and ap- proaches. Looking at OBN closely, we can distinguish two paths that have become significant for contemporary feminism: First, the rejec- tion in their manifesto of generalizing “theses” in favor of “antitheses” – in other words, rather than defining what Cyberfeminism is, they say what it is not, thus leaving room for a variety of approaches. Second and most important, they created a “network,” which was active both online and offline in workshops, meetings, conferences, chat rooms, and mailing lists. They explored the potential of getting organized in a “phygital” world that was just beginning to expand. Meanwhile, this expanded space has become the natural place for communities to emerge and feminist campaigns to take place; the place where women meet, learn, discuss, and forge action plans. As studies of some recent feminist protests have shown, the continuity of networked and offline spaces offers entirely new ways of unfolding political forms of action, such as taking virality out onto the streets as a tactical means. The protests carried out by Femen since 2008, usually against specific targets like Vladimir Putin or Silvio Berlusconi, gathered a lot of media attention, not so much thanks to their anti-patriarchy slogans, but rather because the protesters were topless. These actions have stirred great controversy in the feminist world, especially when it was revealed in the media that, initially a man, Victor Svyatski, led the planning and organization of the group. He allegedly selected the women for protests based on whether they met conventional beauty standards and then taught them how they should act. Even though Svyatski had left the group by the time Femen went international, the aesthetics of their protests still follow the same performative path: flashing signs written on the chests of young, white, thin, able-bod- ied women. The protesters are usually held back by police officers within moments of their appearance; however, their topless images live for much longer as they are widely shared online, thus transfer- ring the discourse from the streets to online media. In this sense, the performativity of the protest only makes sense if we view it within the continuous online/offline space as an event that lasts for a few 230 synth

Viral Performances of Gender // 99 moments offline and lives on online. Even though Femen’s tactics of virality have brought attention to cases of patriarchal oppression, they have also alienated other feminists, as their stance obviously serves the objectifying male gaze. Similar controversies surround Slutwalks, during which protesters dress as what would be considered a “slut” according to patriarchal logic. The first Slutwalks were organized in Toronto in 2011 as a pro- test against a police officer’s remarks that “women should avoid dress- ing like sluts in order not to become victims.” By adopting a deroga- tory term that stems from “rape culture,” the participants sought to undermine the latter, arguing that sexual assault is never the victim’s fault. Even though not all protesters opt for “slutty” clothes, the imag- es appearing on social media are usually of beautiful women exposing their bodies. Once more, the discourse centers on the objectification of women and the tendency to conform to standards set by the beauty or porn industries. As was the case with the artists discussed above, the women who decide to reveal their bodies act both as the subject of action and scrutiny. Different groups of women and gender activists have different priorities, so it is not surprising that the “fourth wave” appears frag- mented in relation to both its concerns and scope. It is undisputed, however, that these fragments add up a growing wave that has attract- ed media attention and fueled political discourse, especially over the last two years. The Women’s March (2017), which took place in different cities across the United States, was accompanied by many smaller solidarity protests worldwide. With a total of more than five million demon- strators, it set a new record in the history of the United States for a one-day protest. The demonstrations were triggered by the inaugura- tion of Donald Trump as President of the United States. In the past, Trump has demonstrated a disparaging attitude towards women and announced changes to the abortion laws. One should note here the presence of hashtags (common since the 2011 Occupy Movement) on protest signs. The hashtags reflect the continuity of online and offline space and the presumption that the images of the protesters will be shared on social media. The protesters’ pink knitted hats with pointed tips resembling cat ears – the “pussy hats” – were a reference to Trump’s comments that “he grabs women by the pussy.” The hats gave a pink tone to the images of the protests. Rather than rejecting synth 231

100 // The Beautiful Warriors the stereotypical color and “girly” aesthetics, most contemporary fem- inists embraced it. In the same year, another record-breaking protest took place, this time primarily online. The #MeToo campaign was launched in 2006 by Tarana Burke, a black activist, as a way to show empathy to young victims of sexual abuse. The slogan didn’t go viral until 2017, when actor Alyssa Milano suggested that everyone affected by sexual harass- ment or sexual assault should use the hashtag #MeToo to share their experiences. Within a day, the hashtag was used over 500,000 times on Twitter and 4.7 million times on Facebook. The online campaign meant real-life repercussions for some of the perpetrators of the of- fences, such as the film producer Harvey Weinstein, who had to say goodbye to his powerful position and is now being prosecuted. At the same time, the campaign as beneficial to some of the victims, who felt empowered by the discussion to speak out against the injustices they have faced. Last but not least, the dynamics of the #MeToo movement have contributed to massive turnout in subsequent feminist protests world- wide. On March 8 2018, women in Spain called for a strike for equal rights at work and demanded an end to domestic violence, femicide, and sexual assault. On the eve of the march, a nocturnal gathering was held demanding the right to take to the streets without fear of assault. The atmosphere was particularly charged in light of recent rapes reported in the news, such as the “Wolfpack” trial that would, again, spark large-scale nationwide protests two months later follow- ing the apparently unfair ruling. The International Women’s Day strike saw hundreds of thousands taking to the streets and over 5.3 million workers skipping work. It was a strike on an unprecedent- ed scale. The main slogan, “Si paramos el mundo para” [“When we stop, the world stops”], showed the determination of the protesters and the sheer number of people on the streets – all traffic had to be stopped. Social media feeds not only represented the events, but also showed that the flood of news contributed to the scale of mobili- zation. Comparing this massive protest with the Spanish solidarity protest for the American Women’s March, which brought together only a handful of people, one could conclude that the Women’s Day demonstration in Spain was successful because it addressed concrete problems faced by women from all walks of life in Spain. The massive scale of the protests, therefore, suggests that it is not enough to have 232 synth

Viral Performances of Gender // 101 a universal vision to mobilize the masses; rather, a specific local agen- da that would unite different groups in the fight against particular problems.

Viral Noise From Trolls to Influencers A recurring pattern in the development of digital technology seems to be, at the beginning, the inflated optimism. Just as in the early days of the internet, a new hope arose in the years after 2005: The public’s active participation in publishing content would lead to the development of independent news sites and thus to better quality of news, freed from corporate control. The emergence of social media and the attendant opportunities for groups to communicate prompt- ly and cheaply, exchange information, and organize autonomously made this perspective even more realistic. In 2011, when the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement spread worldwide, blogs and so- cial media were often viewed as “spaces of democracy,” while trolls and hackers were seen as heroic figures enabling progressive activism through détournement – employing the tools of the system against the system itself. However, the same tools and methods are now used by groups that want to influence a broad audience – but with a different objective. From troll factories, fake news sites, online vigilantes, and hackers to government agencies and intelligence services, everyone today uses the same means to manipulate: to influence election results, harass marginalized groups, manipulate facts, or simply sell products. To name all these phenomena in one breath does not mean that they are all the same. It is merely intended to illustrate that various groups use virality as a tactic – just as feminists do. And while the feminist move- ment is gaining momentum worldwide thanks to new communica- tion strategies, the Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) and other radical groups of the extreme right are also gaining influence through the use of the same strategies. The economic crisis of the last decade has prepared the ground for radical extremists, who are responsible for violent actions – from Athens to Charlottesville. What is significant to stress is that the ex- treme right neophytes are often radicalized through online platforms, where they also coordinate their efforts against their targets, such as synth 233

102 // The Beautiful Warriors ethnic minorities, migrants, or feminists. This type of behavior has become so commonplace that even in online discussions about games, sports, or politics, women who dare to express their opinion are met with hostility. The seemingly harmless “mansplaining” belongs to the scale of dis- criminatory forms of behavior. Although the phenomenon is hardly new, social media have contributed significantly to its spread as public contributions can be commented on by anyone. Another tactic is at- tacking a straw man, the deliberate attempt to create a confrontation in which the other’s arguments are twisted to make them sound ab- surd. The most common tactic, however, is less subtle: online dis- putes often escalate very quickly to rape and murder threats, even within communities that are considered progressive. The increased aggressiveness is blamed on online anonymity, which combined with troll culture promoted across popular forums, is blossoming. Users of 4chan, for example, repeatedly try to deceive mainstream media with absurd information – just for “fun.” Even though 4chan’s cultural in- fluence is often exaggerated, these viral tactics have contributed sig- nificantly to the formation of troll armies that spread fake news in the US in the wake of the 2016 election and repeatedly launched smear campaigns against individuals. Gamergate is one of the best-known examples of how the culture of abuse is turned against women who dare to enter what is considered to be a male-dominated space. It started with an orchestrated attack against Zoe Quinn, a successful game developer, after her ex-boy- friend claimed that she had cheated on him in 2014. Alleged cheat- ing is a useful tool for internet “vigilantes” who feel that the woman needs to be punished for her actions; it is the most frequently used claim in revenge porn websites, where intimate photos and videos of women are shared alongside their names, telephone numbers, and ad- dress details by vindictive ex-partners. Quinn’s haters, who had often spoken against her about what they felt was an undeserved success, were finally given a “reason” to feel righteous in their attacks. This hate campaign against a woman linked to the gaming community was not the first and would certainly not be the last: Two years earlier, Anita Sarkeesian received similar treatment for her YouTube series “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” as did tech culture journalist Leigh Alexander, actress and professional gamer Felicia Day, and developer Brianna Wu. The public threats of murder and rape and the disclosure 234 synth

Viral Performances of Gender // 103 of private contact information had a real impact on the victims, who had to withdraw from their environment and sometimes even give up their homes in order to escape the attacks. When Quinn sought justice, the judge advised her to “go offline,” much like women are advised to stay out of public space to be safe. Gamergate revealed how a troll army can gain power. This included spreading untrue stories by cleverly manipulating search engines and social media algorithms with tags and meta-data that made their sto- ries appear at the top of Twitter, Facebook, or Google searches. The manipulation of facts by right wing and reactionary groups reveals a solid knowledge of online media, and their actions show how virality and noise help to stifle real news in the flood of information or silence women with confusion, fake news, and hate campaigns. One of the extremist “stars” that emerged from the scandal was Milo Yiannopoulos, who was covering the story for Breitbart, a conser- vative news site that became instrumental in the making and spread- ing of fake news, especially before the last US election. Yiannopoulos’ texts and speeches are representative of the tactics of noise: A gay man himself married to a black man, he speaks against gay culture and non-white people; he often makes outrageous claims and when they backfire, he says that it was just satire – for example, claiming that he’s happy about the deaths of Syrian children or that it is acceptable to harass 13-year-old boys. He usually masks his offensive behavior as “opinion” and the harassment of others as defense of “free speech.” “Satire” and “humor” are also often used as arguments in anti-women online campaigns: “Doing it for the lulz” is the insider term for it, which means doing something for fun. The expression comes from 4chan’s environment and has always ignored the real injuries caused by this kind of assault. The language of online trolls and anti-feminists has become partic- ularly popular with right-wing populists and has received a new boost since Donald Trump came into power. They like to use vague source attribution (such as “everyone knows that”), personal affirmation (such as “trust me”), exaggerated adjectives (such as “the most fantas- tic,” “absolutely most horrible”), personal stories as solid arguments, and above all – sentences that are never finished in the verbose form of repetition and paraphrase and are therefore confusing for the audi- ence. The term “Trump-speak” refers to this kind of populist speech that aims to generate impact, rather than communicate an idea, while synth 235

104 // The Beautiful Warriors it dismisses eloquence as “elitist.” Spending a few minutes on the YouTube channels of Alt-right and Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), these language patterns quickly become apparent. As examples, the videos “Why modern women are unhappy” (by Milo Yiannopoulos) or “Why are women being educated” (Roosh V) can be considered; in the latter the portrait of the 45th President of the USA hangs in the background. The “problem” being discussed in the above videos is feminism, which allegedly discourages women from fulfilling their purpose in life. But women are not the only ones to suffer from feminism: According to the men’s rights groups, feminism is responsible for the decline of Western civilization as a whole, forcing men to become “female” or “beta” in order to find a partner at all. To counter this problem, the MRAs give advice on how to restore and maintain mas- culinity. Pick Up Artists (PUAs), for example, focus on the “game” or, as they vividly describe it, “fucking” as many women as possible. The members of the Men Going Their Own Way group, on the other hand, opt for celibacy as a consequence of their contempt for women who are sexually liberated and manipulative (supposedly just trying to lure them into marriage), and therefore are too dirty for them. Involuntary Celibates (Incels), on the other hand, consider women too powerful because of their ability to choose; women would prefer better-looking men and thus have control over the sexual fulfillment of men. The Incels are looking forward to a rebellion against this status quo and the fact that beta men will also get their chance. In the mean- time, their rage had deadly consequences on several occasions: the massive shooting in Santa Barbara (2014) by Roger Elliot and the van attack in Toronto (2018) by Alek Minassian – both of whom declared their allegiance to the Incel movement before the attacks and blamed “women” for being the cause of their actions because they refuse to have sex with them. Female agency in sex is the big issue for these men, who insult feminists online for being “sluts,” “too promiscuous,” or for making themselves undesirable for men. Even if it is not a question of a wom- an acting in a male space – as in Gamergate – or actively campaigning for women’s rights, she can still anger the trolls if she reveals herself as an “attention whore.” For many trolls, feminist artists mentioned earlier, who question gender stereotypes by making them visible in 236 synth

Viral Performances of Gender // 105 an exaggerated way and claim the male territory for self-determined display of female bodies, certainly belong to this group. Whereas in the case of trolls and men’s rights activists you can easily unveil their tactics of noise, it might not be so straightforward to draw the line in actions that claim to be “empowering” for women. Nevertheless, it is important, as we examine the space where con- temporary feminism takes place, to say – in accordance with the Old Boys Network antitheses manifesto – what contemporary feminism is not. Today, anything a woman does can be portrayed as empowering: Indulging in consumption, publishing images of her body as a sign of self-confidence and body positivity, wearing a T-shirt with the word “feminist” on it, although it may have been sewn by a woman in a third world country who does not even receive the minimum wage for her work. In addition, social media influencers and digital mar- keting strategists are appropriating the increasingly popular feminism to further establish their products and brands with its help. Using the term feminism for purposes that have nothing to do with social and political activism weakens its potential in the struggle against gen- der inequality and instead associates it with consumer culture, the objectification of one’s own image and the exploitation of unjustly paid labor. Notably, these claims of “empowerment” are being replicated in the same online platforms where harassment campaigns against wom- en are being carried out, with technology companies owning these platforms repeatedly failing to protect the victims – because their business model consists in making a profit out of users’ data, they do not make an effort to curtail hate speech and fake news that create a hostile environment for women – and other marginalized groups – as it might have an impact on their popularity.

Conclusions Contemporary feminism is defined by the cross-pollination of digital and physical space, generating new tools of resistance through visual and media culture. The study of various forms of expression of the feminist movement, often referred to as the “fourth wave,” reveals several contradictions: Feminism is gaining popularity and retaining much of its militancy – on the street and on the internet – but often manifests itself in affirmative forms; it takes advantage of virality and synth 237

106 // The Beautiful Warriors noise to establish its presence, but the same tactics are also used for harassment campaigns or completely apolitical purposes. Ultimately, viral performances of gender can be attributed not just to activists and artists who advocate feminism but also to the opposite side: The MRAs who want to express an outdated version of masculinity and white male domination. The confusion about the meaning of femi- nism by people either claiming feminist views under false premises or fighting against it is a sign of our times. Contemporary feminists who do not want to disappear among all the trolls and marketing experts are forced to experiment with new strategies of visibility. The artists who visualize problems of contemporary feminism seem to be aware of the contradictions and use the same strategies as subjects or tools for their work. Other feminists and anti-feminists of- ten denigrate them as narcissists. This label is often applied to digital natives who grew up with social media and who take it for granted to share their images, preferences, and thoughts with strangers. At the same time, female creators have always been accused of narcis- sism whenever they abandoned their ancestral function as “neutral objects or surfaces” and instead presented their bodies in a self-de- termined way. Women are generally regarded as sex objects, as Lucy Lippard notes. This leads to the assumption that every woman who presents her naked body in public only does so because she thinks she is beautiful. The feminist artists presented here do not completely re- ject common ideals of beauty, such as those found in magazines, porn films, and art history; they understand their importance, but also try to escape their power of definition and instead allow themselves to play with them. Their eclectic aesthetics therefore often consist of dif- ferent sources and refer to very different aesthetics. Men often feel excluded by this kind of self-portrayal of women, especially when the images break with traditional notions of female attractiveness. So where do feminist artists of the digital age draw the line be- tween feminism and consumer culture, between feminist activism and noise? Instead of drawing such a line, they intentionally blur it, using their performances to question the limits between staged performance and reality, empowerment and objectification. The border is marked by its blurring. 238 synth

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YouTube: Daryush Valizadeh, Roosh V Youtube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UC16j6EppP0K85CzYMduNCqw Milo Yiannopoulos, MILO Youtube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/ UC0aVoboXBUx2-tVIWHc3W2Q synth 241

TECHNO-ECOFEMINISM Nonhuman Sensations in Technoplanetary Layers

Yvonne Volkart

Translated by Rebecca van Dykes

“The devaluation of care is not very far from the devaluation of the environment, from a society that destroys the environment, from the negation of the body.” – Precarias a la Deriva1

The feeling that the possibilities of existence on planet Earth are becoming increasingly limited and allowing less and less scope for action has become prevalent in recent years. It is necessary to look the

1 Precarias a la Deriva, Globalisierte Sorge, p. 42.

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possible extinction of the human species and many other living things in the eye – not caused by a spectacular war of the worlds, but, much more ordinary, by the way people treat the “environment.” “Nature” is striking back. “Gaia” is intruding, is how Isabelle Stengers describes this ontological force, this planetary creature that determines us and is now stalking us with a barbarism that is “blind to the damage she causes, in the manner of everything that intrudes.”2 How can we live with the contradictory experience that we are part of technocapitalistic acceleration whose playful front and bar- barian back oppress us on a daily basis? How can I sense pleasure if my feelings and desires are controlled algorithmically, always longing for more? If the waste my existence produces, instead of disappearing with time, merely disintegrates into even smaller pieces? Waste, about which we do not know what it will do with us. When my eating and travel habits contribute to global warming, which leads to changes in ocean currents, migration, and to the mutation of plants and animals? When we do not know if it will become very cold or very hot? When we have to acknowledge that it was “only” in the last twenty to thirty years that major species extinction began go occur? I am not only right in the middle of it, in the networked and virtualized era of cyberpunk, which at the time, when we read “Neuromancer” or “He, She and It,” I did not imagine to be so or- dinary; rather, what is more is that I also belong to that reprehensi- ble species (the “human” species) that takes control of, pollutes, and eradicates everything. But I am also a mother, cyborg, art theorist, bacteria, water, plant, subjectified “in the belly of the monster;”3 I am a sentient, moving, feeling being, an earthling with and among others. I exist, I am open, I am … … not accepting the apparently inevitable intensification of exten- sive forms of exploitation and the paralyses and fears that accompany the discourse on the Anthropocene, which have recently led to a reviv- al of feminist and ecological concerns, not only in art and theory – my area of study – but in everyday practices and activist resistance as well. Concerns regarding the desire for becoming, for relationships and ex- change, for coexistence and care, for attention and participation, for

2 Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times, p. 43. Stengers’s concept of “Gaia” does not correspond to that of deep ecology. 3 Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters, p. 298. synth 243

Techno-Ecofeminism // 113 love and empathy. Concerns, that feminists and ecologists have always considered worthy of investigating and theorizing. Since the eras of hippies and deep ecology, there does not seem to have been any move- ments in art and theory in which existential needs for commoning and sharing, presence, affect, and immersion with others have been articulated as new values – and this against the background of techno- logical innovation and economic growth, where the values of care and feelings are ridiculed and feminized. In our Western culture, “women and household (oikos)” and “women and nature” are practically synonyms. However, women and technology are also readily equated, in particular when women em- body the capitalist machine and its products, such as, for instance, the mechanical women Olimpia in The Sandman, Maria in Metropolis, or Dolores and Maeve in Westworld. Women have examined these equa- tions and reacted differently to them, and hence taken action. For the current text, two apparently diametrical movements are of inter- est: technofeminism and ecofeminism and their present concurrence that I advocate. Unlike technofeminist approaches, ecofeminism is less widely received and often devalued as essentialist. It has attracted more attention, however, with the renewed interest in feminism and ecology. The most promising developments point to a concurrence of both movements. The corresponding key words are New Materialism, Anthropocene Feminism, and Politics of Care.4 The “old” ecofeminist question of how people treat nature, which technologies they explore, and how other relationships can be estab- lished with nonhuman beings has become one of the most central questions in the Anthropocene. Inasmuch as technocapitalism always seeks to solve the really big questions by using new technologies whose impact is unknown (geoengineering, electric cars, dissolving plastic waste, et cetera), the “old” cyber- or technofeminist question also has to be asked and reformulated: What role do technologies play in our subjectification? And not just new technologies, but old, for example indigenous, ones as well. This question concerning subjectification/ subordination through technologies has to be supplemented by new materialist approaches that inquire into the role technologies play or do not play in the restructuring of our diverse relationships with non- human and human beings. It also becomes apparent here that while

4 Publications on these are listed in the bibliography. 244 synth

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questions about relationships have hitherto constituted the core area of feminist issues, the achievement of feminism is not acknowledged in the current museum and aesthetic discourse on techno-ecologies and the Anthropocene to the extent it deserves to be.5 Referring to selected artistic projects, I attempt to bring together these two apparently diametrically opposed movements – technofem- inism and ecofeminism. I assert that the most advanced approaches currently emphasize not only the vitality and transformational pow- er of organisms and matter, but also examine and facilitate relation- ships between different beings. In other words: If cyberfeminism was concerned with creating feminist, technohybrid concepts of subjects that were fluid, no-longer-only-human, bacterial, female, and queer, and, as its self-proclaimed successor feminism, xenofeminism prop- agates alienated techno-artifacts, then techno-ecofeminism focuses on the vitality, transformational power, and relationality of human and nonhuman entities and their different temporalities. It is about the oikos, the household understood in both a macro- as well as mi- croscopic sense, that is to say, with connections, with couplings and decouplings, sequences and effects. Feminist techno-eco-subjectivity is a vibrant assemblage of concatenations, a relay of pulsating circuits and non/human movements, communication, and sentiments in the technoplanetary layers and deposits called Earth. As I demonstrate, art succeeds in breaking open the alienation of naturalist ideologemes by means of calculated strategies and the pro- duction of an excess of meaning that aesthetically activates the vitality of being-with-others without denying the catastrophic aspect of the Anthropocene.

Scripting the Seascape: Acoustic Ocean as a Non-Human Radio The video opens with a shot of an eerily blue landscape, flat-topped mountains with white plateaus and ridged slopes, and is accompanied by a swelling electronic sound punctuated by oddly threatening tones. This uncanny, unfamiliar image is of a 3-D model of the ocean floor and the sounds of communicating fish. The rhythmically fading text

5 The symposium “Territories that Matter: Gender, Art and Ecology,” Madrid, November 23-24, 2018, sought to address this imbalance. synth 245

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Fig. 1 (top) and Fig. 2 (below): Video stills from Ursula Biemann: Acoustic Ocean

describes how, in the mid-1940s, a sound channel was discovered in the North Atlantic Ocean. Because of its specific physical nature, the water in the SOFAR (SOund Fixing And Ranging) channel can relay submarine sound waves over several thousand kilometers. It was used in World War II as a “natural” medium for the transmission of dis- tress calls. During the Cold War, hydrophones embedded in it moni- tored submarine traffic and espionage technologies detected unknown 246 synth

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sounds. They could later be decoded as low-frequency waves emitted by blue whales and finback whales – an acoustic ecology that was previously inaudible. The next shot reveals a pebbled shore and a woman wearing an orange neoprene suit. She unpacks a case with underwater sound re- cording equipment and sets it up. The sound that we hear changes when she turns the control knobs. The camera is close to the “aqua- naut” and observes her actions: the devices render the sound of the marine organisms audible to the human ear and she mounts a sound event like a DJane. Connecting and tuning the channels, she is per- forming a submarine radio broadcast and transmits the sounds of the ocean into the ether. All of the creatures on Earth shall hear what happens in the depths of the oceans! Fluorescent sea butterflies swim toward us; they are very close, breathing. As a result of ocean acidifi- cation, these are microorganisms are endangered. The caption reads: “Their absence will silence the submarine springs.” In a kind of mythical chant, the woman takes up the concept of the destruction of the ecosystem and relates how the climate is chang- ing for them, the Sami people. Climate changes lead to deaths of rein- deer and as a result the ancient, symbiotic relationship between hu- mans and animals – each other’s guardians – is endangered. We hear her singing a Sami song off camera – a terrestrial echo of the oceanic sound, a cry into the ether. It is her contribution to making contact with the sea creatures. Again, she tunes her radio, and again goes on air. “That night, a few whales showed up near the surface.” Maybe she did manage to establish communication, maybe not. I chose the video Acoustic Ocean (2018) by Ursula Biemann as an introduction for a number of reasons. First of all, it supports my assertion that current techno-ecological and technofeminist percep- tion has moved in the direction of relationships and communication with nonhuman natureculture6 beings. In Biemann’s fictive video, this occurs on an imaginary level: The technologies with which the pro- tagonist operates function symbolically; the fish sounds come from an archive. However, the constructed setting does not interfere with our perception that a “real” situation might well be “documented” here. The protagonist uses the media of “nature” – the SOFAR water

6 To my knowledge, Donna Haraway suggested the term. It stands for hybrid as- semblages of “nature,” “culture,” and “technology” beyond their dichotomies. synth 247

Techno-Ecofeminism // 117 channel, the air, her voice, and her hands – to establish a different kind of communication. Technical means are also available, such as various recording and playback devices, computers, hydrophones, cables, and antennas. All of the media are equally important, of equal value. As a technoscientist and hybrid trickster with a headlamp and wearing orange, high-visibility clothing, she attempts to bring light into the darkness of the ocean and establish communication with its inhab- itants. The boundaries between nature and culture and nature and technology dissolve. The media, as well as the female figure’s clothing and makeup, stem from naturecultures. Hence the hydrophones, ar- ranged in an octopus-like fashion, are to a lesser extent prosthesis-like techno-optimizations and instead “external organs that enable them to plunge deeply into the marine habitat.” The boundaries of her body have also become indefinite. The watertight suit has sealable holes that enable an exchange with external environment. In this case, the outer space is nature, the habitat of human and nonhuman beings. A rein- deer skin slung around the woman’s neck testifies to the “aquanaut’s” close ties to animals, an intimacy that not only implies scientific anal- ysis or cuddlesome kinship, but also killing and consumption – since the ecology of coexistence also has to involve the provision of nour- ishment, the so-called food webs, that is, the complex interactions between the species that transport energy and nutritional value.7 She also tells of these entangled chains and their disruption in her myth- ical chant. In fact, the question concerning the functioning of food chains and the provision of nourishment is not only primeval, but also current and impending. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa points out, the threat of nourishing several billion people has been employed for decades to legitimize agro-industrial production and the colonization of land. At the same time, as she writes, it is precisely this accepted, shortsighted industrial agriculture that undermines current and fu- ture food security. Acoustic Ocean documents the shift from technofeminism to tech- no-ecofeminism; for Ursula Biemann, it is a shift from issues of gen- der, globalization, and mobility to issues of raw materials, climate, and ecology. Her video essays, such as Performing the Border (1998)

7 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa points out that the food web concept examines not only who eats whom, but also how, for example, the waste of one species can pro- vide nourishment for another. Puig de la Bellacasa, Making Time for Soil, p. 702. 248 synth

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and Remote Sensing (2001), framed explicitly cyberfeminist concerns. In times of a digital longing for the immaterial, they insisted on the materiality of bodies and raised what is in principle the ecofeminist question of the costs at which digital technologies arise and what gen- ders subjectify them and how. Hierarchical divisions concerning the notions of body and nature lead to global inequities. In Forest Law (2014), a Native American in the Amazon fighting for the rights of the indigenous people relates that the rain forest does not constitute an outside-of-the-body for the people who live there, but is a part of it. His struggle for the rights of the Native Americans implies that in- ternational jurisprudence has to open itself up to concepts of physical existence that would include nonhuman beings. Finally, the cyborg trickster figure appearing in Acoustic Ocean op- erates as an intermediary between the worlds and the new order of mutual awareness. She registers and senses what occurs around her with her sensing organs (sensing technologies). The figure is not a gen- dered signifier for the purpose of allegorically embodying the interests of others. She is “woman” but not specifically “female,” a scientist as well as a singer; she is a human but also an indigenous Sami, a fish- like creature and an organ of her sensing machines. As a messenger of her own pluralities, she sets out to decolonize the technosciences and to initiate a cyborg requiem of the species: an underwater radio per- formance on video that combines different times, species, and atoms.

Conceptual Genealogies In Ursula Biemann’s last three videos – besides Acoustic Ocean, Twenty One Percent (2016) and Subatlantic (2015) – as in the early ones, “women” once more specifically come into play as the carriers and agents of knowledge. “Women” also play a prominent role in the ar- tistic works I will discuss in the following. This brings “old” feminist concerns into play in a laid-back and casual way, namely that the deconstruction of hierarchical, dichotomous power structures means the participation of subjects who call themselves “women.” “In the 1990s, ecofeminists worked to remedy a perceived problem in feminist theory, animal advocacy, and environmentalism, namely, a lack of attention to the intersecting structures of power that rein- force the “othering” of women and animals, and contribute to the increasing destruction of the environment. Though sometimes called synth 249

Techno-Ecofeminism // 119 “utopian” or “concerned with too many issues,” ecofeminist theory exposes and opposes intersecting forces of oppression, showing how problematic it is when these issues are considered separate from one another.”8 This statement brings home that techno-ecofeminist con- cerns go far beyond the apparently obligatory issues of gender, sex, and reproduction and take into account the economies of exploitation at work all over the world. One of the foundations of feminist and queer deconstruction is the “queering” of powerful dichotomies. Feminists see this as the basic ideological and cultural structure for exploitation and subor- dination based on “othering,” regardless of whether it is a matter of nature, gender, sex, disability, nonhuman beings, machines, and so- cial, global or subaltern weaknesses. Those who help to break through these dualistic hierarchies in the direction of complex relations and entanglements of agents always take action, one could say, in a queer/ feminist or ecofeminist way: “Queer values – caring not (just) about the individual, the family, or one’s own descendants, but about the Other species and persons to whom one has no immediate relations – may be the most effective ecological values.”9 Noticeably, the terms “feminism,” “ecology” or, more up to date, “techno-ecology” are used universally. Whereas feminism works against power relations based on dichotomies, techno-ecology sees itself as a very fundamental theory of the collaboration of a wide range of agents who no longer give pri- ority “only” to “green” concerns. As Erich Hörl writes in the introduction to his anthology General Ecology: “Ecology has started to designate the collaboration of a mul- tiplicity of human and nonhuman agents: it is something like the cipher of a new thinking of togetherness and of great cooperation of entities and forces, which has begun to be significant for contem- porary thought; hence it forces and drives a radically relational on- to-epistemological renewal.”10 Although one has to completely agree with Hörl on this observation and definition, it is nevertheless evident that the techno-ecological discourse, similar to the media-ecological discourse until not so long ago, strongly relies on networks based on technological media or the critique of the traditional concept of

8 Adams and Gruen, Ecofeminism, p. 1. 9 Nicole Seymore, quoted in Davies, Toxic Progeny, p. 232. 10 Hörl, Introduction to General Ecology, p. 3. 250 synth

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nature.11 Concerns that have to do with the biosphere and imply relations with nonhuman beings are rarely fully differentiated. I re- peat: Although the most innovative approaches with respect to new or “green” relations with naturecultures come from within feminist ranks, they are underrepresented in techno-ecological discourses. Of the fifteen authors in General Ecology, for example, only four of them are female, and that does not indicate whether their approaches are feminist. However, to the extent to which questions about coexis- tence, about animal and plant rights, empathy and care, repairing and healing are now starting to penetrate dominant theoretical and art discourses, feminist approaches have also left their ghettos. They are becoming key references where reformulations of coexistence are con- cerned: “Ecofeminist theory provides ethical guidance to challenge inequities arising along racial, gendered, and species boundaries.”12

The Plastic Eaters and the Mermaid Torpedo Relating to other forms of subjectivity has remained a major feminist con- cern to this day. The key figure of technofeminism was “the ironic myth” of the cyborg, which stands for the blurring of dual boundaries. Such a fluid body is to me a “symptom and effect body”; a body that displays the subject relations that produce it semiotically-materially.13 What was new about it was, and cyberfeminists adopted these definitions, that cyborgs enjoy becoming a symptom and their boundaries becoming blurred. At the time I wrote: “Whereas feminism claimed the appropriation of new technologies as tools for women’s liberation, cyberfeminism promotes both the idea of becoming cyborgian and the pleasures involved in it. In other words: technologies are no longer perceived as prostheses and instruments for liberation that are separated from the body... In cyber- feminism, the utopian ideology of women’s liberation is located in the body and gender, but this body is no longer what it was thought to be.” 14

11 Broader approaches of media-ecology, however, not necessarily feminist ones, can be found, for example, in The Fibreculture Journal; zfm; Maxwell et.al., Media and the Ecological Crisis; Gabrys, Program Earth. 12 Adams and Gruen, Ecofeminism, p. 5. 13 Volkart, Fluide Subjekte, pp. 4–8. 14 Volkart, The Cyberfeminist Fantasy of the Pleasure of the Cyborg, pp. 99–100. synth 251

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Fig. 3 (top): Pinar Yoldas: Plastic sensing organs, from: Ecosystem of Excess

Fig. 4 (below): Pinar Yoldas: Plastic balloon-turtle, from: Ecosystem of Excess 252 synth

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And further: “Resistance lays in the non/materiality of a constructed and discursive body itself.”15 The concept of a material-semiotic, affective form of resistance formulated at the time became even more fully differentiated in the course of the “nonhuman turn” or the “material turn.”16 Matter is increasingly defined as vibrant, artefactual, and relational: “These vi- brant animals, plants, viruses, hurricanes, storms, pharmaceuticals, and other technological artefacts vie with, make demands upon, and impede and enable human agency. They make their presence known to us, or, one could say, make “calls” to which we are continually responding,” writes Jane Bennett.17 Karen Barad also places emphasis on the relational, entangled, and reality-producing elements of her “agential realism.” She writes: “Matter is not figured as a mere effect or product of discursive practices, but rather as an agentive factor in its iterative materialization.”18 What is unique about cyberfeminism is that it included biological and chemical forces – for example, in the form of discarded female bodily fluids or dangerous viruses – in the concept of the performative- ly generated body in a playful (and not in every case unproblematic) way. Today, added to this are “environmental” and deep-time, geolog- ical, and physical conditions and their relational concatenations. The plastic-eating mutations in Pinar Yolda’s project Ecosystem of Excess (2014), for instance, make reference to the geological non-expirability of plastic. They presage our future and play with the adaptability of “low” (nonhuman) organisms to environmental changes, something that for humans seems uncanny. “Nature,” these miniature monsters say, always survives somehow. But is that what we want? The mon- strous thing about the symptom and effect body of today consists in rendering Gaia’s intrusion into the human sphere visible – to take up Stengers’ concept – and in the shattering of the human perspective. This also occurs in the two video projects Sirenomelia (2017) and Mirror Matter Sirenomelia (2017), in which the artist Emilija Škarnulyte plays a sea creature that swims through the dark, endless

15 Ibid. p. 100. 16 Cf. Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn. 17 Bennett, Dynamische Materie und Zero Landscape, p. 20; Bennett, “Vibrant Matter – Zero Landscape,” p. 19 18 Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” p. 32. synth 253

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Fig. 5 (top) and Fig. 6 (below): Video stills from Emilija Škarnulytė: Sirenomelia

channels and tunnels of a former NATO submarine base in the Arctic waters of Norway. “Sirenomelia,” as she is called, is also the name of a condition, the so-called mermaid syndrome, a rare congenital defor- mity in which the legs are fused together Disease, disability, defect: those are the human perspectives on her silvery, shiny tail with which 254 synth

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she agilely moves in this strange and uncanny underwater environment where the man-made, the technological, decays. Commandeered by sea anemones and other creatures, it thrives like a magical landscape. The two videos vary, above all with respect to how they begin: In the older work, for several minutes we see the slow-moving, rotating mountains of Svalbard, isolated by fragments of a white satellite dish. It is a geodesic telescope that measures the earth and the changes in the ocean caused by climate warming. We embark on a journey to the Arctic, a scientific expedition to an extreme place. By contrast, Sirenomelia Mirror Matter begins with a highly artificial, fluid mir- ror landscape and model-like techno-architecture – references to the artist’s research residencies at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, and in Japan, where research stations have been built for the exploration of antimatter and mirror mat- ter. In the video, they seem like scenes from a science fiction mov- ie, suggesting that the figure came to Earth from the future. Both videos share hypnotic sounds and standstill; we look out at ice floes and a decapitated whale. Then the tunnels and basins, Sirenomelia swimming along, close to the marine creatures, as if she had to touch every millimeter. In the end we see how she “wags” out of the image, small, “disabled,” floundering solitarily with what now seems to be her clumsy tail, all alone in the endlessly blue expanse. Timothy Morton places emphasis on the cyborgian nature of Sirenomelia, her symptom and effect body, when he writes: “Emilija allows herself to be measured by cosmic and gigantic terrestrial forces: evolution, black holes, the biosphere, magnetic fields, photons, gravi- ty waves, NATO, the Soviet Union, patriarchy, the military industrial complex, nuclear energy, crystals, minerals, the mineral extraction in- dustry. She is a chameleon who lets herself be meditated on by beings that are physically larger than the conventional human realm, and which seem to many to be indifferent to it, or invisible, or irrelevant. But as we’ve seen, the reason why there’s a radio telescope in the Artic is that things such as the biosphere and quasars have become relevant to human beings.”19

19 Timothy Morton, “We Are All Mermaids,” p. 8. Quasar means quasi-stellar radio wave and refers to the active center of a galaxy. Sonifications of quasar activity can be heard in the video. synth 255

Techno-Ecofeminism // 125 There are not only various materializations, eras, and discourses combined in the Sirenomelia figure; she also mediates between them. She establishes contact with the strangely abandoned place as if she wanted to explore and testify to its vibrancy and connect the different spheres and elements with one another. The artist personally immers- es herself in this situation. She “others”20 – becomes fish, mermaid, submarine, torpedo, machine. But why a mermaid, of all things, this ancient male fantasy that has recently even provided the material for TV series for teenagers? As Emilija Škarnulyté told me, she wanted to strike out at this militarized place, which continues to tell of the disintegration of the myth of war, with a counter-myth: sea creatures have always been the mediators of “nature.” They are not innocent; like the cyborgs, this makes them useful for paradoxical figurations: Sirenomelia comes from another space and another time; she is awk- ward, thrown in, the last survivor of a species or first one of its kind that is no longer human. She returns to that place from where life on Earth came: the water, in whose frigid temperatures she learned to live, to survive. Her “femaleness” is not accentuated; one does not see her hair. The camera’s gaze concentrates on her movements, the way she glistens, the physical closeness and touch, but not on sex. Like Biemann’s trickster figure, Sirenomelia is also a mediator that establishes a different kind of communication and participation. Her body, this contradictory assemblage consisting of ages, matters, ges- tures, and fantasies, is a signal from the future that establishes contact without the great gesture of appropriation and colonization. What remains are traces – waves on the surface of the water.

To Mother a Plant: A Special Kind of Care According to Špela Petrič, the technoscientific mentality of feasibility determines our perception of nonhuman organisms. Earth has be- come a laboratory – an experiment with an unknown outcome. We are within it, and because of this we have to take action if other rela- tions want to be established. Petrič therefore constructs test arrange- ments, takes “the laboratory” into public space, and makes it – under

20 On the concept of “othering” as a subject-changing process, see Adorf, Operation Video. 256 synth

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Fig. 7 (top) and Fig. 8 (below): Špela Petrič: Phytoteratology synth 257

Techno-Ecofeminism // 127 other, aesthetic premises – negotiable. For her project Phytoteratology (2017), it was a question of a different form of procreating, breed- ing, and care.” I wanted to mother a plant, a gentle green alien,” emphasizing that the dominant idea of fathering is replaced by that of maternal-monstrous engendering/mothering. For the project, she extracted embryonic tissue from a so-called weed and nourished it in an incubator with steroids from her own urine. With reference to the reproduction method of this plant, this means artificial concep- tion and subsequently the blending of the vegetal tissue with human cells: While from the outside seemingly “normal,” the product is a transspecies plant that was crossed on a morphological level. Petrič apparently repeats strategies of molecular biology and the associated blurring of boundaries, which is common practice in technoscience today and for which there are few ethical guidelines. Do her actions frighten us because they intervene more deeply than traditional prac- tices of breeding, namely on a molecular level, or because she blends the human-plant species? Or because her method illustrates that with technosciences even conventional or “normal” breeding methods ac- quire the overtone of exploitation, optimization, and unpredictable experiment? Špela Petrič presents the incubators with the growing plants in the exhibition space along with a video; the installation is accompanied by a performance in which such questions are raised. Phytoteratology makes a case for the necessity of broadening the current discourse on genetic engineering and biotechnologies. It can no longer be just a matter of the dichotomy between human and plant; rather, the question must be asked concerning what power rela- tions and economies code what kind of nonhuman entities, and who benefits from it. It becomes clear that other relationships could be es- tablished under laboratory conditions: “There are very different kinds of care,” she says.21 “These tiny monsters, coming into being from an impossible love, with intense labor and a yearning of plant parent- hood, emerge in a time of environmental, political and social crisis as beings of permeability, harbingers of affective agential intra-action. Making kin with plants, caring for us, hopeful monsters.”22 With these concepts, Petrič takes up Barad’s and Haraway’s arguments, both of whom do not fundamentally come out either for or against

21 Špela Petrič in conversation with Yvonne Volkart, April 2018. 22 On this, see the website http://www.spelapetric.org//portfolio/ectogenesis. 258 synth

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Fig. 9 (top) and Fig. 10 (bottom): Ursula Damm: Insect Songs synth 259

Techno-Ecofeminism // 129 synthetic biology and biotechnology.23 Taking care of others in times of technoscience is a challenge that has to be repeatedly readdressed and continuously performed, so that it does not remain abstract. It cannot, as another project by Petrič revealed, always succeed.24 Also in this project, the elements of love, care, and shared time, which were at work for several months in the beginning of the project, are not fully presented in the quite technical set-up of the exhibition. The now “motherless” plants remained somehow “alone” and therefore could not thrive in this difficult environment. And yet, Petrič’s experiments set themselves apart from that “human” hubris of technological fea- sibility into which xenofeminism à la Laboria Cuboniks lapses, when they say: “If nature is unjust, change nature!”25 The old feminist work on the concept of nature does not simply imply the one-sided control of “nature,” but a vibrant balancing of differently oriented “queer” relations.

Meaning-less Communication I would like to conclude the discussion of artistic projects with a per- formance and its documentation on film in which “real” communi- cation between mosquitos, humans, musical instruments, and various media technologies are established. The point of departure for the project was an experience that the artist had: She began to miss the sound of insects. Her research revealed that in Germany alone, 75 percent of the insect population has disappeared. The exact causes are not yet known; it can presumably be traced back to pesticides, as well as to the loss of their natural habitats. In Insect Songs (2018) by Ursula Damm in collaboration with Christina Meißner (cello) and Teresa Carrasco (sound), we see, and above all hear, tentative, soft, or screeching sounds, overtones, pure tones; a woman playing the cello, whirring and buzzing, mosqui- toes can be seen on a monitor; their flight paths are being record- ed, and there is also a box in which they fly around, confined. The

23 This openness also led to ecofeminist critique, for example by Donovan, “Participatory Epistemology, Sympathy, and Animal Ethics,” pp. 87–88. 24 See my critique of this in Does Art Make a Difference? Technologies of the Ecological after the Anthropocene, pp. 154–57. 25 Laboria Cuboniks, Xenofeminism, p. 34. 260 synth

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performance is meant to bring about an experimental situation, in which it is first of all possible to observe whether and how mosquitos react to music played by people and instruments and what the later results might be. The intention is to create a kind of dialogue and en- gagement-with-one-another, namely with those seemingly annoying animals whose disappearance people normally desire more than they would later regret. The performance was preceded by years of prepa- ration, during which the artist made an “arena” in her kitchen using “biomedia,” such as gauze, glass, yeast, and wine, which attracted fly- ing insects and enticed them to perform a courting dance and song. She recorded the sound that was produced in the process. In collab- oration with the neuroscientist Birgit Brüggemeier, software was de- veloped that detects the pitch of the mosquito songs and amplifies and modulates the sounds that occur. What results is a song similar to human music. First, a technical set up enabling hearing and seeing the insects’ flight paths was created. The cellist Christina Meißner was asked to improvise to it and find out what sounds cause a change in their behavior. For the subsequent recording, Meißner wanted to work exclusively by way of listening and attempted, according to her understanding, to produce mosquito sounds, and in doing so entice the mosquitoes into swarm- ing. It became apparent from the very beginning that the mosquitoes were engaging in this interaction. Ursula Damm wrote: “The type of music is as amorphous as our perception of mosquito song. It does not correspond with our music habits but enters a stage of sound perception that is more primal, raw, simple. First of all, a part of the process is to find the species-specific tone/pitch, to see if overtones have an effect, and later in the piece also effectuate the musician’s abandon as a hu- man being in a dialogue. Christina Meißner did not want to force the mosquitoes to react; rather, she wanted to “become a mosquito” herself and “sing with them’.”26 And she continued: “The actual media-related aspect is that we humans have to become quiet in order to hear the mosquitoes. Admittedly, we use technology to enable us to hear them, and we in turn use technology to examine the impact our music has on the mosquitoes.”27 But they are simple arrangements, not sensors: “For me it is an aesthetic decision not to employ any additional technology,

26 Ursula Damm, e-mail to Yvonne Volkart, May 2018. 27 Ibid. synth 261

Techno-Ecofeminism // 131 but to work on my attentiveness (being quiet, watching at length) or to simulate the habitat of the mosquitos (mosquito box). Instead of being about technology, it is about understanding the different “Umwelten” [surrounding worlds] in the sense of Jakob Johann von Uexküll. To me, making music together with feedback on and responding to the reac- tion seems to be much more than merely working with sensors. One senses and develops meaning for one another. If you rely on feedback, you save yourself the step of technical data production + interpretation + application.”28 The extraordinary thing about this work is the fact that we attain an independent temporality of listening through the unpredictable, “interactively” arranged timing of the sound, the foreignness of the tones, and the self-imposed concentration and quietness. As Christoph Brunner has shown, aesthetic timing, as the experienced and shared time in the here and now, provides the condition for what he, in con- nection with Brian Massumi, calls the “ecology of relation.”29 What is meant by this is a specific form of temporality that touches those present on an affective level and “calls on” them in their physicality and relationship to others in the room as a plurality of pre-individual entities in embryo, in this case: faces, flies, sounds, movements, tech- nologies, signals, traces, and so on. The abandon experienced by each individual in this event, which extends over a longer period of time without a specifically announced beginning or end, becomes a con- sciously perceived experience of shared participation; Ursula Damm speaks of “shared experience” or “shared habitats.” This is based on communication that initially appears to be completely meaningless because it is situated outside of our language codes and, for us, serves no apparent purpose. However, this communication becomes mean- ingful if it can involve a different kind of “understanding,” empathy, and collectively created and shared (temporary) temporality. In this sense it provides an aesthetic excess of pure becoming and goes be- yond any purposeful rationality – a hierarchical relationship that in the context of “green” lifestyles people readily pursue in their contacts with nonhuman creatures.30

28 Ibid. 29 Cf. Brunner, Affective Politics of Timing. 30 In the same way “women” are not automatically feminists, an “organic label” does not rule out exploitation. 262 synth

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In Favor of a Techno-Eco-Queer- Feminist Being-with-Others The examples discussed show that the irony of cyberfeminism has changed into an aesthetic of participation and participating that does not shy away from developing empathy toward, and affective relationships with, nonhuman creatures and also staging them aes- thetically. The building and fostering of such relations is associated with a great deal of effort, personal as well, and cannot be substituted with technological optimizations. The idea that human beings caring- ly or even healingly intervene in what industrial economies destroy no longer seems ridiculous or lame.31 On the contrary, such values contribute to the erosion of the dualism of “human” versus “nature” or “good” versus “evil” discussed above and which, for example, con- tinue to be perpetuated in xenofeminism. Modes of coexistence are invented that are commensurate with the seriousness of the situation in the Anthropocene. Natasha Myers writes that what is cultivated is a “robust mode of knowing grounded in queer, feminist, decolo- nial politics.”32 Christoph Brunner speaks of an “ecology of relation”: “From pure relationality to an ecology of relation, an amplification takes place which selects out of the manyness of potential lines sever- al without disregarding the others. This process is politically relevant because an ecology does not mark an already closed system but gives forces the potential to actively attune to an emergent situation‚ ‘in the name of that which emerges.’”33 Becoming involved in the diverse ecology of relations reveals that there are different temporalities and spatialities. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa writes that from the perspective of an earthworm, catalyst

31 Theorists such as Donna Haraway, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Vinciane Despret, Lori Gruen, Natasha Myers, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, or permaculture de- sign in general, make reference to “healing” aspects in a positive way. Haraway writes about fictions in which it is about “migrat[ing] to ruined places and work[ing] with human and non-human partners to heal these places… Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 137. 32 Myers, https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/28848/ pdf_17, p. 1. 33 Ibid. synth 263

Techno-Ecofeminism // 133 fertilizers are growth inhibitors.34 If we allow this involvement of dif- ferent times, spaces, and factors, it becomes apparent that accelera- tionist strategies fall short, because they are conceived too “humanly”: They emanate from a dualism of temporality and the exclusivity of the capitalist production paradigm, which in view of the emergence of the forces and range of unpredictable transformations is untenable. Unfortunately, limiting and limited perspectives of this kind domi- nate contemporary rhetoric and policy, even though they are so obvi- ously recognizable as phantasmal constructions in their adherence to anthropocentric hubris. Isabelle Stengers has repeatedly pointed out that it is necessary to challenge such powerful simplicities, for exam- ple by beginning to ask simple and concrete questions. Questions are difficult to answer because things are more complicated than they are made out to be.35 Transversal practices need to be invented and lived: imaginary, aesthetic, activist practices – life practices. Practices that, on any level, create an excess of meaning, a not-being-wrapped-up in the limitations of capitalist, dual argumentations. Techno-ecofeminist queerings – to the extent that, as I asserted at the beginning, acti- vate the vibrancy, transformational power, and relationality of human and nonhuman entities and their different temporalities – seem more than suitable for this purpose: “Queer attachments work both to cel- ebrate the excess of life and to politicize the sites at which this excess is eradicated.“36

Bibliography Adams, Carol J., and Lori Gruen. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Adorf, Sigrid. Operation Video: Eine Technik des Nahsehens und ihr spezifisches Subjekt; die Videokünstlerin der 1970er Jahre. Bielefeld: transcript, 2008. Avanessian, Armen, and Helen Hester, eds. dea ex machina. Berlin: Merve, 2015. Barad, Karen. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Kvinder 1, no. 2, pp. 25-53. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

34 Puig de la Bellacasa, Making Time for Soil, p. 709. 35 Stengers, In Catastrophic Times. 36 Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Burce Erickson, Queer Ecologies, quoted in Davies, Toxic Progeny, p. 232. 264 synth

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Bennett, Jane, and Klaus K. Loenhart. “Vibrant Matter, Zero Landscape: Interview with Jane Bennett. GAM 07 (October 19, 2011) pp. 14-25. Brunner, Christoph. “Affective Politics of Timing: On Emergent Collectivity in Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors.” In Marie-Luise Angerer et al., eds. Timing of Affect: Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics. Berlin and Zurich: diaphanes, 2014, pp. 245-62. Coole, Diana. “Der neue Materialismus: Die Ontologie und die Politik der Materialisierung.” In Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier, eds. Macht des Materials / Politik der Materialität. Zurich: diaphanes, 2014, pp. 29-46. Davies, Heather. “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures.” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 5, no. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 231-50. Davies, Heather, and Etienne Turpin, eds. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2015. Donovan, Josephine. “Participatory Epistemology, Sympathy, and Animal Ethics.” In Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen, eds. Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 75-90. The Fibreculture Journal. Issue 17: Unnatural Ecologies (April 21, 2011). fibreculture- journal.org Gabrys, Jennifer. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis and London: Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 2016. Grusin, Richard, ed. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis and London: Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 2017. Grusin, Richard. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis and London: Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 2015. Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 2000. Haraway, Donna. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. In Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 295–337. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Laboria Cuboniks. Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation. http://www.laboriacubon- iks.net/20150612 Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015. synth 265

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Precarias a la Deriva. “Globalisierte Sorge.” In Tobias Bärtsch et al., eds. Ökologien der Sorge. Vienna: transversal texts, 2017, pp. 25–96. http://transversal.at/books/ oekologiendersorge. Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care.” Social Studies of Science 45 (2015), pp. 692–716. Maxwell, Richard, Jon Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg, eds. Media and the Ecological Crisis. New York and London: Routledge, 2015. Myers, Natasha. “Ungrid-able Ecologies: Decolonozing the Ecological Sensorium in a 10,000 year-old NaturalCultural Happening.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3, no. 3 (2017), p. 1–24. http://www.catalystjournal.org. Morton, Timothy. “We Are All Mermaids.” Manuscript for the exhibition Manifold at Decad in Berlin, June 22–August 26, 2017. Berlin, 2017 Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey. Lüneburg: Open Humanities Press in collaboration with me- son press, 2015. The Laboratory Planet. No. 5: Alien Capitalism (2016). Weinstein, Jami, and Claire Colebrook, eds. Posthumous Life: Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Volkart, Yvonne. Fluide Subjekte: Anpassung und Widerspenstigkeit in der Medienkunst. Bielefeld: transcript, 2006. Volkart, Yvonne. “The Cyberfeminist Fantasy of the Pleasure of the Cyborg.” In Claudia Reiche and Verena Kuni, eds. Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols. New York: Autonomedia, 2004. Volkart, Yvonne. “Does Art Make a Difference? Technologies of the Ecological After the Anthropocene.” In Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits, eds. Acoustic Space. Issue 17: Open Fields, Art and Science Research Practices in the Network Society. Riga: RIXC, 2018, pp. 149_64. zfm: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften. Issue 4: Medienökologien (January 2016).

The ongoing research project “Ecodata-Ecomedia-Ecoaesthetics,” which is being conducted at the Institute of Aesthetic Practice and Theory, Academy of Art and Design FHNW Basel (2017-20) and produced these results, was made possible by funding provided by the Swiss National Foundation. 266 synth

STIRRING THE EMBERS Preliminary Critical Notes on Xenofeminisms

Isabel de Sena

THE XENOFEMINIST MANIFESTO – officially, “Xenofeminsim: A Politics for Alienation” – was first published online in 2014 as the brainchild of the polyglossial collective Laboria Cuboniks, com- posed of Amy Ireland (Sydney), Diann Bauer (London), Helen Hester (London), Katrina Burch (nomadic), Lucca Fraser (Halifax), and Patricia Reed (Berlin). A logic- and reason-embracing mutant of left-accelerationism re-engineered with cyberfeminist genes, xe- nofeminism (XF) is described as a “technomaterialist, anti-naturalist, and gender abolitionist form of feminism.”1 Its aim is “to articulate

1 Hester, H. (2018), Xenofeminism. Medford, Cambridge: Polity Books, p.6.

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138 // The Beautiful Warriors a feminism fit for the twenty-first century.”2 Its motto: “If nature is unjust, change nature!” (OVERFLOW, 0x1A).3 Hailed by critics, XF has been said to “definitively grasp feminism back from the … hands of the moralizing-spiteful petit-bourgeoisie.”4 Also among the general public – if Google is anything to go by – but also in witnessing the newly spawned “disciple movements” or the wave of XF (over-) representation at public events in cities like Berlin and London – there seems to be a choir of univocal accolade verging on glorification for all things XF. It is difficult, even four years on, to find critical voices. This is at best surprising, given some of the distinctly audacious – alternatively, brash and ill considered – claims of XF. At worst, it is also detrimental to XF. Itself aiming to be “a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language … that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked” (OVERFLOW, 0x19), one would assume consensus is not exactly the lifeblood they were hoping for. This text aims to stir the embers somewhat, to open a new conver- sation on XF by addressing a number of fundamental tenets it adopts which I argue are untenable, specifically their conceptualizations of scalability and universality. This critique is by no means exhaustive; it comprises an initial and partial instigation to challenge a publication that though provocative, has subsisted without the oppositional voic- es that might invigorate the discourse around it. Given the confus- ing and confused nature of the concepts, but also in a genuine spirit to invite response, the discussions are each translated into a series of questions. The analysis is guided by a number of seminal feminist texts published between 1984 and 2015, which not only offer a di- rect retaliation to the three concepts mentioned above, but also show their teeth, muscles, and sinews as vigorous narratives from the past and present of feminist practice. In their undying commitment to

2 Laboria Cuboniks (2018), The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation. London: Verso Books. 3 Xenofeminsim: A Politics for Alienation, laboriacuboniks.net. Quotations from the manifesto are referenced by noting their heading (an imperative verb) and sub- heading (a number and/or letter combination comprising a consecutive series). 4 Mark Fisher quoted in: “After Accelerationism: The Xenofeminist Manifesto,” tripleampersand.org (June 11, 2015). 268 synth

Stirring the Embers // 139 non-scalability and non-universality, they are quite comfortably in- vulnerable to being qualified as “petit-bourgeois.”

// SCALABILITY The XF Manifesto states, “Refusing to think beyond the micro com- munity … to consider how emancipatory tactics can be scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain satisfied with temporary and defensive gestures” (TRAP, 0x0A). It consequently coalesces “the un- ambitious and the non-scalable” (ADJUST, 0x11), asserting the wish to tear them down. It will not be unreasonable here to consider for a moment why ex- actly so many proficient scholars and practitioners have come to reject scalability, consistently and over several decades now. The concept in fact is plagued by a number of fundamental problems that, togeth- er with their particular histories and disciplinary ancestries, cannot simply be bypassed. In the XF manifesto, the concept is mystifyingly abstract, lacking any form of address of these important details, which leaves unclear whether Laboria Cuboniks adheres to the concept re- gardless of its implications, or whether its militant adherence to it obviates a thorough lack of consideration. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaubt Tsing is among those who have dedicated rigorous thought to the issue, of which she offers a concise diagnosis in chapter three of “The Mushroom at the End of the World,” titled “Some Problems with Scale.” Cutting to the chase already in the first paragraph, she states the problem with scalability is primarily that it “demands the possibility of infinite expansion without changing the research framework … the research questions … [or] the framing assumptions.”5 These stakes seem rather high for something as trite as “infinite expansion.” However, history clearly disagrees: In its stead- fast nature, and unyieldingness to the details of processual alterations, scalability has become the darling of (mainstream) modern science, lending it the ideal methodological framework to make sweeping uni- versal claims. Unsurprisingly, science has since centuries and to great avail adopted scalability as one of its fundamental requirements, and discarded as irrelevant (like XF) any projects that don’t comply with

5 Tsing, A.L., p.38. synth 269

140 // The Beautiful Warriors it. It is gainful to ignore the reality of interruption – to “admit only data that already fit the research frame.”6 To be clear, these are not possible, optional, or even probable characteristics of scalability; they are its non-negotiable prerequisites. Scalability is unachievable unless a project’s fundamental components are made perfectly uniform (and therefore transposable) and hermet- ically immutable to any adaptation-requiring details encountered along the way. That is what scalability means. Hence, it is scalability that is essentially conformist – in the fundamental sense of the word, “to ‘make (something) like another thing’”7 – while non-scalability essentially is not. Change and transformation are the mortal enemies of scalability; they are toxic to it; it withers and dies in their fumes. And of course, the lucrativeness of scalability extends beyond the field of science. In its bull-headed pursuit of maximally efficient – i.e., homogeneous, identically replicable – growth, scalability deserves full credit for making projects profitable and for this reason has become the modus operandi of many an exploitative endeavor. As a characteris- tic and precondition of all progress narratives, it has come to define – and capacitate – the machinery of capitalism. In the context of capital- ism, Laboria Cuboniks’ adherence to scalability comes as no surprise. As an accelerationist spin-off, it aims to cannibalize the instruments/ systems of capitalism, thereby taking distance from the self-sanctity of leftist politics. This it has made clear, consistently and on numerous platforms, including the manifesto, and the appropriationist impulse is both clear and valid. However, as gender studies scholar Emma Rees observes, “any potential for scalability and real-world application that xenofeminism might have remains frustratingly elusive,” which makes it very difficult to say anything about how Laboria Cuboniks envi- sions scalable projects might possibly circumvent the problems out- lined above, if this is at all the intention.8 Seeking an example elsewhere will at least provide a foothold and is anyhow crucial in view of historical awareness; as stated in the man- ifesto, “we not should not hesitate to learn from … the successes and failures of history” (PARITY, 0x10). The first scalable project, for

6 Idem. 7 Conform (n.d.), in: Google Dictionary (accessed 22.05.2018). 8 Rees, E., “Xenofeminism, by Helen Hester,” in: www.timeshighereducation.com/ books/review-xenofeminism-helen-hester-polity-press (March 1, 2018). 270 synth

Stirring the Embers // 141 instance, is the landscape model that emerged from the 16th-17th century European colonial plantation. The Portuguese in Brazil were the first to stumble on this golden “formula for smooth expansion” and developed the alienated, isolated, extracted, abstracted, self-con- tained, standardizable, interchangeable – and therefore commodi- fiable – project elements that have come to define scalability.9 The process leading up to this achievement went “as follows: Exterminate local people and plants; prepare now-empty, unclaimed land; and bring in exotic and isolated labor and crops for production.”10 This model “became an inspiration for later industrialization and [capital- ist] modernization”11; the property of scalability on which it is based has made possible the full-blown exploitation of people and resources that has become the gruesomely common new normal in the realities of many, past and present. Again: How does Laboria Cuboniks propose to practice scalability in a way that does not fall back on its inherently exploitative patterns, as evidenced by this and a myriad of other historic and contemporary examples? There is little to no discussion within their very abstract- ed address of the concept – in which they neglect to situate it both epistemologically (i.e., in relation to science) and historically (i.e., in relation to the colonial plantation that birthed it and the many other exploitative infrastructures that followed) – to how exactly they envi- sion a practicable implementation of the oxymoron that is adaptive, diversified scalability. This does seem to be their intention. In the manifesto, Laboria Cuboniks explicitly rejects many of the implications of scalability outlined above. For instance, they claim to “invite contamination as a mutational driver” (CARRY, 0x17) and state that “the task of en- gineering platforms for social emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic mutations these platforms afford” (TRAP, 0x0D). It appears then, that Laboria Cuboniks wants to adopt scalability therein aligning itself with mainstream modern science and even more closely with the notion of progress epitomized in capital- ism, but repudiates admitting the inherent conditions of scalability

9 Tsing, A.L., p.39. 10 Idem. 11 Idem. synth 271

142 // The Beautiful Warriors to its project. Of course, however, they cannot have their cake and eat it, too. So is the scalability they propose to practice in fact not scalability? And if not, why call it that? If they mean developing work that reaches many people or operates on otherwise large scales, why not say that: “develop large-scale projects”? Not as catchy, admittedly, but certainly more accurate. In any case, developing large-projects is not the same as “scalability,” which simply makes it quite senseless to call it so. Alternatively, if the scalability they propose is scalability, how do they account for the fact that the processes of abstraction, isolation, and standardization that are necessarily implicated in any scalable project are essentially incompatible with the ideas of mutability and contamination they advance, or for the fact they effectively hijack any possibility for social emancipation, leaving only space for top-down, autocratic and delusional hallucinations of a gifted emancipation, i.e., no emancipation at all? On a final note, Tsing is quick to stress that “it would be a huge mistake to assume that scalability is bad and non-scalability is good. Non-scalable projects can be as terrible in their effects as scalable ones.” Non-scalable projects therefore do not at all escape scrutiny; there is no intrinsic sanctity whatsoever in them. As she explains, “The main distinguishing feature between scalable and non-scalable projects is not ethical conduct, but rather that the latter are more diverse because they are not geared up for expansion.”12 The main – and inevitable – consequence of XF’s adoption of scalability as a key driver, assuming scalability is indeed what they mean, is therefore that it “banishes meaningful diversity, that is, diversity that might change things.”13

// UNIVERSALITY The manifesto claims, that “XF constructs … a future in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every human” (ZERO, 0x00) and “declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular” (ZERO, 0x04).

12 Idem., p.41. 13 Idem., p.38. 272 synth

Stirring the Embers // 143 This is immediately reminiscent of two seminal feminist texts. The first is Donna Haraway’s 1988 essay, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Specifically, it is reminiscent of the notion of “the god trick” – fa- mously introduced in this essay – by which Haraway refers to the illu- sionist deception that for centuries has allowed “The imagined ‘they’” of [masculine] objectivity in science to “leap out the marked body and into a conquering gaze”: The trick “of seeing everything from nowhere.”14 It is difficult to see how speaking “as no one in particu- lar,” or assuming to speak for “every human” is not a re-performance of this god trick, now under the seemingly unified guise of “feminist emancipation.” Which feminist emancipation? Whose feminist eman- cipation? The combination of a self-evident, universal “we” with this singular subject begs many questions. As Haraway continues, in her attack on universalism through her insistence on “the particularity and embodiment of all vision,” “where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims,” and in her mission in this essay to outline a feminist objectivity, which “means quite simply situated knowledges,” Haraway finds no exemption for “The positionings of the subjugat- ed.”15 These are no more “’innocent’ positions” than those of the patri- arch or any other “master decoder,” but rather “knowledgeable modes of denial through repression, forgetting, and disappearing acts – ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively.”16 To assume the first person plural voice of a mythically singular “feminist eman- cipation” with the sweeping universalist and ventriloquist gesture to “speak for every human” is to neglect that, which might actually pro- duce “better accounts of the world,” namely “webs of differential po- sitionings,” of “limited location,” and “the joining of partial views … of views from somewhere.”17 Much more can be said, but there is little need for it; “The moral is simple: Only partial perspective promises objective vision. It allows us to become answerable.”18

14 Haraway, D., pp.575, 581. 15 Idem., pp.582, 584, 589. 16 Idem., pp.584, 593. 17 Idem., pp.583, 590. 18 Idem., p.583. synth 273

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That is the core issue at stake: Accountability. The ensuing ques- tion is how Laboria Cuboniks proposes to possibly – and again, if at all – make itself accountable if the politics it undertakes is universalist, and if it supports everyone’s right (including their own) to speak from the abstracted, alienated position of no body in particular, while taking it upon itself to construct a future feminist emancipation that miracu- lously subsumes the needs of every body? Laboria Cuboniks dedicates an entire paragraph in the manifesto to nuancing their notion of universality, which in its relevance to this discussion deserves full mention: “Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory ab- olitionist projects – the abolition of class, gender, and race – hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced iden- tities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up – or, bet- ter, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars – namely Eurocentric universalism – whereby the male is mistaken for the sex- less, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abo- lition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even – especially – when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves.” (PARITY, 0x0F) The first question is how much universality is left in this universal. A “non-absolute” universal might be said to be yet another oxymoron, in which case the same question arises as for scalability: Why call it so if it is not? More importantly, however – admitting for the sake of argument that such a universal is possible, which in fact is certainly arguable, albeit not convincingly addressed in the text – the second question is how this universal actually takes shape in practice, and whether XF succeeds in its ambitious “reworking of the universal” as “a political orientation that slices through every particular,” despite its abstracting tendencies. What follows addresses these questions by returning to the core issue of accountability and extending it to an ex- amination of how exactly the universal substantiates in the manifesto. 274 synth

Stirring the Embers // 145 Poet and radical feminist Adrienne Rich in her seminal lecture for the “Conference on Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980s” held in Utrecht, the Netherlands in 1984, titled “Notes to- ward a Politics of Location,” offers additional thoughts on the issue of accountability. Especially, she addresses the inevitable compromise of accountability in the face of disembodiment, or of the “faceless, race- less, classless category of ‘all women’,” under the “‘deadly sameness’ of abstraction,” which she is not tongue-tied to designate as a “creation of white Western self-centeredness.”19 No, Laboria Cuboniks does not speak for “all women.” But “every human” is equally if not more face- less, raceless, and classless; as is the abstracted, singular, fantastical category of “feminist emancipation”; as is the chronically recurrent and deeply mystifying “we” with which the text is permeated: “[I]t is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure,” “we must overhaul,” “we must engineer,” “How are we to become,” “How do we build,” “the desires we want,” “the problems we face,” “We should,” “We need,” “we see,” and so on and so forth. Who is “we”? And why is it speaking for “us”? Is “we” everyone, everywhere? Or is it everyone in the West? Or just the feminists? All of them, or just the technofeminists, or rath- er the cyberfeminists? Is it Western feminists? Does “we” include feminists in rural communities in large swathes of Asia, Africa, and Central/South America, for instance, who have no privileged access to technology? What role is there for them to play within Laboria Cuboniks’ self-ascribed task of constructing the future through “The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms of technological mediation”? Laboria Cuboniks explicitly recognizes that “no one can claim [digital tools’] comprehensive accessibility.” But in noting that most of “the world’s poor is adversely affected by the ex- panding technological industry” takes it upon itself to combat “these conditions as a target for elimination” (all: INTERRUPT, 0X08). So is the role of feminists in these communities limited to being saved? Who knows – one can only guess at a faceless face. But while the “we” is left unnamed, there are clues in the text about who is not in- cluded. They show how Laboria Cuboniks’ abstracted disengagement from its own limited localities and its megalomaniac ambitions to speak for all evidence an inconsideration of political accountability,

19 Rich, A., pp.219, 221. synth 275

146 // The Beautiful Warriors and thereby a renunciation of objectivity, specifically feminist objec- tivity. For example, on the topic of the family, they state: “We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domes- tic life are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere – the way of the commune – or bearing its burdens manifold – the way of the single parent. If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place … we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place.” Clearly, “The task before us” is in any case not that of the millions of people living in the polygamy belt stretching across sub-Saharan Africa, “from Senegal through to Tanzania, in which it is not uncom- mon for a third of married women to share their husbands.”20 This whole section of the planet – and many others, in which the Western trend of the nuclear family is by far the minority family structure – recognizes nothing in the two singular, “only” options described above: either withdrawing from the economic sphere or bearing its bur- dens manifold. Rather, their domestic realities are shaped by the far more common structure of the extended family – and the particular set of problems that derive from it – which includes parent(s) and kin from outside the nuclear family, and is common not only in sub-Sa- haran Africa, but also in large parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Central and South America.21 That is a substantial part of the global population whose realities are left unaddressed in this manifesto for the future. And who are nevertheless subsumed into a “we” who out- lines the problems “we” face and defines the solutions “we” should seek. This fails to account for the unspoken yet undeniably practiced assumption, articulated by Rich already in 1984, “That only certain kinds of people can make theory; that the white-educated mind is capable of formulating everything; that white middle-class feminism can know for “all women”; that only when a white mind formulates is the formulation to be taken seriously.”22

20 Fenske, J., “African polygamy: Past and present,” in: https://voxeu.org/article/ african-polygamy-past-and-present (November 9, 2013). 21 http://worldfamilymap.ifstudies.org/2015/articles/world-family-indicators/ family-structure. 22 Rich, A., p.230. 276 synth

Stirring the Embers // 147 That this is not an accusation is primarily because it is impossible to hold anyone accountable who circumvents the conditions for ac- countability by abstracting themselves from the specific localizations of the bodies they inhabit. And that is exactly the point. As long as the “god trick” remains operative, their abstraction is no less prone to that of “abstract masculinity” (a term coined by Nancy Hartstock in 1983), nor to what Haraway describes as the “perverse capacity – honed to perfection in the histories of science tied to militarism, colonialism, and male supremacy – to distance the knowing subject from everyone and everything.”23 In her critique of her own myopic vision as a younger writer and feminist, Adrienne Rich in her “struggle for accountability” explic- itly names the specific, non-abstracted determinants of her particu- lar body and the histories and conditions that inscribe it: those of “a United States citizen,” “a Jew,” “a feminist,” “a lesbian,” “a woman”; “privileged,” “female,” “White.” The matter is not to circumvent these determinants but to name them, in order to – only then – be able to pose the real question: “How do we actively work to build a white Western feminist consciousness that is not simply centered on itself, that resists white circumscribing?”24 “Pick up again the long struggle against lofty and privileged ab- straction. Perhaps this is the core of revolutionary process.”25

References Haraway, D. (1988), “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3. (Autumn, 1988), pp.575-599. Rich, A. (1984), “Notes toward a Politics of Location.” Talk given at the First Summer School of Critical Semiotics, Conference on Women, Feminist Identity and Society in the 1980s, Utrecht, Holland, June 1, 1984. Retrieved from: peo- ple.unica.it/.../Adrienne-Rich-Notes-Toward-a-Politics-of-Location.pdf Tsing, A.L. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

23 Haraway, D., p.581. 24 Rich, A., p.219. 25 Idem., p.213. synth 277 A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist- Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century

AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LAN- cial relations, our most important political construc- GUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED tion, a world-changing fiction. The international CIRCUIT women’s movements have constructed ‘women’s expe- rience’, as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and material- of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on ism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, the construction of the consciousness, the imagina- than as reverent worship and identification. Blas- tive apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. phemy has always seemed to require taking things The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from that changes what counts as women’s experience in within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over United States politics, including the politics of social- life and death, but the boundary between science ist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral fiction and social reality is an optical illusion. majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - about contradictions that do not resolve into larger creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of hold- populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. ing incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a po- between organism and machine, each conceived as litical method, one I would like to see more honoured coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. Donna Haraway A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of ma- chine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived so- 278 synth

‘sex’ restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of tradition of imagining a world without gender, which ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylac- is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also tics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is un- a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is coupled from organic reproduction. Modern produc- outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on tion seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Mel- an $84 billion item in 1984’sUS defence budget. I am anie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction map- terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in ping our social and bodily reality and as an imagina- cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives tive resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. with a different logic of repression, which we need to Michael Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition understand for our survival. of cyborg politics, a very open field. The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are wholeness through a final appropriation of all the cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense imagination and material reality, the two joined cen- - a ‘final’ irony since the cyborg is also the awful tres structuring any possibility of historical trans- apocalyptic telos of the formation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individu- capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition ation, an ultimate self untied at last from all depen- of the appropriation of nature as resource for the dency, a man in space. An origin story in the ‘West- productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction ern’, humanist sense depends on the myth of original of the self from the reflections of the other - the unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the relation between organism and machine has been a phallic mother from whom all humans must sepa- border war. The stakes in the border war have been rate, the task of individual development and of histo- the territories of production, reproduction, and imag- ry, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully ination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in has argued that both Marxism and psychoanaly- their construction. It is also an effort to contribute sis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post- and gender formation, depend on the plot of origi- modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian nal unity out of which difference must be produced synth 279

and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of tion state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their unity, of identification with nature in the Western fathers, after all, are inessential. sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars. I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, crucial boundary breakdowns that make the follow- irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, ing political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer possible. By the late twentieth century in United structured by the polarity of public and private, States scientific culture, the boundary between the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not household. Nature and culture are reworked; the turned into amusement parks--language tool use, so- one can no longer be the resource for appropriation cial behaviour, mental events, nothing really convinc- or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships ingly settles the separation of human and animal. for forming wholes from parts, including those of And many people no longer feel the need for such a polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue separation; indeed, many branches of feminist cul- in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Franken- ture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and stein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father other living creatures. Movements for animal rights to save it through a restoration of the garden; that are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across through its completion in a finished whole, a city and the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries the model of the organic family, this time without the have simultaneously produced modern organisms as oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the objects of knowledge and reduced the line between Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I ideological struggle or professional disputes between want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of life and social science. Within this framework, returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to teaching modern Christian creationism should be name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do fought as a form of child abuse. not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a nat- Biological-determinist ideology is only one posi- ural feel for united front politics, but without the tion opened up in scientific culture for arguing the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of meanings of human animality. There is much room course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of for radical political people to contest the meanings militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to men- of the breached boundary.2 The cyborg appears in 280 synth

myth precisely where the boundary between human arbitrary reading.4 It is certainly true that post- and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a modernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the signal distrurbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage the certainty of what counts as nature -- a source of exchange. insight and promise of innocence -- is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization The second leaky distinction is between animal-hu- of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology man (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic grounding ‘Western’ epistemology. But the alterna- machines could be haunted; there was always the tive is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism version of abstract existence, like the accounts of structured the dialogue between materialism and technological determinism destroying ‘man’ by the idealism that was settled by a dialectical proge- ‘machine’ or ‘meaningful political action’ by the ‘text’. ny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the an- basically machines were not self-moving, self-de- swers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees signing, autonomous. They could not achieve man’s and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we (de dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)? to himself, but only a caricature of that masculin- ist reproductive dream. To think they were other- The third distinction is a subset of the second: the wise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late boundary between physical and non-physical is very twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the conse- ambiguous the difference between natural and art) quences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent designed, and many other distinctions that used to to Harlequin romances* as a marker of radical apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are change in American white heterosexuality: they get disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern inert. machines are quintessentially microelectronic devic- es: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Mod- Technological determination is only one ideological ern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon organism as coded texts through which we engage in chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular the play of writing and reading the world.3 ‘Textu- scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate alization’ of everything in poststructuralist, post- interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and modernist theory has been damned by Marxists and technology are old partners in Western stories of socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has lived relations of domination that ground the ‘play’ of changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturiza- synth 281

tion has turned out to be about power; small is not an antigen in the immune system, ‘no more’ than the so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in experience of stress. The nimble fingers of ‘Orien- cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s tal’ women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist Victorian girls with doll’s houses, women’s enforced bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. attention to the small take on quite new dimensions Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking all light and clean because they are nothing but sig- account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might nals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in and these machines are eminently portable, mobile Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail* whose -- a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and constructed unities will guide effective oppositional Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being strategies. both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quin- tessence. So my cyborg myth is about transgressed bound- aries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely which progressive people might explore as one part why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. of needed political work. One of my premises is that They are as hard to see politically as materially. They most American socialists and feminists see deepened are about consciousness - or its simulation.5 They dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, ide- are floating signIfiers moving in pickup trucks across alism and materialism in the social practices, sym- Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weav- bolic formula-tions, and physical artefacts associated ings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture. From women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very One-DimensionalMan (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death well, than by the militant labour of older masculinist of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources politics, whose natural constituency needs defence developed by progressives have insisted on the nec- jobs. Ultimately the ‘hardest’ science is about the essary domination of technics and recalled us to an realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the Another of my premises is that the need for unity of preservation of potent secrets. The new machines people trying to resist world-wide intensification of are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-wor- domination has never been more acute. But a slightly shippers mediating a new scientific revolution perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms *The US equivalent of Mills & Boon. of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies. associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the are ‘no more’ than the minuscule coding changes of final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, 282 synth

about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars FRACTURED IDENTITIES apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculin- It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a ist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspec- single adjective -- or even to insist in every circum- tive, a cyborg world might be about lived social and stance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their through naming is acute. Identities seem contra- joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid dictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won of permanently partial identities and contradictory recognition of their social and historical constitution, standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for perspectives at once because each reveals both domi- belief in ‘essential’ unity. There is nothing about nations and possibilities unimaginable from the other teeing ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg complex category constructed in contested sexual sci- unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our pres- entific discourses and other social practices. Gender, ent political circumstances, we could hardly hope for race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I on us by the terrible historica experience of the con- like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, tradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically and capitalism. And who counts as ‘us’ in my own converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground and spew out the tools such a potent political myth called ‘us’, and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Pain- * A practice at once both spiritual and political that ful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention linked guards and arrested anti-nuclear demonstra- among women) along every possible fault line has tors in the Alameda County jail in California in the made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the early 1985. matrix of women’s dominations of each other. For me - and for many who share a similar historical loca- Of technological apocalypse, and committed to build- tion in white, professional middle-class, female, rad- ing a political form that acutally manages to hold ical, North American, mid-adult bodies - the sources together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Chris- of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent tians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to dis- history for much of the US left and US feminism arm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless affinity group in my town.(Affinity: related not by splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nucle- there has also been a growing recognition of another ar group for another, avidiy.)6 response through coalition - affinity, not identity.7 synth 283

Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a consideration of the capacity to act on the basis of natural identifi- specific historical moments in the formation of the cation, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, new political voice called women of colour, has theo- of affinity, of political kinship.8 Unlike the ‘woman’ rized a hopeful model of political identity called ‘oppo- of some streams of the white women’s movement in sitional consciousness’, born of the skills for reading the United States, there is no naturalization of the webs of power by those refused stable membership matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is in the social categories of race, sex, or class. ‘Wom- uniquely available through the power of oppositional en of color’, a name contested at its origins by those consciousness. whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all Sandoval’s argument has to be seen as one potent the signs of Man in ‘Western’ traditions, constructs formulation for feminists out of the world-wide a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, development of anti-colonialist discourse; that is to difference, and specificity. This postmodernist iden- say, discourse dissolving the ‘West’ and its highest tity is fully political, whatever might be said abut product - the one who is not animal, barbarian, or other possible postmodernisms. Sandoval’s opposi- woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called tional consciousness is about contradictory locations history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and semiotically, the identities of the occident de- and pluralisms. stabilize, including those of feminists.9 Sandoval argues that ‘women of colour’ have a chance to build Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential cri- an effective unity that does not replicate the imperi- terion for identifying who is a woman of colour. She alizing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous notes that the definition of the group has been by Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the conscious appropriation of negation. For example, consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging a Chicana or US black woman has not been able from decolonization. to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade Katie King has emphasized the limits of identifica- of negative identities, left out of even the privileged tion and the political/ poetic mechanics of identifica- oppressed authorial categories called ‘women and tion built into reading ‘the poem’, that generative core blacks’, who claimed to make the important revolu- of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tions. The category ‘woman’ negated all non-white tendency among contemporary feminists from differ- women; ‘black’ negated all non-black people, as well ent ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in feminist practice as all black women. But there was also no ‘she’, to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s no singularity, but a sea of differences among US own political tendencies appear to be the telos of women who have affirmed their historical identity the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake femi- as US women of colour. This identity marks out a nist history so that it appears to be an ideological self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm struggle among coherent types persisting over time, 284 synth

especially those typical units called radical, liberal, ernist theory and the constructive tools of ontolog- and socialist-feminism. Literally, all other feminisms ical discourse about revolutionary subjects might are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves building an explicit ontology and epistemology.10 in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to conscious of what it means to have a historically police deviation from official women’s experience. And constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in of course, ‘women’s culture’, like women of colour, our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden is consciously created by mechanisms inducing either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain the naivete of innocence. But what would another forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What The politics of race and culture in the US women’s kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, movements are intimately interwoven. The common permanently unclosed constructions of personal and achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how collective selves and still be faithful, effective - and, to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a ironically, socialist-feminist? logic of appropriation, incorpora-tion, and taxonomic identification. I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront The theoretical and practical struggle against effectively the dominations of ‘race’, ‘gender’, ‘sexual- unity-through-domination or unity-through-in- ity’, and ‘class’. I also do not know of any other time corporation ironically not only undermines the when the kind of unity we might help build could justifica-tions for patriarchy, colonialism, human- have been possible. None of ‘us’ have any longer the ism, positivism, essentialism, scient-ism, and other symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or of reality to any of’them’. Or at least ‘we’ cannot natural standpoint. I think that radical and social- claim innocence from practicing such dominations. ist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/ White women, including socialist feminists, dis- our own epistemological strategies and that this is a covered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. to notice) the non-innocence of the category ‘wom- It remains to be seen whether all ‘epistemologies’ as an’. That consciousness changes the geography of Western political people have known them fail us in all previous categories; it denatures them as heat the task to build effective affinities. denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that ‘we’ do not want any more natural matrix It is important to note that the effort to con- of unity and that no construction is whole. Inno- struct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies cence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as as achievements of people committed to changing the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. the world, has been part of the process showing the But the constructed revolutionary subject must give limits of identification. The acid tools of postmod- late-twentieth-century people pause as well. In the synth 285

fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies unity of women here rests on an epistemology based for constructing them, the possibility opens up for on the ontological structure of’labour’. Marxist/so- weaving something other than a shroud for the day cialist-feminism does not ‘natur-alize’ unity; it is a after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salva- possible achievement based on a possible standpoint tion history. rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structure of labour or of its ana- Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical femi- logue, women’s activity.11 The inheritance of Marx- nisms have simul-taneously naturalized and dena- ian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, tured the category ‘woman’ and conscious-ness of the is the difficulty for me. The contribution from these social lives of ‘women’. Perhaps a schematic carica- formulations has been the emphasis on the daily ture can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian so- responsibility of real women to build unities, rather cialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labour which than to naturalize them. reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker Catherine MacKinnon’s (198Z, 1987) version of is dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and radical feminism is itself a caricature of the ap- illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in prac- propriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of tice. Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category Western theories of identity grounding action.12 It enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of that point of view which is necessary for changing the diverse ‘moments’ or ‘conversations’ in recent the world. Labour is the humanizing activity that women’s politics named radical feminism to MacKin- makes man; labour is an ontological category permit- non’s version. But the teleological logic of her theory ting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge shows how an epistemology and ontology - including of subjugation and alienation. their negations - erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon’s theory is the rewriting In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced of the history of the polymorphous field called radi- by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies cal feminism. The major effect is the production of of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marx- a theory of experience, of women’s identity, that is a ist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. the category of labour to accommodate what (some) That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical women did, even when the wage relation was sub- feminism achieves its end - the unity of women - by ordinated to a more comprehensive view of labour enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, women’s non-being. As for the Marxist/ socialist feminist, labour in the household and women’s activity as consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the social- And MacKinnon’s theory eliminates some of the dif- ist-feminist sense), entered theory on the authority ficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The but at the cost of radical reductionism. 286 synth

in doing - feminists’ consciousness of the non-exis- MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily ad- tence of women, except as products of men’s desire. I opted a different analyt-ical strategy from Marxism, think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian looking first not at the structure of class, but at version of identity can firmly ground women’s uni- the structure of sex/gender and its generative rela- ty. But in solving the problem of the contradictions tionship, men’s constitu-tion and appropriation of of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon’s ‘ontology’ purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another’s doctrine of experience. If my complaint about social- desire, not the self’s labour, is the origin of ‘woman’. ist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made enforces what can count as ‘women’s’ experience - visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacK- anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex innon’s intentional erasure of all difference through itself as far as ‘women’ can be concerned. Feminist the device of the ‘essential’ non-existence of women is practice is the construction of this form of conscious- not reassuring. ness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not. In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism a re-inscription of history, radical feminism can still has the epistemolo-gical status of labour; that is accommodate all the activities of women named by to say, the point from which an analysis able to con- socialist feminists as forms of labour only if the tribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual activity can somehow be sexualized. Reproduction object)fication, not alienation, is the consequence of had different tones of meanings for the two tenden- the structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowl- cies, one rooted in labour, one in sex, both calling the edge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion consequences of domination and ignorance of social and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply and personal reality ‘false consciousness’. alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since Beyond either the diff~culties or the contributions she owes her existence as a woman to sexual ap- in the argument of any one author, neither Marx- propriation. To be constituted by another’s desire is ist nor radical feminist points of view have tended not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both separation of the labourer from his product. were regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; how else could MacKinnon’s radical theory of experience is totaliz- the ‘Western’ author incorporate its others? Each ing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize tried to annex other forms of domination by ex- as obliterate the authority of any other women’s po- panding its basic categories through analogy, simple litical speech and action. It is a totalization produc- listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race ing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded among white radical and socialist feminists was one synth 287

major, devastating political consequence. History and ing for a single ground of domination to secure our polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. But in try to establish genealogies. There was no structural the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into room for race (or for much else) in theory claiming to boundless difference and giving up on the confusing reveal the construction of the category woman and task of making partial, real connection. Some differ- social group women as a unified or totalizable whole. ences are playful; some are poles of world historical The structure of my caricature looks like this: systems of domination. ‘Epistemology’ is about know- socialist feminism--structure of class // wage la- ing the difference. bour // alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race radical feminism THE INFORMATICS OF DOMINA- - structure of gender // sexual appropriation // objec- TION tification sex, by analogy labour, by extension repro- duction, by addition race In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture of possible In another context, the French theorist, Julia unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist Kristeva, claimed women appeared as a histori- principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set cal group after the Second World War, along with by the extent and importance of rearrangements in groups like youth. Her dates are doubtful; but we world-wide social relations tied to science and tech- are now accustomed to remembering that as objects nology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about of knowledge and as historical actors, ‘race’ did not fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, always exist, ‘class’ has a historical genesis, and and gender in an emerging system of world order ‘homosexuals’ are quite junior. It is no accident that analogous in its novelty and scope to that created the symbolic system of the family of man - and so by industrial capitalism; we are living through a the essence of woman - breaks up at the same mo- movement from an organic, industrial society to a ment that networks of connection among people on polymorphous, information system--from all work to the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and and complex. ‘Advanced capitalism’ is inadequate to ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the convey the structure of this historical moment. In following chart of transitions from the comfortable the ‘Western’ sense, the end of man is at stake. It is old hierarchical dominations to the scary new net- no accident that woman disintegrates into women in works I have called the informatics of domination: our time. Perhaps socialist feminists were not sub- stantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that Representation Simulation suppressed women’s particularity and contradictory Bourgeois novel, realism interests. I think we have been, at least through un- Science fiction, postmodernism reflective participation in the logics, languages, and Organism Biotic Component practices of white humanism and through search- Depth, integrity Surface, boundary 288 synth

Heat Noise igod’is dead; so is the ‘goddess’. Or both are revivi- Biology as clinical practice Biology as inscription fied in the worlds charged with microelectronic and Physiology Communications engineering biotechnological politics. In relation to objects like Small group Subsystem biotic components, one must not think in terms of Perfection Optimization essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary Eugenics Population Control constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of Decadence, Magic Mountain Obsolescence, Future Shock lowering constraints. Sexual reproduction is one kind Hygiene Stress Management of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and Microbiology, tuberculosis Immunology, AIDS benefits as a function of the system environment. Organic division of labour Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer rea- Functional specialization Modular construction sonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic Reproduction Replication aspects in natural objects like organisms and fami- Organic sex role specialization Optimal genetic strategies lies. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, Bioogical determinism Evolutionary inertia, constraints and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy Community ecology Ecosystem and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange Racial chain of being bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism. Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism Scientific management in home/factory Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversi- Global factory/Electronid cottage ty have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of Family/Market/Factory Women in the Integrated Circuit parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. Family wage Comparable worth It is ‘irrational’ to invoke concepts like primitive and Public/Private Cyborg citizenship civilized. For liberals and radicals, the search for Nature/Culture fields of difference integrated social systems gives way to a new prac- Co-operation Communicatins enhancemenet tice called ‘experimental ethnography’ in which an Freud Lacan organic object dissipates in attention to the play of Sex Genetic engineering writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations labour Robotics of racism and colonialism into languages of develop- Mind Artificial Intelligence ment and under-development, rates and constraints Second World War Star Wars of modernization. Any objects or persons can be White Capitalist Patriarchy Informatics of Domination reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no ‘natural’ architectures constrain sys- This list suggests several interesting things.13 First, tem design. The financial districts in all the world’s the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded cities, as well as the export-processing and free-trade as ‘natural’, a realization that subverts naturalis- zones, proclaim this elementary fact of’late capi- tic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot talism’. The entire universe of objects that can be go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that known scientifically must be formulated as problems synth 289

in communications engineering (for the managers) or ordering discourse in ‘the West’ since Aristotle still theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia are cyborg semiologies. (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been ‘techno-di- gested’. The dichotomies between mind and body, One should expect control strategies to concentrate animal and human, organism and machine, public on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of and private, nature and culture, men and women, flow across boundaries-- and not on the integrity of primitive and civilized are all in question ideological- natural objects. ‘Integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the West- ly. The actual situation of women is their integra- ern self gives way to decision procedures and expert tion/ exploitation into a world system of production/ systems. For example, control strategies applied to reproduction and com-munication called the infor- women’s capacities to give birth to new human beings matics of domination. The home, workplace, market, will be developed in the languages of population public arena, the body itself- all can be dispersed control and maximization of goal achievement for and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous individual decision-makers. Control strategies will ways, with large consequences for women and others be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, - consequences that themselves are very different degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other for different people and which make potent opposi- component or subsystem, must be localized in a sys- tional international movements difficult to imagine tem architecture whose basic modes of operation are and essential for survival. One important route for probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bod- reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through ies are sacred in themselves; any component can be theory and practice addressed to the social rela- interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the tions of science and technology, including crucially proper code, can be constructed for processing sig- the systems of myth and meanings structuring our nals in a common language. Exchange in this world imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled transcends the universal translation effected by and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal capitalist markets that Marx analysed so well. The self. This is the self feminists must code. privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress - communications break- Communications technologies and biotechnologies are down (Hogness, 1983). The cyborg is not subject to the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a embody and enforce new social relations for women much more potent field of operations. world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions of knowledge which have appeared historically since constituting them, but they should also be viewed as the Second World War prepares us to notice some instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary important inadequacies in feminist analysis which is permeable between tool and myth, instrument has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms and concept, historical systems of social relations 290 synth

and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including and immunobiology. The organism has been trans- objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually lated into prob-lems of genetic coding and read-out. constitute each other. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly.14 In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist Furthermore, communications sciences and modern as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic compo- biologies are constructed by a common move - the nents, i.e., special kinds of information-processing translation of the world into a problem of coding, a devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be search for a common language in which all resistance examined by probing the history and utility of the to instrumental control disappears and all heteroge- concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and asso- neity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, ciated medical practices are rich exemplars of the investment, and exchange. privilege of coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for In communications sciences, the translation of the us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography. Research world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity. Ironies looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems abound. A stressed system goes awry; its commu- theories applied to telephone technology, computer nication processes break down; it fails to recognize design, weapons deployment, or data base construc- the difference between self and other. Human babies tion and maintenance. In each case, solution to the with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexi- key questions rests on a theory of language and con- ty-- for animal rights activists at least as much as trol; the key operation is determining the rates, di- for the guardians of human purity. In the US gay rections, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called men and intravenous drug users are the ‘privileged’ information. The world is subdivided by boundaries victims of an awful immune system disease that differentially permeable to information. Information marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundar- is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis ies and moral pollution (Treichler, 1987). of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective But these excursions into communications sciences communication). The biggest threat to such power is and biology have been at a rarefied level; there is a interruption of communication. Any system break- mundane, largely economic reality to support my down is a function of stress. The fundamentals of claim that these sciences and technologies indicate this technology can be condensed into the metaphor fundamental transforma-tions in the structure C31, command-controlcommunication-intelligence, of the world for us. Communications technologies the military’s symbol for its operations theory. depend on electronics. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state appara- In modern biologies, the translation of the world into tuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabri- a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular cation of our imaginations, labour-control systems, genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, medical construc-tions of our bodies, commercial synth 291

pornography, the international division of labour, also indicate that science and technology provide and religious evangelism depend intimately upon fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of electronics. Micro-electronics is the technical basis of analysis and political action (Latour, 1984). Some of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals. the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make social- Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour ist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic politics. engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The ‘Homework Economy’ Outside the The new biotechnologies concern more than human Home reproducdon. Biology as a powerful engineering sci- ence for redesigning materials and processes has rev- The ‘New Industrial Revolution’ is producing a new olutionary implications for industry, perhaps most world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities obvious today in areas of fermentadon, agriculture, and ethnicities. The extreme mobility of capital and and energy. Communicadons sciences and biology are the emerging international division of labour are construcdons of natural-technical objects of knowl- intertwined with the emergence of new collecdvi- edge in which the difference between machine and ties, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool developments are neither gender- nor race-neutral. are on very intimate terms. The ‘multinational’ ma- White men in advanced industrial societies have terial organization of the production and reproduc- become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and tion of daily life and the symbolic organization of the women are not disappearing from the job rolls at production and reproduction of culture and imagi- the same rates as men. It is not simply that women nation seem equally implicated. The boundary-main- in Third World countries are the preferred labour taining images of base and superstructure, public force for the science-based multinationals in the and private, or material and ideal never seemed more export-processing sectors, particularly in electron- feeble. ics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumphon, and I have used Rachel Grossman’s (1980) image of producdon. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women in the integrated circuit to name the situa- women’s lives have been structured around employ- tion of women in a world so intimately restructured ment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their inti- through the social relations of science and tech- mate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, nology.15 I used the odd circumlocution, ‘the social negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or relations of science and technology’, to indicate that most other forms of traditional community, a high we are not dealing with a technological determinism, likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulner- but with a historical system depending upon struc- ability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity tured relations among people. But the phrase should of women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm 292 synth

of conflicting differences in culture, family, religion, technologies to integrate and control labour despite education, and language. extensive dispersion and decentralization. The con- sequences of the new technologies are felt by women Richard Gordon has called this new situation the both in the loss of the family (male) wage (if they ‘homework economy’.16 Although he includes the phe- ever had access to this white privilege) and in the nomenon of literal homework emerging in connecdon character of their own jobs, which are becoming capi- with electronics assembly, Gordon intends ‘home- tal-intensive; for example, office work and nursing. work economy’ to name a restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to The new economic and technological arrangements female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work are also related to the collapsing welfare state and is being redefined as both literally female and fem- the ensuing intensification of demands on women to inized, whether performed by men or women. To be sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; children, and old people. The feminization of pov- able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as erty-- generated by dismantling the welfare state, a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than by the homework economy where stable jobs become as servers; subjected to dme arrangements on and the exception, and sustained by the expectation off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited that women’s wages will not be matched by a male work day; leading an existence that always borders income for the support of children-- has become an on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. urgent focus. The causes of various women-headed Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to households are a function of race, class, or sexual- formerly privileged workers. However, the homework ity; but their increasing generality is a ground for economy does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, coalitions of women on many issues. That women nor does it deny that new areas of high skill are regularly sustain daily life partly as a funcdon of emerging, even for women and men previously ex- their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the cluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept kind of integration with the overall capitalist and indicates that factory, home, and market are inte- progressively war-based economy is new. The partic- grated on a new scale and that the places of women ular pressure, for example, on US black women, who are crucial - and need to be analysed for differences have achieved an escape from (barely) paid domeshc among women and for meanings for relations be- service and who now hold clerical and similar jobs in tween men and women in various situations. large numbers, has large implicadons for condnued enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage The homework economy as a world capitalist organi- women in industrializing areas of the Third World zational structure is made possible by (not caused by) increasingly find themselves the sole or major source the new technologies. The success of the attack on of a cash wage for their families, while access to land relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized is ever more problemadc. These developments must jobs is deaf to the power of the new communications have major consequences in the psychodynamics and synth 293

politics of gender and race. United States have long known what it looks like to face the structural underemployment (‘feminization’) Within the framework of three major stages of of black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable capitalism (commercial/ early industrial, monopoly, position in the wage economy. It is no longer a secret multinational) --tied to nationalism, imperialism, that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community and multinationalism, and related to Jameson’s three life are interwoven with this economic structure in dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, myriad ways which have also differentiated the situ- and postmodernism --I would argue that specif- ations of white and black women. Many more women ic forms of families dialectically relate to forms of and men will contend with similar situations, which capital and to its political and cultural concomitants. will make cross-gender and race alliances on issues Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal of basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, forms of these families might be schematized as (1) not just mice. the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and accom- The new technologies also have a profound effect panied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate on hunger and on food production for subsistence spheres and nineteenth-century Anglo-American world-wide. Rae Lessor Blumberg (1983) estimates bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated that women produce about 50 per cent of the world’s (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions subsistence food.17 Women are excluded generally like the family wage, with a flowering of a-femi- from benefiting from the increased high-tech com- nist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical modification of food and energy crops, their days are versions represented in Greenwich Village around made more arduous because their responsibilides to the First World War; and (3) the ‘family’ of the provide food do not diminish, and their reproductive homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of situations are made more complex. Green Revolution women-headed households and its explosion of femi- technologies interact with other high-tech industrial nisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion production to alter gender divisions of labour and of gender itself. differential gender migration patterns.

This is the context in which the projections for The new technologies seem deeply involved in the world-wide structural unemployment stemming from forms of’privatization’ that Ros Petchesky (1981) has the new technologies are part of the picture of the analysed, in which militarization, right-wing family homework economy. As robodcs and related technol- ideologies and policies, and intensified definitions of ogies put men out of work in ‘developed’ countries corporate (and state) property as private synergisti- and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third cally interact.18 The new communications technol- World ‘development’, and as the automated of fice be- ogies are fundamental to the eradication of ‘public comes the rule even in labour-surplus countries, the life’ for everyone. This facilitates the mushrooming feminization of work intensifies. Black women in the of a permanent high-tech military establishment at 294 synth

the cultural and economic expense of most people, but body politics in the negotiation of reality in the prac- especially of women. Technologies like video games tices of cyborg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. and highly miniaturized televi-sions seem crucial The technologies of visualization recall the important to production of modern forms of ‘private life’. The cultural practice of hundng with the camera and the culture of video games is heavily orientated to in- deeply predatory nature of a photographic conscious- dividual compedtion and extraterrestrial warfare. ness.20 Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here, actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations that can contemplate destruction of imaginations of personal and social possibility. the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized; and the Another critical aspect of the social relations of the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are new technologies is the reformulation of expecta- inescapable. These are the technologies that promise tions, culture, work, and reproduction for the large ultimate mobility and perfect exchange-- and inci- scientific and technical work-force. A major social dentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mo- and political danger is the formation of a strongly bility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world’s bimodal social structure, with the masses of women largest single industries. and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of The new technologies affect the social relations of several varieties, and general redundancy and impo- both sexuality and of reproduction, and not always tence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses in the same ways. The close ties of sexuality and ranging from entertainment to surveillance and dis- instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of appearance. An adequate socialist-feminist politics private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing ma- should address women in the privileged occupational chine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin categories, and particularly in the production of sci- stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the ence and technology that constructs scientific-tech- inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female nical discourses, processes, and objects.21 gender roles.19 These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component This issue is only one aspect of enquiry into the or cybernetic communications system. Among the possibility of a feminist science, but it is important. many transformations of reproductive situations is What kind of constitutive role in the production of the medical one, where women’s bodies have boundar- knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups ies newly permeable to both ‘visualization’ and ‘inter- doing science have? How can these groups be allied vention’. Of course, who controls the interpretation with progressive social and political movements? of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneubcs is a What kind of political accountability can be con- major feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon structed to the women together across the scientif- of women’s claiming their bodies in the 1970S; that ic-technical hierarchies separating us? Might there handcraft tool is inadequate to express our needed be ways of developing feminist science/technology synth 295

politics in alliance with and-military science facility point of view of advanced capitalist societies: Home, conversion action groups? Many sciendfic and tech- Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hos- nical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys pital, and Church. Each of these idealized spaces is included, do not want to work on military science.22 logically and practically implied in every other locus, Can these personal preferences and cultural tenden- perhaps analogous to a holographic photograph. I cies be welded into progressive politics among this want to suggest the impact of the social relations professional middle class in which women, including mediated and enforced by the new technologies in women of colour, are coming to be fairly numerous? order to help formulate needed analysis and practical work. However, there is no ‘place’ for women in these Women in the Integrated Circuit networks, only geometries of difference and contra- diction crucial to women’s cyborg identities. If we Let me summarize the picture of women’s historical learn how to read these webs of power and social life, locations in advanced industrial societies, as these we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. There positions have been restructured partly through is no way to read the following list from a standpoint the social relations of science and technology. If it of’idendfication’, of a unitary self. The issue is dis- was ever possible ideologically to characterize wom- persion. The task is to survive in the diaspora. en’s lives by the disdnction of public and private domains-- suggested by images of the division of Home: Women-headed households, serial monog- working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois amy, flight of men, old women alone, technology of life into market and home, and of gender existence domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of into personal and political realms --it is now a totally home sweat-shops, home-based businesses and tele- misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of com-muting, electronic cottage, urban homelessness, these dichotomies construct each other in practice migration, module architecture, reinforced (simulat- and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image, ed) nuclear family, intense domestic violence. suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body Market: Women’s continuing consumption work, and in the body politic. ‘Networking’ is both a femi- newly targeted to buy the profusion of new produc- nist practice and a multinational corporate strategy tion from the new technologies (especially as the com- -- weaving is for oppositional cyborgs. petitive race among industrialized and industrializ- ing nations to avoid dangerous mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new markets for ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal buy- So let me return to the earlier image of the infor- ing power, coupled with advertising targeting of the matics of domination and trace one vision of women’s numerous affluent groups and neglect of the previous ‘place’ in the integrated circuit, touching only a few mass markets; growing importance of idealized social locations seen primarily from the 296 synth

informal markets in labour and commodities parallel women of colour; growing privadzation of material to high-tech, affluent market structures; surveil- and ideological life and culture; close integration of lance systems through electronic funds transfer; privatization and militarization, the high-tech forms intensified market abstraction (commodification) of of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invis- experience, resulting in ineffective utopian or equiv- ibility of different social groups to each other, linked alent cynical theories of community; extreme mo- to psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract bility (abstraction) of marketing/financing systems; enemies. inter-penetration of sexual and labour markets; intensified sexualization of abstracted and alienated School: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs consumption. and public educa-tion at all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender; managerial classes involved Paid Work Place: Continued intense sexual and in educational reform and refunding at the cost of racial division of labour, but considerable growth of remaining progressive educational democratic struc- membership in privileged occupational categories for tures for children and teachers; education for mass many white women and people of colour; impact of ignorance and repression in technocratic and milita- new technologies on women’s work in clerical, ser- rized culture; growing and-science mystery cults in vice, manufacturing (especially textiles), agriculture, dissendng and radical political movements; continued electronics; international restructuring of the work- relative scientific illiteracy among white women and ing classes; development of new time arrangements people of colour; growing industrial direction of edu- to facilitate the homework economy (flex time, part cation (especially higher education) by science-based time, over time, no time); homework and out work; multinationals (particularly in electronics- and increased pressures for two-tiered wage structures; biotechnology-dependent companies); highly educated, significant numbers of people in cash-dependent pop- numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society. ulations world-wide with no experience or no further hope of stable employment; most labour ‘marginal’ or ‘feminized’. Clinic-hospital: Intensified machine-body relations; renegotiations of public metaphors which channel State: Continued erosion of the welfare state; decen- personal experience of the body, particularly in rela- tralizations with increased surveillance and control; tion to reproduction, immune system functions, and citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political ‘stress’ phenomena; intensification of reproductive power broadly in the form of information rich/in- politics in response to world historical implications of formation poor differentiation; increased high-tech women’s unrealized, potential control of their relation militarization increasingly opposed by many social to reproduction; emergence of new, historically spe- groups; reduction of civil service jobs as a result of cific diseases; struggles over meanings and means of the growing capital intensification of office work, health in environments pervaded by high technology with implications for occupational mobility for products and processes; continuing feminization of synth 297

health work; intensified struggle over state responsi- depressed by the implications of late twentieth-cen- bility for health; continued ideological role of popular tury women’s relation to all aspects of work, culture, health movements as a major form of American production of knowledge, sexuality, and reproduction. politics. For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination best and have trouble understanding what can only Church: Electronic fundamentalist ‘super-saver’ look like false consciousness and people’s complicity in preachers solemnizing the union of electronic capital their own domination in late capitalism. It is crucial and automated fetish gods; intensified importance of to remember that what is lost, perhaps especially churches in resisting the militarized state; central from women’s points of view, is often virulent forms struggle over women’s meanings and authority in of oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of religion; continued relevance of spirituality, inter- current violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupt- twined with sex and health, in political struggle. ed unides mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of clear-sighted The only way to characterize the informatics of critique grounding a solid political epistemology’ domination is as a massive intensification of inse- curity and cultural impoverishment, with common *Service Employees International Union’s office failure of subsistence networks for the most vulner- workers’ organization in the US. able. Since much of this picture interweaves with the social relations of science and technology, the versus ‘manipulated false consciousness’, but subtle urgency of a socialist-feminist politics addressed to understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, science and technology is plain. There is much now and powers with serious potential for changing the being tione, and the grounds for political work are rules of the game. rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms of col- lecdve struggle for women in paid work, like SEIU’s There are grounds for hope in the emerging bas- District 925,* should be a high priority for all of us. es for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and These efforts are profoundly deaf to technical re- class, as these elementary units of socialist-feminist structuring of labour processes and reformations of analysis themselves suffer protean transformations. working classes. These efforts also are providing un- Intensifications of hardship experienced world-wide derstanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour in connection with the social relations of science and organization, involving community, sexuality, and technology are severe. But what people are experienc- family issues never privileged in the largely white ing is not transparently clear, and we lack aufficient- male industrial unions. ly subtle connections for collectively building effective theories of experience. Present efforts - Marxist, The structural rearrangements related to the so- psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological-- to clarify cial relations of science and technology evoke strong even ‘our’ experience are rudimentary. ambivalence. But it is not necessary to be uldmately 298 synth

I am conscious of the odd perspecdve provided by my are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be historical position - a PhD in biology for an Irish embodied in high-tech worlds. They are theorists for Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik’s impact cyborgs. Exploring concephons of bodily boundaries on US national science-education policy. I have a and social order, the anthropologist Mary Douglas body and mind as much constructed by the post-Sec- (1966, 1970) should be credited with helping us to ond World War arms race and cold war as by the consciousness about how fundamental body imagery women’s movements. There are more grounds for is to world view, and so to political language. hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of poli- tics designed to produce loyal American technocrats, French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Monique which also produced large numbers of dissidents, Wittig, for all their differences, know how to write than in focusing on the present defeats. the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and pol- itics from imagery of embodiment, and especially for The permanent pardality of feminist points of view Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and reconsti- has consequences for our expectations of forms of tution of bodies.24 political organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn, dream of a common language, like all dreams for a Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming affected our political imaginations - and perhaps of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In restricted too much what we allow as a friendly body that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing and political language.25 They insist on the organic, to resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can opposing it to the technological. But their symbolic learn from our fusions with animals and machines systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these only be understood in Sandoval’s terms as opposition- potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the al ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They social relations of science and technology, there might would simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied with indeed be a feminist science. the machines and consciousness of late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilides inherent in the breakdown I want to conclude with a myth about idendty and of clean disdnctions between organism and machine boundaries which might inform late twentieth-cen- and similar distinctions structuring the Western tury political imaginations (Plate 1). I am indebted self. It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. the matrices of domination and opens geometric Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia But- possibilities. What might be learned from personal ler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda McIntyre.23 These and political ‘technological’ pollution? I look briefly at synth 299

two overlapping groups of texts for their insight into the construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth: men through a history of risking death to learn and constructions of women of colour and monstrous to teach reading and wridng. Writing has a special selves in feminist science fiction. significance for all colonized groups. Writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction Earlier I suggested that ‘women of colour’ might be between oral and written cultures, primitive and understood as a cyborg idendty, a potent subjecdvity civilized mentalities, and more recently to the ero- synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and sion of that distinction in ‘postmodernist’ theories in the complex political-historical layerings of her attacking the phallogo-centrism of the West, with its ‘biomythography’, Zami (Lorde, 1982; King, 1987a, worship of the monotheistic, phallic, authoritative, 1987b). There are material and cultural grids map- and singular work, the unique and perfect name.26 ping this potential, Audre Lorde (1984) captures Contests for the meanings of writing are a major the tone in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing political myth, Sister Outsider is the offshore wom- the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and an, whom US workers, female and feminized, are stories of US women of colour are repeatedly about supposed to regard as the enemy prevendug their writing, about access to the power to signify; but this solidarity, threatening their security. Onshore, dme that power must be neither phallic nor inno- inside the boundary of the United States, Sister cent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the Outsider is a potential amidst the races and ethnic imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before identities of women manipulated for division, com- language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writ- petition, and exploitation in the same industries. ing is about the power to survive, not on the basis ‘Women of colour’ are the preferred labour force of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the for the science-based industries, the real women for tools to mark the world that marked them as other. whom the world-wide sexual market, labour market, and politics of reproduction kaleidoscope into daily The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions life. Young Korean women hired in the sex industry that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms and in electronics assembly are recruited from high of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, schools, educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin especially in English, distinguishes the ‘cheap’ female of Western culture. We have all been colonized by labour so attractive to the multinationals. those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse. The phallogocentrie origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the ‘oral prim- technologies - teehnologies that write the world, bio- idve’, literacy is a special mark of women of colour, technology and microelectronics - that have recently acquired by US black women as well as textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have the task of 300 synth

recoding communication and intelligence to subvert Moraga’s body, affirms it as the body of a woman command and control. of colour, against the possibility of passing into the unmarked category of the Anglo father or into the Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade orientalist myth of ‘original illiteracy’ of a mother the struggles of women of colour; and stories about that never was. Malinche was mother here, not Eve language have a special power in the rich contempo- before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms rary writing by US women of colour. For example, Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-in- retellings of the stom~ of the indigenous woman to-Writing needed by the phallogocentric Family of Malinche, mother of the mesdzo ‘bastard’ race of Man. the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry special meaning for Chicana construc- Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, tions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983) in Loving in etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg the War Years explores the themes of identity when politics is the struggle for language and the struggle one never possessed the original language, never told against perfect communication, against the one code the original story, never resided in the harmony of that translates all meaning perfectly, the central legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg poli- and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from tics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing innocence and right to natural names, mother’s or in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. father’s.27 Moraga’s writing, her superb literacy, is These are the couplings which make Man and Wom- presented in her poetry as the same kind of viola- an so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, tion as Malinche’s mastery of the conqueror’s lan- the force imagined to generate language and gender, guage -- a violation, an illegitimate production, that and so subverting the structure and modes of repro- allows survival. Moraga’s language is not ‘whole’; duction of ‘Western’ idendty, of nature and culture, it is self-consciously spliced, a chimera of English of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. and Spanish, both conqueror’s languages. But it is ‘We’ did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but this chimeric monster, without claim to an original choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology language before violation, that crafts the erode, com- that imagines the reproduction of individuals before petent, potent identities of women of colour. Sister the wider replications of ‘texts’. Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival not because of her innocence, but because of her From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need ability to live on the boundaries, to write without the to ground politics in ‘our’ privileged position of the founding myth of original wholeness, with its ines- oppression that incorporates all other dominations, capable apocalypse of final return to a deathly one- the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of ness that Man has imagined to be the innocent and those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibil- all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another ities. Feminisms and Marxisms have run aground spiral of appropriation by her son. Writing marks on Western epistemological imperatives to construct synth 301

a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latent position of who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to dmes a ‘western’ commentator remarks on the sad nature. With no available original dream of a com- passing of another primitive, another organic group mon language or original symbiosis promising protec- done in by ‘Western’ technology, by writing.28 These tion from hostile ‘masculine’ separation, but written real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast Asian into the play of a text that has no finally privileged village women workers inJapanese and US electronics reading or salvation history, to recognize ‘oneself’ as firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewrit- fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to ing the texts of their bodies and sociedes. Sumival is root politics in identification, vanguard parties, puri- the stakes in this play of readings. ty, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been per- importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of sistent in Western traditions; they have all been colour have transformed her from the evil mother of systemic to the logics and practices of domination masculinist fear into the originally literate mother of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals who teaches survival. - in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these This is not just literary deconstruction, but lim- troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/ inal transformation. Every, story that begins with nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/ap- original innocence and privileges the return to pearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made, wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individ- active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, totaVpar- uation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy tial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dom- of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, inated, who knows that by the semice of the other, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the other is the one who holds the future, who knows the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive that by the experience of domination, which gives politics --rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstrac- the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be tion. In this plot women are imagined either better autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One or worse off, but all agree they have less selflhood, is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstan- there is another route to having less at stake in mas- tial. One is too few, but two are too many. culine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in imaginaw. It passes through women and other pres- intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who ent-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, is made in the relation between human and machine. who refuse the ideological resources of victimization It is not clear what is mind and what body in ma- 302 synth

chines that resolve into coding practices. In so far friendly selves. We don’t need organic holism to give as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for impermeable whole-ness, the total woman and her example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, feminist variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we point by a very partial reading of the logic of the cy- find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chime- borg monsters of my second group of texts, feminist ras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, science fiction. communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and make very problematic the statuses of man or wom- organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott an, human, artefact, member of a race, individual film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg endty, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in culture’s fear, love, and confusion. reading these fictions is not largely based on idend- fication. Students facingJoanna Russ for the first One consequence is that our sense of connection to time, students who have learned to take modernist our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without by many computer users has become a staple of sci- flinching, do not know what to make of The Adven- ence-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraple- tures of Alyx or The Female Man, where characters gics and other severely handicapped people can (and refuse the reader’s search for innocent wholeness sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of while granting the wish for heroic quests, exu- complex hybridization with other communication berant eroticism, and serious politics. The Female devices.29 Anne McCaffrey’s pre-feminist The Ship Man is the story of four versions of one genotype, Who Sang (1969) explored the consciousness of a all of whom meet, but even taken together do not cyborg, hybrid of girl’s brain and complex machinery, make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent mor- formed after the birth of a severely handicapped al action, or remove the growing scandal of gender. child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, skill: all were The feminist science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, reconstituted in the story. Why should our bod- especially Tales of Neveyon, mocks stories of origin ies end at the skin, or include at best other beings by redoing the neolithic revolution, replaying the encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century founding moves of Western civilization to subvert dll now, machines could be animated - given ghostly their plausibility. James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose souls to make them speak or move or to account for fiction was regarded as particularly manly undl her their orderly development and mental capacides. Or ‘true’ gender was revealed, tells tales of reproduction organisms could be mechan-ized - reduced to body based on non-mammalian technologies like alterna- understood as resource of mind. These machine/ tion of generations of male brood pouches and male organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For nurturing. John Varley constructs a supreme cyborg us, in imagination and in other practice, machines in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad god- can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, dess-planet-trickster-old woman-technological device synth 303

on whose surface an extraordinary array of post-cy- kinship with the divers and cetaceans. Transforma- borg symbioses are spawned. Octavia Butler writes tions are effected by virus vectors carrying a new de- of an African sorceress pithug her powers of trans- velopmental code, by transplant surgery, by implants formation against the genetic manipulations of her of microelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and rival (Wild Seed), of dme warps that bring a modern other means. Lacnea becomes a pilot by accepting a US black woman into slavery where her actions in heart implant and a host of other alterations allow- relation to her white master-ancestor determine the ing survival in transit at speeds exceeding that of possibility of her own birth (Kindred), and of the light. Radu Dracul survives a virus-caused plague illegidmate insights into idendty and community of in his outerworld planet to find himself with a time an adopted cross-species child who came to know the sense that changes the boundaries of spatial percep- enem’ as self (Survivor). In Dawn (1987), the first tion for the whole species. All the characters explore instalment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler tells the limits of language; the dream of communicating the story of Lilith Iyapo, whose personal name recalls experience; and the necessity of limitation, partiality, Adam’s first and repudiated wife and whose family and indmacy even in this world of protean trans- name marks her status as the widow of the son of formation and connection. Superluminal stands also Nigerian immigrants to the US. A black woman for the defining contradictions of a cyborg world in and a mother whose child is dead, Lilith mediates another sense; it embodies textually the intersec- the transformation of humanity through genetic tion of feminist theory and colonial discourse in the exchange with extra-terrestrial lovers/rescuers/de- science fiction I have alluded to in this chapter. This stroyers/genetic engineers, who reform earth’s habi- is a conjunction with a long history that many ‘First tats after the nuclear holocaust and coerce surviving World’ feminists have tried to repress, including humans into intimate fusion with them. It is a novel myself in my readings of Superluminal before being that interrogates reproductive, linguishc, and nucle- called to account by Zoe Sofoulis, whose different ar politics in a mythic field structured by late twen- location in the world system’s informatics of domin- tieth-century race and gender. ation made her acutely alert to the imperialist mo- ment of all science fiction cultures, including women’s Because it is particularly rich in boundary trans- science fiction. From an Australian feminist sensi- gressions, Vonda McIn-tyre’s Superluminal can close tivity, Sofoulis remembered more readily McIntyre’s this truncated catalogue of promising and dangerous role as writer of the adventures of Captain Kirk and monsters who help redefine the pleasures and poli- Spock in TV’s Star Trek series than her rewriting tics of embodiment and feminist writing. In a fiction the romance in Superluminal. where no character is ‘simply’ human, human status is highly problematic. Orca, a genetically altered Monsters have always defined the limits of commu- diver, can speak with killer whales and survive deep nity in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and ocean conditions, but she longs to explore space as a Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits pilot, necessitating bionic implants jeopardizing her of the centred polls of the Greek male human by 304 synth

their disruption of marriage and boundary pollu- seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex tions of the warrior with animality and woman. and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the identity after all, even if it has profound historical confused human material in early modern France breadth and depth. who grounded discourse on the natural and super- natural, medical and legal, portents and diseases The ideologically charged question of what counts as -- all crucial to establishing modern identity.30 The daily activity, as experience, can be approached by evolutionary and behavioural sciences of monkeys exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recent- and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late ly claimed that women are given to dailiness, that twentieth-century industrial identities. Cyborg mon- women more than men somehow sustain daily life, sters in feminist science fiction define quite different and so have a privileged epistemo-logical position political possibilities and limits from those proposed potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman. one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life. There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. But the ground of life? What about all the igno- Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and rance of women, all the exclusions and failures of identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is knowledge and skill? What about men’s access to not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic take them apart, to play? What about other embod- dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it iments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsi- to become a political language to ground one way of ble for machines; they do not dominate or threaten looking at science and technology and challenging the us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. informatics of domination-- in order to act potently. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female One last image organisms and organismic, holistic embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and politics depend on metaphors of rebirth and invari- its metaphoric exten-sions. Only by being out of place ably call on the resources of reproductive sex. I would could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regener- with excuses that this was organic activity after all, ation and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more and of most birthing. For salamanders, regeneration synth 305

after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves re- Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late growth of structure and restoration of function with Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Wom- the constant possibility of twinning or other odd en: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Rout- topographical productions at the site of former inju- ledge, 1991), pp.149-181. ry. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibili- ties for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.

Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial ar- guments in this essay: first, the production of uni- versal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of tech- nology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technol- ogy are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dual- isms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, 306 synth A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you wrongs, we will identify them and address them by of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. This governance will arise according to the condi- tions of our world, not yours. Our world is different. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in declare the global social space we are building to be the web of our communications. Ours is a world that naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor bodies live. do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic pow- Governments derive their just powers from the er, military force, or station of birth. consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does may express his or her beliefs, no matter how sin- not lie within your borders. Do not think that you gular, without fear of being coerced into silence or can build it, as though it were a public construction conformity. project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are You have not engaged in our great and gathering all based on matter, and there is no matter here. conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our eth- ics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to John Perry Barlow synth 307

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we can- not obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that Your increasingly obsolete information industries from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the com- would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in monweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. itself throughout the world. These laws would declare The only law that all our constituent cultures would ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human will be able to build our particular solutions on that mind may create can be reproduced and distrib- basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are uted infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of attempting to impose. thought no longer requires your factories to accom- plish. In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudi- These increasingly hostile and colonial measures ates your own Constitution and insults the dreams place us in the same position as those previous lovers of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToque- of freedom and self-determination who had to reject ville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We anew in us. must declare our virtual selves immune to your sov- ereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule You are terrified of your own children, since they are over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the natives in a world where you will always be immi- Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts. grants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyber- are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, space. May it be more humane and fair than the all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from world your governments have made before. the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot Davos, Switzerland separate the air that chokes from the air upon which February 8, 1996 wings beat. We will create a In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off civilization of the the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the Mind in Cyberspace. frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media. 308 synth

The Rejection of Closure Lyn Hejinian Lyn Hejinian is a poet, translator, and “all the elements of the work are maximally essayist. She is perhaps best known as one excited” and multiple readings or interpre- of the founding figures of the language writ- tations become available. Hejinian then goes ing movement, a loosely affiliated group on to list a few techniques that “open” a text: of writers and poets active in California’s arrangement and rearrangement, repetition, Bay Area in the 1970s. Language writing and compositional techniques resulting in generally championed non-narrative forms “gaps” in the text which must be filled by and collaborative practices, linking both to the reader. In emphasizing the reader’s role, a progressive political agenda; as a group, writing as process, and the political impli- language writers also tended to emphasize cations of both, Hejinian’s essay articulates both the materiality and social dimension of many of the main goals and concerns of the language. Through a variety of techniques language movement. such as the “new sentence,” language writers sought to engage the reader in new ways, As “The Rejection of Closure” progresses, making them active participants in the pro- Hejinian looks at the role of form as an cess of reading and meaning-making. Like organizing principle and discusses the inad- other language writers, Hejinian’s own work equacy of language to describe the “vastness is a blend of philosophy, literary theory, and and uncertainty” that characterizes our expe- experimental lyricism. Her essays on poet- rience of the world. She concludes that while ics are important in understanding her work a truly open text would be impossible, that and the aims of the language movement in failure—of words to match the world—“per- general. mits us to distinguish our ideas and our- selves from the world.” An elegant combina- Hejinian’s essay, “The Rejection of Closure” tion of poetry, linguistics, philosophy, and was originally delivered as a talk in 1983, theory, “The Rejection of Closure” is by no partly as a response to issues then being means a historical document, and its influ- raised in the language writing community ence continues to be felt in much contempo- about language, gender and power. Though rary poetry and poetics to this day. the essay does touch upon certain feminist critiques, it is more generally concerned with Introduction language, meaning and form. In the essay, Hejinian posits two kinds of texts: “closed” “The Rejection of Closure” was originally and “open.” For Hejinian, closed texts are written as a talk and given at 544 Natoma those which allow for a single interpreta- Street, San Francisco, on April 17, 1983. tion—in her introduction she cites “some (1) The “Who Is Speaking?”­ panel discus- contemporary lyric poetry” and detective sion had taken place several weeks earlier, stories as examples. In open texts, however, and with the “Poetry & Philosophy” issue of synth 309

Poetics Journal (volume 3) about to come out, Barrett Watten and I had just decided But if we have positive as well as negative to devote Poetics Journal 4 to the theme of models for closure, why reject it? Is there “Women & Language.”(2) Within the writ- something about the world that demands ing community, discussions­ of gender were openness? Is there something in language frequent, and they were addressed both to that compels and implements the rejection of perceptible­ practical problems (instances closure? of injustice) immediately affecting people’s work and lives and to longer-term questions I can only begin a posteriori, by perceiving of power and, in particular, the ethics of the world as vast and overwhelming;­ each meaning. moment stands under an enormous verti- cal and horizontal pressure of information, Carla Harryman’s signal work, The Middle, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, was published this same year. Originally giv- and certainly incomplete. What saves this en as a talk, it is an organizationally radiant from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass critique (one might even say trashing) of of data and situation is one’s ability to make conventional (patriarchal) power structures. distinctions. The open text is one which both (3) In The Middle, the power of authority acknowledges the vastness of the world and gives way to the power of invention, with is formally differentiating. It is form that its plenitudes of focus, and to the power of provides an opening.—Lyn Hejinian performance. The subject position is in the middle—an uncontainable presence making meaning.

In “The Rejection of Closure,” I give no ex- amples of a “closed” text, but I can offer sev- eral. The coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry can serve as a negative model, with its smug pretension to universality­ and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth. And detective­ fiction can serve as a positive model, presenting an ultimately stable, calm and calming (and fundamentally unepiphanic) vision of the world. In either­ case, however pleasurable its effects, closure is a fiction, one of the ame- nities that falsehood and fantasy provide. 310 synth

they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, di­rections, number, and velocities Two dangers never cease threatening of a work’s motion. The mate­rial aporia objectifies the world: order and disorder. the poem in the context of ideas and of lan­guage Paul Valéry, Analects itself.

Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often These areas of conflict are not neatly parallel. Form characterized­ and always complicated by opposing does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw impulses in the writer and by a seeming dilemma materiality provide openness. Indeed, the conjunction that language creates and then cannot resolve. The of form with radical openness may be what can offer writer experiences a conflict between a desire to a version of the “paradise” for which writ­ing often sat­isfy a demand for boundedness, for containment yearns—a flowering focus on a distinct infinity. and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a corre- For the sake of clarity, I will offer a tentative charac- spondingly open response to it. Curi­ously, the term terization of the terms open and closed. We can say inclusivity is applicable to both, though the conno- that a “closed text” is one in which all the elements tative emphasis is different for each. The impulse of the work are directed toward a single reading of to bounded­ness demands circumscription and that it. Each element confirms that reading and delivers in turn requires that a dis­tinction be made between the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the “open inside and outside, between the rele­vant and the (for text,” mean­while, all the elements of the work are the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrel- maximally excited; here it is because ideas and things evant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered exceed (without deserting) argument that they have access and response to the world (an encyclopedic taken into the dimension of the work. impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out. The essential question here concerns the writ- Though they may be different in different texts, er’s subject position. depending on other elements in the work and by all means on the intention of the writer, it is not hard The impasse, meanwhile, that is both language’s to discover devices—structural de­vices—that may creative con­dition and its problem can be described serve to “open” a poetic text. One set of such devic- as the disjuncture be­tween words and meaning, but es has to do with arrangement and, particularly, at a particularly material level, one at which the with re­arrangement within a work. The “open text,” writer is faced with the necessity of making for­mal by definition, is open to the world and particularly decisions—devising an appropriate structure for the to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the work, anticipating the constraints it will put into authority of the writer over the reader and thus, play, etc.—in the con­text of the ever-regenerating by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, plenitude of language’s resources, in their infinite economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing combinations. Writing’s forms are not merely shapes that is generative rather than directive. The writer but forces; formal questions are about dynamics— relinquishes total control and challenges authority as synth 311 a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” But there are more complex forms of juxtaposition. often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the My inten­tion (I don’t mean to suggest that I suc- process of the original composition or of subsequent ceeded) in a subsequent work, “Resistance,” was to compo­sitions by readers, and thus resists the cultur- write a lyric poem in a long form—that is, to achieve al tendencies that seek to identify and fix material maximum vertical intensity (the single moment into and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduc- which the idea rushes) and maximum horizontal tion and commodification. As Luce Irigaray says, extensivity (ideas cross the landscape and become the positing this tendency within a feminine sphere of horizon and weather).(6) To myself I proposed the dis­course, “It is really a question of another economy paragraph as a unit representing a single moment of which diverts the linearity of a project, undermines time, a single moment in the mind, its content all the the target-object of a de­sire, explodes the polarization thoughts, thought particles, impressions, impulses— of desire on only one pleasure, and disconcerts fideli- all the di­verse, particular, and contradictory ele- ty to only one discourse.” (4) ments—that are included in an active and emotional mind at any given instant. For the mo­ment, for the “Field work,” where words and lines are distributed writer, the poem is a mind. irregu­larly on the page, such as Robert Grenier’s poster/map entitled Cambridge M’ass and Bruce To prevent the work from disintegrating into its sep- Andrews’s “Love Song 41” (also origi­nally published arate parts—scattering sentence-rubble haphazardly as a poster), are obvious examples of works in which on the waste heap—­I used various syntactic devices the order of the reading is not imposed in advance. to foreground or create the conjunction between (5) Any reading of these works is an improvisation; ideas. Statements become interconnected by being one moves through the work not in straight lines but grammatically congruent; unlike things, made alike in curves, swirls, and across intersections, to words gram­matically, become meaningful in common and that catch the eye or attract attention repeatedly. jointly. “Resis­tance” began:

Repetition, conventionally used to unify a text or Patience is laid out on my papers. Its harmonize its parts, as if returning melody to the visuals are gainful and equably square. Two tonic, instead, in these works, and somewhat dif- dozen jets take off into the night. Outdoors­ ferently in a work like my My Life, chal­lenges our a car goes uphill in a genial low gear. The inclination to isolate, identify, and limit the burden flow of thoughts—impossible! These are the of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line). defamiliarization tech­niques with which we Here, where cer­tain phrases recur in the work, are so familiar. recontextualized and with new em­phasis, repetition disrupts the initial apparent meaning scheme. The There are six sentences here, three of which, begin- initial reading is adjusted; meaning is set in motion, ning with the first, are constructed similarly: sub- emended and extended, and the rewriting that rep- ject—verb—prepositional phrase. The three prepo- etition becomes post­pones completion of the thought sitions are on, into, and in, which in iso­lation seem indefinitely. 312 synth similar but used here have very different meanings. On is locational: “on my papers.” Into is metaphorical In both My Life and “Resistance,” the structural and atmo­spheric: “into the night.” In is atmospheric unit (grossly, the paragraph) was meant to be mimet- and qualitative: “in a genial low gear.” There are a ic of both a space and a time of thinking. In a some- pair of inversions in effect here: the unlike are made what different respect, time predeter­mines the form similar (syntactically) and the like are sundered (se- of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day. The work mantically). Patience, which might be a quality of a begins when the clock is set running (at dawn on De- virtuous character attendant to work (“it is laid out cember 22, 1978) and ends when the time allotted to on my papers”), might also be solitaire, a card game the work runs out (late night of the same day). “It’s played by an idler who is avoiding attention to work. true,” Mayer has said: “I have always loved projects Two dozen jets can only take off together in forma- of all sorts, including say sorting leaves or what­ever tion; they are “laid out” on the night sky. A car goes projects turn out to be, and in poetry I most espe- up­hill; its movement upward parallels that of the cially love having time be the structure which always jets, but whereas their formation is martial, the sin- seems to me to save structure or form from itself gle car is somewhat domestic, genial and innocuous. because then nothing really has to begin or end.”(7) The image in the first pair of sentences is horizontal. The upward movement of the next two sentences Whether the form is dictated by temporal con- de­scribes a vertical plane, upended on or intersect- straints or by other exoskeletal formal elements—by ing the horizon­tal one. The “flow of thoughts” runs a prior decision, for ex­ample, that the work will down the vertical and comes to rest—“impossible!” contain, say, x number of sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, stresses, or lines, etc.—the work gives the The work shifts between horizontal and vertical impression that it begins and ends arbitrarily and landscapes, and the corresponding sentences—the not because there is a necessary point of origin or details of each composed on its particular plane— terminus, a first or last mo­ment. The implication form distinct semantic fields. (In fact, I would like (correct) is that the words and the ideas (thoughts, each individual sentence to be as nearly a complete perceptions, etc. —the materials) continue beyond the poem as possible.) work. One has simply stopped because one has run out of units or minutes, and not because a conclusion One of the results of this compositional technique, has been reached nor “everything” said. building a work out of discrete fields, is the creation of sizable gaps between the units. To negotiate this The relationship of form, or the “constructive prin- disrupted terrain, the reader (and I can say also the ciple,” to the materials of the work (to its themes, the writer) must overleap the end stop, the period, and conceptual mass, but also to the words themselves) is cover the distance to the next sentence. Meanwhile, the initial problem for the “open text,” one that faces what stays in the gaps remains crucial and infor- each writing anew. Can form make the pri­mary cha- mative. Part of the reading oc­curs as the recovery of os (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and that information (looking behind) and the discovery in­formation, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vast- of newly structured ideas (stepping forward). ness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious synth 313 vitality, its generative power? Can form go even body is alive that they should use exactly the same further than that and actually generate that poten- emphasis.” (9) cy, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? Tynianov continues: In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an The unity of a work is not a closed sym- activity. metrical whole, but an unfolding dynamic integrity. . . . The sensation of form in such In an essay titled “Rhythm as the Constructive a situation is always the sensation of flow Factor of Verse,” the Russian Formalist writer Yurii (and therefore of change).... Art exists by Tynianov writes: means of this interaction or struggle.(10)

We have only recently outgrown the well- Language discovers what one might know, which in known analogy: form is to content as a glass turn is always less than what language might say. is to wine….I would venture to say that in We encounter some limitations of this relationship nine out of ten instances the word “composi­ early, as children. Anything with limits can be imag- tion” covertly implies a treatment of form as ined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy a static item. The concept of “poetic line” or with other objects—balls and rivers. Children objec- “stanza” is imperceptibly removed from the tify language when they render it their plaything, in dynamic category. Repetition ceases to be jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and considered as a fact of varying strength in rhymes. They discover that words are not equal to various situations of frequency and quantity. the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of par- The dangerous concept of the “symmetry of allax, exists in the relation between things (events, compositional facts” arises, dangerous be- ideas, objects) and the words for them—a displace- cause we cannot speak of symmetry where ment produc­ing a gap. we find intensification.(8) Among the most prevalent and persistent categories of jokes is that which identifies and makes use of the One is reminded of Gertrude Stein’s comparable fallacious comparison of words to world and delights comments in “Portraits and Repetitions”: “A thing in the ambiguity resulting from the discrepancy: that seems to be exactly the same thing may seem to be a repetition but is it.” “Is there repe­tition or is —Why did the moron eat hay? there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no —To feed his hoarse voice. such thing as repetition. And really how can there be.” “Express­ing any thing there can be no repetition —How do you get down from an elephant? because the essence of that expression is insistence, —You don’t, you get down from a goose. and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while any- —Did you wake up grumpy this morning? 314 synth

—No, I let him sleep. ence of using it, which in­cludes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is Because we have language we find ourselves in a spe- inevitably active—both intellectually and emotional- cial and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, ly. The progress of a line or sentence, or a series of and situations which constitute what we imagine of lines or sen­tences, has spatial properties as well as the world. Language generates its own characteris- temporal properties. The meaning of a word in its tics in the human psychological and spiritual condi- place derives both from the word’s lat­eral reach, its tions. Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition. contacts with its neighbors in a statement, and from its reach through and out of the text into the outer This psychology is generated by the struggle be- world, the matrix of its contemporary and historical tween language and that which it claims to depict reference. The very idea of reference is spatial: over or express, by our overwhelming experience of the here is word, over there is thing, at which the word vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what is shooting amiable love-arrows. Getting from the often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination beginning to the end of a statement is simple move- that longs to know it—and, furthermore, for the ment; fol­lowing the connotative byways (on what poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language Umberto Eco calls “in­ferential walks”) is complex or that appears to describe, dis­cuss, or disclose it. This compound movement. psychology situates desire in the poem itself, or, more specifically, in poetic language, to which then we may To identify these frames the reader has to “walk,” attribute the motive for the poem. so to speak, outside the text, in order to gather inter- textual sup­port (a quest for analogous “topoi,” themes Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity or motives). I call these interpretative moves inferen- takes. It makes us restless. As Francis Ponge puts it, tial walks: they are not mere whimsical initiatives on “Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not the part of the reader, but are elicited by discursive in himself.”(11) Instead that center of gravity seems structures and foreseen by the whole textual strate- to be located in language, by virtue of which we gy as indispensable components of the construction. negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, (13) heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward. Language is productive of activity in another sense, I am urged out rummaging into the sunshine, with which anyone is familiar who experiences words and the depths increase of blue above. A paper hat as attractive, magnetic to meaning. This is one of on a cone of water. . . . But, already, words. . . . She the first things one notices, for example, in works is lying on her stomach with one eye closed, driving constructed from arbitrary vocabularies generated a toy truck along the road she has cleared with her by random or chance operations (e.g., some works by fingers.(12) Jackson Mac Low) or from a vocabulary limited ac- cording to some other criteria unrelated to meaning Language itself is never in a state of rest. Its syn- (for example, Alan Davies’s a an av es, a long poem tax can be as complex as thought. And the experi- excluding any words containing letters with ascend- synth 315 ers or descenders, what the French call “the prison- in a great lock of letters er’s convention,” either because the bars are removed like knock look . . . or because it saves paper). It is impossible to discover worked by utter joy way any string or bundle of words that is entirely free of think through with that in possible narrative or psy­chological content. Moreover, minutes though the “story” and “tone” of such works may be already interpreted differently by different readers, nonethe- slippage thinks random pat- less the readings differ within definite limits. While terns word strings are permissive, they do not license a through free-for-all. wishes I intend greed as I intend pride Writing develops subjects that mean the words we patterns of roll extend over the wish have for them. (14)

Even words in storage, in the dictionary, seem fre- The “rage to know” is one expression of the restless- netic with ac­tivity, as each individual entry attracts ness engendered­ by language. “As long as man keeps to itself other words as defi­nition, example, and hearing words / He’s sure that there’s a meaning amplification. Thus, to open the dictionary at ran- somewhere,” as Mephistopheles points out in Goethe’s dom, mastoid attracts nipplelike, temporal, bone, ear, Faust.(15) and behind. Turning to temporal we find that the definition includes time, space, life, world, transitory, It’s in the nature of language to encourage and, and near the temples, but, significantly, not mastoid. in part, to jus­tify such Faustian longings.(16) The There is no entry for nipplelike, but the definition notion that language is the means and medium for for nipple brings over protuberance, breast, udder, attaining knowledge and, concomitantly, power is, the female, milk, discharge, mouthpiece, and nurs- of course, old. The knowledge toward which we seem ing bottle, but again not mastoid, nor temporal, nor to be driven by language, or which language seems time, bone, ear, space, or word. It is relevant that the to promise, is inherently sacred as well as secular, exchanges are incompletely reciprocal. redemptive as well as satisfy­ing. The nomina sint numina position (that there is an essential identity and how did this happen like an excerpt between name and thing, that the real nature of a beginning in a square white boat abob on a gray thing is immanent and present in its name, that sea . . . nouns are numinous) suggests that it is possible tootling of another message to find a language which will meet its object with by the perfect identity. If this were the case, we could, in hacking lark . . . speaking or in writing, achieve the “at oneness” with as a child the uni­verse, at least in its particulars, that is the to the rescue and its spring . condition of complete and perfect knowing. . . 316 synth

But if in the Edenic scenario we acquired knowl- drive, seeks also a redemp­tive value from language. edge of the animals by naming them, it was not by Both are appropriate to the Faustian legend. virtue of any numinous immanence in the name but because Adam was a taxonomist. He distinguished Coming in part out of Freudian psychoanalytic theo- the individual animals, discovered the concept of ry, espe­cially in France, is a body of feminist thought categories, and then organized the various species that is even more explicit in its identification of according to their different functions and relation- language with power and knowl­edge—a power and ships in the system. What the “naming” provides is knowledge that is political, psychological, and aes- structure, not individual words. thetic—and that is a site specifically of desire. The project for these French feminist writers has been As Benjamin Lee Whorf has pointed out, “Every to direct their atten­tion to “language and the un- language is a vast pattern-system, different from conscious, not as separate entities, but language as others, in which are cultur­ally ordained the forms a passageway, and the only one, to the uncon­scious, and categories by which the personality not only to that which has been repressed and which would, communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or if al­lowed to rise, disrupt the established symbolic ne­glects types of relationship and phenomena, chan- order, what Jacques Lacan has dubbed the Law of nels his reasoning,­ and builds the house of his con- the Father.”(18) sciousness.” In this same es­say, apparently his last (written in 1941), titled “Language, Mind, Reality,” If the established symbolic order is the “Law of the Whorf goes onto express what seem to be stirrings of Father,” and it is discovered to be not only repressive a religious motivation: “What I have called patterns but false, distorted by the illogicality of bias, then are basic in a really cosmic sense.” There is a “PRE- the new symbolic order is to be a “woman’s language,” MONITION IN LANGUAGE of the unknown, corresponding to a woman’s desire. vaster world.” The idea Luce Irigaray writes: is too drastic to be penned up in a catch phrase. I would rather leave it unnamed. It is the view that But woman has sex organs just about a noumenal world—a world of hyperspace, of higher everywhere. She experiences­ pleasure almost dimensions—awaits discovery by all the sciences everywhere. Even without speaking of the [linguistics being one of them] which it will unite hysterization of her entire body, one can say and unify, awaits discovery under its first aspect of that the ge­ography of her pleasure is much a realm of PATTERNED RELATIONS, inconceiv- more diversified, more multiple­ in its differ- ably manifold and yet bearing a recognizable affinity ences, more complex, more subtle, than is to the rich and systematic organization of LAN- imagined. . . . “She” is indefinitely other in GUAGE.(17) herself. That is undoubtedly the reason she is called temperamental, incomprehensible, It is as if what I’ve been calling, from Faust, the perturbed, capricious—not to mention her “rage to know,” which is in some respects a libidinous language­ in which “she” goes off in all direc- synth 317 tions.(19) “For we / Have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise….”(24) “A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending,” says In the gap between what one wants to say (or what Hélène Cixous: “There’s no clo­sure, it doesn’t one per­ceives there is to say) and what one can say stop.”(20) (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous in- The narrow definition of desire, the identification volvement with the materials of language, we long of desire solely with sexuality, and the literalness of to join words to the world—to close the gap between the genital model for a woman’s language that some ourselves and things—and we suffer from doubt and of these writers insist on may be problematic. The anxiety because of our in­ability to do so. desire that is stirred by language is located most interestingly within language itself—as a desire to Yet the incapacity of language to match the world say, a desire to create the subject by saying, and as a permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves pervasive doubt very like jealousy that springs from from the world and things in it from each other. The the impossibility of satisfying these yearnings. This undifferentiated is one mass, the dif­ferentiated is desire resembles Wordsworth’s “underthirst / Of multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text vigor seldom utterly allayed.”(21) And it is explicit in that contains everything, would in fact be a closed Carla Harryman’s “Realism”: text. It would be insufferable.

When I’m eating this I want food….The I expands. A central activity of poetic language is formal. In The individual is caught in a devouring machine, but being formal, in making form distinct, it opens— she shines like the lone star on the horizon when we makes variousness and multiplicity and possibility enter her thoughts, when she expounds on the im- articulate and clear. While failing in the attempt to mensity of her condition, the subject of the problem match the world, we discover structure, distinc­tion, which interests nature.(22) the integrity and separateness of things. As Bob Perelman writes: If language induces a yearning for comprehension, for perfect and complete expression, it also guards At the sound of my voice against it. Thus Faust complains: I spoke and, egged on By the discrepancy, wrote It is written: “In the beginning was the Word!” The rest out as poetry.(25) Already I have to stop! Who’ll help me on? It is impossible to put such trust in the Word!(23)

This is a recurrent element in the argument of the lyric: “Alack, what poverty my Muse brings NOTES forth…”; “Those lines that I be­fore have writ do lie…”; 318 synth

(1) “The Rejection of Closure” was included in Writ- (7) Bernadette Mayer to Lyn Hejinian, letter (1981?). ing/ Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (Carbondale: South- ern Illinois University Press, 1985), and, following (8) Yurii Tynianov, “Rhythm as the Constructive suggestions from Barrett Watten, in revised form in Factor of Verse,” in Readings in Russian Poetics, Po­etics Journal 4: “Women & Language” (May 1984). ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann More recently, it was anthologized in Onward: Con- Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1978), 127-28. temporary Poetry & Poetics, ed. Peter Baker (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), and extracts appear in (9) Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetitions,” in Postmodern Ameri­can Poetry: A Norton Anthology, Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932-1946, ed. Catharine ed. Paul Hoover (New York: W. W. Nor­ton and Co., R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: 1994). The essay has been translated into Serbian Library of America, 1998), 292, 288. by Du­bravka Djuric, and that version appeared in Gradina 2-3 (1991; Nis, Yugoslavia). (10) Tynianov, “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor,” 128. (2) Poetics Journal 4: “Women & Language” (May 1984). (11) Francis Ponge, “The Object Is Poetics,” in The Power of Lan­guage, tr. Serge Gavronsky (Berkeley: (3) Carla Harryman, The Middle (San Francisco: University of California Press, 1979), 47. Gaz, 1983), 4. The Middle was republished in Writ- ing/ Talks, ed. Perelman. (12) Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987), 14-15. (4) Luce Irigaray, “This sex which is not one,” tr. Claudia Reeder, in New French Feminisms, ed. (13) Umberto Eco, Introduction to The Role of the Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 104. 1979), 32. This book was of great help to me as I was considering the ideas expressed in this essay; I was (5) Robert Grenier, Cambridge M’ass (Berkeley: especially interested in Eco’s emphasis on generation Tuumba Press, 1979); Bruce Andrews, Love Songs (creativity on the part of both writer and reader) (Baltimore: Pod Books, 1982). and the polygendered impulses active in it.

(6) At the time this essay was written, “Resistance” (14) Lyn Hejinian, Writing Is an Aid to Memory existed only in manuscript form. A large portion of (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996), parts 2 and it was eventually incorporated into “The Green” and 12. published in The Cold of Poetry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994). (15) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, Part One, tr. Ran­dall Jarrell (New York: Farrar, synth 319

Straus & Giroux, 1976), 137. Hejinian. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press. (16) This idea is reiterated in My Life, one of the Originally Published: October 13th, 2009 several forms of rep­etition in that work. (See My Life, 46).

(17) Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 252, 248, 247-48.

(18) Elaine Marks, in Signs 3, no. 4 (Summer 1978), 835.

(19) Luce Irigaray, “This sex which is not one,” 103.

(20) Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” in Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981), 53.

(21) William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” (1850 version), Book VI, lines 558-59, in William Word- sworth: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 215.

(22) Carla Harryman, “Realism,” in Animal In- stincts (Berkeley: This Press, 1989), 106.

(23) Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, Part One, 61.

(24) Lines excised from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, nos. 102, 115, and 106.

(25) Bob Perelman. “My One Voice,” in Primer (Berkeley: This Press, 1981), 11. Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure” from The Language of Inquiry. Copyright © 2000 by Lyn 320 synth

DELPHI CARSTENS - HYPERSTITION Hyperstition Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’ to describe the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Akin to neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes, hyperstitions work at the deeper evolutionary level of social organisation in that they inßuence the course taken by cultural evolution. Unlike memes, however, hyperstitions describe a speciÞc category of ideas. Coined by renegade academics, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), hyperstition describes both the effects and the mechanisms of apocalyptic postmodern ‘phase out’ or ‘meltdown’ culture.

Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams hyperstitions are ideas that, once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Whether couched as religious mystery teaching, or as secular credo, hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations. The very real socio-economic makeover of western (and increasingly global) society by the hyperstitions of Judeo-Christianity and free-market capitalism are good examples of hyperstitional feedback cycles. As Nick Land explains: “capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ÔspeculationÕ into an effective world-historical forceÓ(email interview).

Not only do the ideas themselves function as hyperstitions, but the trauma and fear engendered by their cultural ÔmakeoversÕ (whether in the form of crusade, jihad, secular war, industrial revolution or economic reform) merely serve to further empower the basic premise and fan the ßames.

“Popular anxieties about the uncertainties of the future procured by rapid change are not merely the issue of ignorance,” explains historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. “Rather they are symptoms of a world in the grip of Ôfuture shockÕÓ (2001:556). Those who Þnd change unbearable not only expect it to become uncontainable but work to make it so by fanning the ßames of paranoia. ÔFuture shockÕ is one mechanism whereby hyperstition works to bring about the causal conditions for apocalypse. Once started, a hyperstition spreads like a virus and with unpredicatable effects. They are “chinese puzzle boxes, opening to unfold to reveal numerous ÔsorcerousÕ interventions in the world of history,Ó explains Land (CCRU.net).

It’s not a simple question of true or false with hyperstitions, explains Land. Rather, its a question of Òtransmuting Þctions into truthsÓ. Belief in this context isnÕt passive. As the CCRU website explains, the situation is closer to the modern phenomenon of hype than religious or rational ‘belief’ as we’d ordinarily think about them. “Hype actually makes things happen and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once itÕs real, in a sense, itÕs always beenÓ (CCRU.net).

“Hyperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality,Ó explains the CCRUs Nick Land. ÒThe hyperstitional object is no mere Þgment or Ôsocial constructionÕ but it is in a very real way ÔconjuredÕ into being by the approach taken to itÓ (ibid). Even conventional historians allude to this process. As Fernández-Armesto cautions in Civilizations (2001: 544), Òillusions Ð if people believe in them -change the course of history.Ó Delphi Carstens synth 321

Falling outside the parameters of conventional philosophy, the concept of hyperstition subscribes to what French post-structuralists Deleuze and Guattari have broadly termed schizoanalysis. Unlike conventional philosophy, with “its predeliction for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions,” explains Nick Land in Meltdown, schizoanalysis avoids seeing ideas as static (1995:2). Rather, it favours an approach that sees ideas as diagrams that are “additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather than transcendent: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches and loops, caught in scaling reverberations” (1995:2). Primed to create what Deleuze and Guattari have termed Bodies without Organs (BWOs) – namely metaphorical exploration devices of the kind crafted by engineers, artists and even junkies to ‘map’ new cognitive territories – schizoanalysis denotes a technique that can be utilised for analysing hyperstitions. The BWO, like a hyperstition, indicates an inchoate ßux of deterritorialised energy; a speeding up. After all, the investigation and crafting of novel directions for culture, implied by BWOs and other types of schizoanalysis, necessitates an investigation of the very mechanisms of cultural overdrive or meltdown. Fictions that explore these areas are in themselves hyperstitional, functioning to speed things up and bring about the very condition of apocalypse.

The CCRU has coined the term ‘K- tactics’ to describe the action of hyperstition, using the mode of schizoanalysis, in contemporary information culture. “K-tactics,” explains Land, “is not a matter of building the future, but dismanteling the past … and escaping the technical neurochemical deÞciency conditions for linear-progressive [narratives]Ó (1995:13). Symptomatic of a type of cultural illness induced by future shock, the hyperstitional ‘infection’ brings about that which is most feared; a world spiraling out of control. This, manifestly, is the task of the’hyperstional cyberneticist,’ according to Land – namely, to “close the circuit” of history by detecting the Òconvergent waves [that] register the inßuence of the future on its pastÓ.

As Nick Land explains in the Catacomic (1995:1), a hyperstition has four characteristics: They function as (1) an Òelement of effective culture that makes itself real,Ó (2) as a ÒÞctional quality functional as a time-travelling device,Ó (3) as Òcoincidence intensiÞers,Ó and (4) as a Òcall to the Old OnesÓ. The Þrst three characteristics describe how hyperstions like the Ôideology of progressÕ or the religious conception of apocalypse enact their subversive inßuences in the cultural arena, becoming transmuted into perceived Ôtruths,Õ that inßuence the outcome of history. Finally, as Land indicates, a hyperstition signals the return of the irrational or the monstrous ‘other’ into the cultural arena. From the perspective of hyperstition, history is presided over by Cthonic ‘polytendriled abominations’ – the “Unuttera” that await us at history’s closure (in Reynolds 2000:1). The tendrils of these hyperstitional abominations reach back through time into the present, manifesting as the ‘dark will’ of progress that rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities. ÒThe [hu]man,Ó from the perspective of the Unuttera Òis something for it to overcome: a problem, drag,” writes Land in Meltdown (1995:14).

Exulting in capitalism’s permanent ‘crisis mode,’ hyperstition accelerates the tendencies towards chaos and dissolution by invoking irrational and monstrous forces Ð the Cthonic Old Ones. As Land explains, these forces move through history, planting the seeds of hyperstition:

John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: “I thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write.” ‘They’ are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of 322 synth

the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress.

The ÔOld OnesÕ can either be read as (hyper)real Lovecraftian entities Ð as myth made ßesh Ð or as monstrous avatars representing that which is most uncontainable and unfathomable; the inevitable annihilation that awaits all things when (their) historical time runs out. “Just as particular species or ecosystems ßourish and die, so do human cultures,Ó explains Simon Reynolds (2000:1). “What feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is really anastrophe: not the past coming apart, but the future coming togetherÓ (ibid).

Hyperstition: An Introduction

In the following interview Nick Land responds to some questions about the mechanisms of Hyperstition in the context of apocalypse.

Q1. I wonder if you could elaborate on what exactly is concealed É what will be revealed by apocalypse?

R1. What is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages Ð a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.

Q2. Does writing about the apocalypse chase it back into the shadows/encode it more heavily É or does the act of investigating the apocalypse help to decode and actualise it?

R2. For theists, the former. For transcendental naturalists (such as hyperstitional cyberneticists), the latter.

Q3. Could you elaborate on the ‘hyperstitional endeavour’? Hyperstition is a key word in the lexicon of my thesis É I was wondering if you could break the term down into language that normal academics (such as my supervisor!) can understand. Hyperstition is the backbone or channel into which everything apocalyptic ßows, but what exactly is it?

Could you deÞne it? The way I understand it from the Catacomic is that it’s a meme or idea around which ideas/trajectories crystalise).

R3. Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be deÞned as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulÞlling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions Ð by their very existence as ideas Ð function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where conÞdence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (Þctional) idea of Cyberspace synth 323 contributed to the inßux of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality.

Abrahamic Monotheism is also highly potent as a hyperstitional engine. By treating Jerusalem as a holy city with a special world-historic destiny, for example, it has ensured the cultural and political investment that makes this assertion into a truth. Hyperstition is thus able, under ÔfavorableÕ circumstances whose exact nature requires further investigation, to transmute lies into truths.

Hyperstition can thus be understood, on the side of the subject, as a nonlinear complication of epistemology, based upon the sensitivity of the object to its postulation (although this is quite distinct from the subjectivistic or postmodern stance that dissolves the independent reality of the object into cognitive or semiotic structures). The hyperstitional object is no mere Þgment of Ôsocial constuctionÕ, but it is in a very real way ÔconjuredÕ into being by the approach taken to it.

Q4+5. In the Catacomic you also relate hyperstition to the ÔOld OnesÕ Ð the Nommos É are these water spirits the avatars of communication technologies? IÕm fascinated by your reference to Dogon/Voodoo/Shamanism/Magick É how do these archaic occult systems, which are so heavily coded and hidden, relate to the immense speeds and ultra-modernity implied by the term hyperstition? IÕve always been fascinated by archaic systems myself É they are the dark roots of modern technologies.

R4+5. John CarpenterÕs In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: ÒI thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write.Ó ÔTheyÕ are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, ÔbeliefsÕ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress.

Q6. Does hyperstition exist outside of time and how is it hidden? This is fascinating, particularly in relation to the apocalypse meme, which is not at all. How do the two terms relate?

R6. Time is the working in historical time of that which lies outside (but constructs itself through) historical time. Apocalypse closes the circuit.

Q7. How does hyperstition relate to capitalism as a force-Þeld?

R7. Capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ÔspeculationÕ into an effective world-historical force.

Q8. Can you say anything on the subject of Þctionality Ð i.e. history and philosophy as Þction, and Þction as a more intensive actualisation of historical / scientiÞc / technological / sociological potential?

R8. Hyperstition is equipoised between Þction and technology, and it is this tension that puts the intensity into both, although the intensity of Þction owes everything to its potential (to catalyse hyperstitional ‘becomings’) rather than its actuality (which can be mere human expressivity). 324 synth

Something’s Missing: A Dis- cussion betwen Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing synth 325 326 synth synth 327 328 synth synth 329 330 synth synth 331 332 synth synth 333 334 synth synth 335 336 synth synth 337 338 synth synth 339 340 synth synth 341

Art Practice as Fictioning (or, myth-science)

elements. Indeed, ultimately, it offers nothing more than a product (or a series of products) designed to …theres some thing in us it dont have no name… meet the desire for knowledge – when the latter is it aint us but yet its in us… (Russell Hoban, Riddly understood as knowledge of the world as-it-is. Walker) As has oft been pointed out, the ‘Art World’ is insatia- 1. Introduction: Art and the World (or, that which is ble in this respect; it requires evermore banners just in the world but not of the world) as it creates ever more artist-archivist-curators (or, simply, new products and new consumers). Nov- When art engages directly with the world as-it-is elty here consists of new groupings of the what-al- it already surrenders some of its power. It needs ready-is, the trumping of one set of knowledges with must use more or less recognizable forms, languag- another, the identification of counter or dissonant or es, narratives – even if these are idiosyncratic and/ secret knowledges, and so forth. Indeed, knowledge or marginal in nature. Another way of saying this is becomes the currency of such practices (knowledge is that such art is both of and for the world in which power as the saying goes – at least power of a worldly it is situated – or, which amounts to the same thing, kind). it already has its audience in place. Jean-Francois Lyotard says as much in his claim that art can simply On the other hand, can art ever be anything but the ‘multiply the fantasies of realism’ rather than, precise- presentation of a subset of the world, seeing as it is ly, disrupting them (which, in Lyotard’s view, is art’s a practice that takes place in that very world? Here, true avant-garde function). the definition of a world – what it includes and what it excludes – is crucial insofar as we might make In its engaged and oppositional form – institutional the tentative claim that art can be specifically oth- critique, for example – such art is still precisely about er-worldly without meaning it is somehow outside the world. Indeed, the more engaged it is, the more it the world-as-is (indeed, how could it be?). In fact, must mirror, however critically (or negatively), its ob- an art practice that attempts to operate completely ject. Such critique, again as Lyotard once remarked, divorced from the world – understood here as our is trapped by its target, which it must, to some extent, contemporary conditions – runs the risk of irrele- adjust itself in order to engage. This kind of critical vance, escapism or simply being a sophisticated form art practice can operate as a kind of melancholic echo of withdrawal. chamber in this sense.

The so-called ‘archival turn’ within contemporary art would be a softer example of this logic. Here, art Simon O’Sullivan practice becomes an archiving gesture, a framing and presenting of a subset of the world. An archive practice is first and foremost curatorial in this sense; it gathers together hitherto separate elements under a banner (a concept, a theme, a name, and so on), but, crucially, it does not necessarily transform these 342 synth

ly charged. Indeed, when the political scene offers no Nevertheless, it is certainly the case that art‘s ‘ma- new models, art steps up. Here, in fact, it might be terials’ are not simply of the world as constituted. less a case of already worked out models than exper- As such, it follows that its audience – an audience imental probes, affective scenes, proto subjectivities, adequate and appropriate to it – is not always already and such like. Art can generate the feel of something in place. Art, in this sense, can be understood as different in this sense. untimely, or as in time, but also out of time. It is, as it were, future-orientated. Gilles Deleuze‘s writings on But to construct a genuinely new form of coding one art foreground this strange temporality of art – that needs material, hence, also in this task, the impor- ‘its people are missing’. tance of the scrambling of already-existing code or the importing of more alien code from elsewhere But how might this untimeliness manifest itself? (outside of typical art-world culture)…at least as a What form might it take? first step. This is a mixing that is both spatial and temporal in nature (more on this below). Ultimately One thing is clear: it will not be easy to understand. If an art practice can then take off from this hybridity it is a communication, it will be one without meaning and begin to work on its own terms, producing its (to paraphrase Lyotard once more), when meaning is own (autonomous) coding. For example, it might understood as a register of knowledge – or, to intro- throw up images or forms that seem to come from duce another term, as part of the code of the world a ‘somewhere else’, but that also have some kind of as-it-is. Hence the important idea that something strange relevance to the world as-it-is. Untimely might be of the world but not of the (dominant) code images. It might also begin to recycle and re-use its of that world. This might mean that such practices – own motifs, nesting one set of fictions within anoth- that communicate without meaning – are not taken er, so as to produce a certain complexity – a density seriously or simply frustrate, bore, annoy or irritate. even. The idea that a practice might involve moves in At an extreme they will be imperceptible, at least, ac- a game for which one does not know the rules echoes cording to dominant regimes (and codes) of visuality this logic of strangeness and autopoietic functioning. (hence the importance of learning to see, or, which 2. Fictioning: Synchronic and Diachronic Operations amounts to the same thing, of attending to our own (or, speaking back and speaking in tongues) particular production of subjectivity). One way of articulating this particular logic of art The importance of these kinds of practices is then practice is as a ‘fictioning’: the production of untime- that they offer something different to the what-al- ly images – that speak back to their producer (1); ready-is. This might be simply a diversion – or, at any and the layering of motifs to produce an accretion of rate, dismissed as one (not part of the dominant code sorts, resulting in an opacity (2). (or, apparently, a threat to it), hence, ultimately un- important). But in other cases, and for different sub- (1) As far as the first of these goes, it might be that a jects, they are points of inspiration and radical dif- practice just presents the result: the final image (or ference that might then be developed and mobilized images). Here the relative strangeness of the image into a different way of being in the world. Here an (its difference to the what-already-is) is foreground- art practice presents something more germinal than ed. On the other hand, it might lay out the procedure parasitic. It can be the seed of something genuinely and protocols that allow this image to step forth new. In an increasingly homogenized and homoge- from its dark background. Indeed, it might be that nizing neoliberal present that offers only more of the a practice stages this event, or even that practice is a same – a present that overcodes all options – these name for it. Performance can involve what we might points of difference can themselves become political- call this magical function: the summoning forth of synth 343

something hitherto unknown and unseen. Collabo- with other more recent experiments. Such work is ration, or more specifically, collectivity – a scene of a palimpsest even when it looks relatively simple. some kind – is also crucial for this operation. How Another way of articulating this logic is that a prac- else can one make something that is of one but not of tice nests its own fictions within itself. This kind of one at the same time? That is intended but produces temporal density comes from the fact that any given the unintended? For I is indeed a stranger, but it is moment – any given image of the practice that we only through a specific practice that this stranger can see – is an extraction from a process, even a narrative foreground itself from the habitual and familiar. It (at least of a kind), that goes from the depths of the should be pointed out here that collectivity (again, a past of the work, towards a future that the work itself scene) need not involve more than a single individ- helps to bring about. ual. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari remark at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, we are always This is the diachronic aspect of fictioning. already more than one. Art is simple but complex in this sense. It inserts it- Art speaks back in this sense. It is both cleverer and self into a variety of registers (signifying and asignify- dumber than its progenitors. This is not to evacuate ing), but it also refers to itself (it is, as it were, inward the subject from the picture. Indeed, such art – like looking). Or, more accurately, it works on itself… all art – is made for subjects (images and objects follows lines of enquiry, repeats certain moments, made ‘for’ other images and objects may be many accelerates some motifs…slows others down… In so things, but art is not one of them – although see my doing, art itself constitutes a world – its own world comments below). Nevertheless there is something (as well as the terms in which it may be ‘under- about this fictioning – this production of something stood’). And this, ultimately, is its power. non-subject – that is specifically object-orientated, to 3. From Collapsing Worlds to Points of Collapse (or, use the current valence. It is as if the goal here is to a holding pattern of minimum consistency) extract a certain objectness (something non-human) from an all-too-human subject. In a way, both of the above modes of fictioning in- volve a layering. Again, the first is spatial, the second This is the synchronic aspect of fictioning. temporal. It is this spatio-temporal density – which results in the production of a different space-time – (2) In terms of the second aspect, time itself becomes that constitutes art when it is a practice rather than a material insofar as the accretion happens through simply the production of a commodity. time…across a work, or across multiple works. It might be that this passage is imperceptible, only able The increasing availability and relative affordability to be tracked by the recurrence of the motifs – or of digital imaging and editing technology means that avatars – that appear, disappear then reappear (per- there is now the possibility of a more accelerated haps in a different form), each with their own oper- mixing of temporal and spatial worlds and, as such, ating logics, their own speeds (and slownesses). An of increasing this density – and, with it, producing art practice has a certain duration in this sense – or ever stranger spatialities and temporalities. Such even multiple durations. A kind of aesthetic ecology technology also allows its user to alter the speeds of is produced which means the practice has more in the different images and sequences being deployed. common with a series, or again, a scene, than with an This might mean the introduction of a different object per se. character (or a different speed) into a different scene that has its own duration, or, indeed, the insertion The elements of an art practice travel in this sense. of one scene into another. In this strange dream- Fragments of previous codes make a re-entry, spliced time a virtual ‘third thing’ is introduced between the 344 synth

two. A no-place and a no-time. An ‘erewhon’ when aspects of culture utilize the latter, albeit only partial- and where other things become possible. This is an ly and somewhat reductively. Fashion, for example indirect answer to the ever present now of commod- (as spatial layering), or the mini-series (as a form that ity culture insofar as it often involves recourse to a involves longer durations than the typical film or, recent past, to that which has been too easily and indeed, the novel). In terms of collapsing worlds we eagerly forgotten in the ever increasing and insatiable need only look at the post-continuity cuts of recent desire for the new. pop videos (but also note that a strange continuity is maintained ‘behind’ the videos themselves in the This collapsing of hitherto separate worlds – and ‘lives’ of the celebrities as narrated on-line and on the concomitant production of a ‘new’ landscape, a TV). This amounts to saying that the world (or let us new platform for dreaming – is another definition of now give it its other name: capitalism) generates its fictioning, especially when it is no longer clear where own experiments outside of art – experiments that in the fiction itself ends and so-called reality begins some senses doubles art’s own probe-heads. (or where reality ends and the fiction begins). Fic- tioning inserts itself into the real in this sense – into But in art, the processes outlined above are accentu- the world as-it-is (indeed, it collapses the so-called ated beyond the reasonable. Art is like a joke pushed real and the fictional), but, in so doing, it necessarily to an extreme in this sense. From a certain perspec- changes our reality. This is fictioning as mythopoeisis: tive it is like an ongoing absurd repetition, a gesture the imaginative transformation of the world through beyond the logics of the market. Indeed, art does not fiction. have to maintain even a modicum of good/common sense in this respect – or, to say it again, is not nec- This particular sense of fictioning dovetails with the essarily involved in the production of typical knowl- idea of post-internet art, or art that is made from edge. and for the web of images that now doubles our own world of things. As such it might be said that Crucially, with art, this often means that something the collapsing worlds we produce have their own unrecognizable – often accidental – is introduced life outside of our control, or, indeed, that of anyone into the mix. Chances can be taken (afterall, there else‘s. Ultimately, they do not rely on being seen to is no audience to please, except for the very specific operate as agents (after all, who, nowadays, can see all audience that is looking for something that does not the images that are generated?). They are already in please them). This is the introduction of something contact and ‘communication’ with image-worlds that random, something that is, as it were, unwelcome are increasingly not of human generation. Once again and spoils any ready made and too neat schema or the question here is whether such worlds that operate logic. It is the introduction – or excavation – of rup- divorced from any kind of subject can be called art ture, a point of collapse. (who, afterall, is there to call them anything?). It is perhaps more accurate to say that they become art It is in this sense the art practice, ultimately, is not the when confronted by an interlocutor (although this production of subjectivity. It is not therapeutic, how- will not necessarily be a ‘human’ in the sense of a par- ever that might be defined. A practice certainly needs ticular historical diagram, with an inside and outside, a sense of cohesion, but it also needs these points a centered ‘self’, and so on. More on this other subject of collapse – or else it risks just presenting more- below). of-the-same. I have written about this – with David Burrows – at more length, and in relation to Guattari Is art the only place where we find this logic of col- (and Jacques Lacan), elsewhere.[^1] Suffice to say lapsing worlds? Or, indeed, the spatial and temporal here that an art practice might be a kind of holding layering laid out in the above section? Certainly other pattern – maintaining a minimum consistency – for synth 345

these points of collapse. Indeed, this might, again, be fiction offers something. It is from and for a collectiv- a definition of fictioning: the production of a myth ity – albeit one that is masked by more typical (atom- that binds the holes and presents and pitches them to ized and hyper-individualized) subjectivity. an audience. 4. Conclusion: Reclaiming the Unconscious (or, a It is also in this sense that this fictioning performs its message not to you but to something within you) own alienation: alienation from and for an already alienated subject. Here fictioning’s difference from It is not news to say that Capital has colonized time the world as-it-is means it will alienate the subject- as well as space, but this needs also to be thought as-is, but, at the same time, speak to the subject-yet- in terms of more imaginary registers, that is to say, to-be. It is a message not to you but to something not just within reality per se with its typical spaces, within you. places, times and durations, but also in terms of our unconscious worlds. As has also been remarked often It is also for this reason that difficulty, complexity, enough, the failure of politics is also the failure of the the refusal of meaning, and so on are not always imagination. Capital, we might say, has increasingly the signs of elitism or a deliberate mystification/ co-opted even our dream worlds – that repository of obscurification, but the sign of something that will images that give us a life beyond the plane of matter. not give ground to the world-as-is, will not pander to the demand to make sense (at least, following the Indeed, this unconscious – understood in a Bergso- dominant codes of meaning, and top-down decisions nian sense (as a virtual reservoir that subsists, but about what should have meaning). It is also, in this that is habitually masked by more utilitarian and sense, that art must invent the criteria by which it pragmatic interests) – is being colonized by com- is ‘understood’, when this does necessarily involve modity culture, and not least by Web 2.0 and its the register of interpretation (to follow Lyotard one logics. Facebook and Twitter and all the other filter- last time, meaning might mean simply that we are ing super-nodes of a once wild – and un-enclosed – ‘set in motion’ by the work). Every practice, if it is a web offer up a restricted repository of images – ever practice, is its own genre in this sense – and, as such, available, seemingly varied, but, in fact, just more-of- to say it again, constitutes its own world. But that the-same. The result of this is not only a poverty in other place from where art is pitched is also a world, the sense of the homogenization performed by these one whose edges are now revealed by this doubling. image-banks, but also an alienation: we become the Indeed, an art practice maintains a critical function spectators of our own subjection insofar as these im- in this respect insofar as it turns away from that other ages are not of us, or, at least, are only of a part of us myth-system which it has revealed as such. Myth-sci- (that part which can be represented by such images ence is a good name for this world-building – and and their attendant algorithms). world-breaking – technology.

Another way of thinking about the fictioning func- [^1]: See David Burrows and Simon O‘Sullivan, ‘Art tion of art practice is then as the reclaiming and Practice as Non-Schizoanalysis’, in Deleuze and the unleashing of this unconscious. Art practice – in the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art (London: Bloomsbury, sense mapped out above – can produce new images 2014). and sequences – new myths, new dream worlds. An important aspect of fictioning, in this sense, is partic- ipation in the fiction. This does not necessarily mean that an audience/spectator is invited into the work – often an artwork is precisely inhospitable (it refuses to give ground), but it does mean that the produced 346 synth

1 This is an un-copy edited draft of an essay to be published (in an abridged form) in Futures Fromand Fictions Science, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Fiction Ayesha Hameed andto Simon Science O’Sullivan (London: Repeater, 2017).

Fictioning (or, What is the Traction of From Science Fiction to Science Fictioning (or, What is the Traction of Science Fiction on the Real?) Science Fiction on the Real?) Simon O’Sullivan, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Introduction

The following essay explores the different kinds of traction Science Fiction (SF) might have on the real, and, in particular, attempts to define a kind of art practice that is less ‘about’ the future than an instantiation – or performance – of it. I begin by setting up the general problematic through a commentary on Raymond William’s writings on utopia and SF (alongside some brief remarks about Fredric Jameson’s idea of SF as an ‘archaeology of the future’). I then go on (in section 2) to look at Quentin Meillasoux’s concept of a more radical ‘extro-science fiction’ – or fictions about worlds in which science is impossible – and, following this, an idea (missing in Meillasoux) that formal experimentation (and especially the break with typical syntax) might operate to present these other space-times. Section 3 of my essay looks to Afrofuturism (especially as outlined by Kodwo Eshun) – and in particular ‘sonic fictions’, but also the more general idea of alienation as somehow enabling – in order to extract further resources to build a concept of what I call ‘science fictioning’ (again, when this is understood as work that is not just about another world, but of it). In the fourth and final section of my essay I extend my concept of science fictioning to take into account a kind of performative writing – of derivatives and other ‘financial instruments’ – which involve a different, but in some ways very similar take on fiction’s traction on the future (a recent essay by Suhail Malik is my guide here). My essay concludes with two case studies of science fictioning: the film Centre Jenny by the artist Ryan Trecartin (that pertains especially to section 4) and the experimental SF ‘novel’ Cyberpositive by the cyber-collective o[rphan] d[rift>] (that pertains more to section 2).

1. Science Fiction and Utopia Simon O’Sullivan The Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams provides a compelling entry point for thinking the relations between fiction and the future. In his essay on ‘Utopia and Science Fiction’ he lays out a matrix of different narrative content for both the genres of his essay’s title (including within the former dystopic literature): 1. The positing of a paradise and/or hell; 2. The externally altered world; 3. The willed transformation; and 4. Technological transformation (Williams 1978). For Williams, the first of these, typically found in ‘fantasy’ literature (and in which the place is more determinate that synth 347

2 the means of getting there), is predominantly a form of magical or religious thinking. In terms of Williams’ other more well known matrix (of the temporal make-up of the present) this tends to utilise archaic forms that are, as it were, already incorporated within the dominant culture (although it is worth noting the very real possibility of residual culture – that might offer an alternative or even an opposition to the dominant – within this genre).1 The second category is also of less interest to Williams amounting, as it does, to the positing of a transformation not caused by human actors (for example, by a natural catastrophe). Indeed, as a Marxist, it is especially the third category that Williams is interested in, but, in terms of cultural diagnosis, it is also the fine line between the third and the fourth that commands his attention.

The interest in willed transformation, which, for Williams, is a characteristic of properly utopian fictions, is then that it attends to human agency. In such fictions the future is not simply portrayed as the result of technological development, at least when this is thought of as somehow divorced from human sociality. Indeed, for Williams, humanity is the only real historical actor as it were (and, as such, also the real pro-genitor of technological development). For Williams the genre of Science Fiction (SF) crosses all the above four categories, but, it is especially the fourth that characterises it in its typical form.

Following this matrix (and interest in agency) Williams suggests that the different kinds of fiction laid out above are also expressions of different class positions (with their own particular ideas – or fictions – about their relation to the dominant mode of production). It is here that he makes some compelling remarks about the kinds of utopia attached to a rising class as oppose to those associated with a descending one. This question of ‘social confidence’ results either in a ‘systematic’ kind of utopia (an expression of confidence) or something more open and heuristic (which, for Williams, expresses a lack of confidence). We might extend this class analysis to race and note that some forms of non-Western SF, although of a particularly alienated consciousness, can express itself (confidently) in systematic and technological form. I will return to this below.

In fact, Williams goes further in his analysis and foregrounds a very particular kind of utopian fiction that attends to the transition to a new kind of world (and, with this, the development of ‘new social relations and kinds of feeling’ (Williams 1978: 209)). Simon O’Sullivan Such literature is not just the dreaming of another place but reports, as it were, on the struggle to bring this other world about. Williams’ paradigmatic example here is William Morris’ News from Nowhere (that itself looks back to Moore’s Utopia) but he also names a more contemporary case of this category of fiction: Ursula K. Le

1 Williams lays out this matrix (of dominant, residual and emergent culture) in his essay ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ (Williams 1980). In relation to fiction and residual culture see also my ‘Myth-Science as Residual Cultures and Magical Thinking’ (O’Sullivan 2017). 348 synth

3 Guin’s The Dispossessed. For Williams, this particular SF novel, of ‘voluntary deprivation’, is especially attuned to our present conditions, at least in what was once called the ‘First World’, and, even more particularly, with the dissatisfactions that comes with the consumer lifestyle of a capitalist hegemony. As Williams remarks:

[…] it is probably only to such a utopia that those who have known affluence and known with it social injustice and moral corruption can be summoned. It is not the last journey. In particular it is not the journey which all those still subject to direct exploitation, to avoidable poverty and disease, will imagine themselves making: a transformed this-world, of course with all the imagined and undertaken and fought-for modes of transformation. But it is where, within a capitalist dominance, and within the crisis of power and affluence which is also the crisis of war and waste, the utopian impulse now warily, self- questioningly, and setting its own limits, renews itself. (Williams 1978: 212)

In another short essay, this time just on ‘Science Fiction’, Williams offers up a reduced tripartite division: 1.‘Putropia’: fiction of this type tends to portray a world in which the isolated individual, often the intellectual, is opposed or in confrontation with ‘the masses’; 2. ‘Doomsday’: this involves the depiction of a world in which the human is faced with extinction; and 3. ‘Space anthropology’: a variation on ‘travellers tales’, a form of fiction in which ‘new tribes’ and ‘new patterns of living’ are articulated and explored (Williams 1988). For Williams it is, of course, the third category that interests him insofar as it offers up experimental models contra the dominant.

Indeed, as oppose to a writer like Fredric Jameson who’s own writings on SF are often a form of ideology critique (or, at a pinch – and as he himself remarks – are ‘anti-anti-Utopianism’) (Jameson 2005: xvi), Williams is more attuned, it seems to me, to these more innovative and experimental aspects of the genre (although he is quite capable of executing his own critique, as in the sharp analysis of putropian fiction as bourgeois ideology). Indeed, we might say that SF is a site of emergent culture (to use another key term from Williams), and, as such, offers up the new ‘structures of feeling’ that he sees as a characteristic of the latter (these are also the ‘new patterns of feeling’ mentioned by Williams in the ‘Science Fiction’ essay) (Williams 1988: 359). SF can be a forward hurled affective probe in this sense. This might involve more technological predictions, themselves the result of a Promethean impulse (indeed, the science of SF announces this), but, for Williams, this kind of fiction is at its best when it explores what Gilbert Simondon once called other ‘modes of existence’.2 SF can indeed be an experimental social anthropology in this sense (albeit one that is also often untethered from the earth).

2 See ‘On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects’ (Simondon 2011). In terms of a renewed rational Prometheanism and its connection to SF (and especially space travel) see Ben Singleton’s essay ‘Maximum Jailbreak’ (Singleton 2014). synth 349

4

Jameson’s own idea of the traction of these future orientated visions in the present is, we might say, more deconstructive. The issue, for Jameson, is not just that SF is written in the present – with the materials at hand – and therefore, necessarily, is of that present (its offering up of something different is limited in this sense), but that this is also a deeper ontological problem of how to combine ‘the not-yet-being of the future’ with the being of the present (Jameson 2005: xvi, note 12). For Jameson this is where the Archaeology of the Future – the title of his book on SF – comes in: just as there are traces of the past in the present (hence, archaeology), so SF might offer traces of the future in the present – although, clearly, the presence of the future in the present is less straightforward than the survival of the past.

Indeed, a key question remains as to the exact nature of this future trace. Or, more generally, how something might be in the world but not wholly of that world. For Jameson – and I think also Williams – this is the key problematic aspect, but also interest of SF (as itself a particular kind of utopian literature). It needs must figure whatever is to come in terms of the already here (or, at least, offer a view of a different kind of place in terms of this one).

2. Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction

The philosopher Quentin Meillassoux’s offers a compelling inflection on this important problematic in his book Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction (Meillassoux 2015). Therein he suggests that there might be a ‘genre within a genre’: whereas SF concerns itself with the relation of science to fiction, and, in particular, concerns the future form that this science might take (Meillassoux’s definition of SF fits neatly into Williams’ fourth category of ‘technological determinism’), ‘extro- Science Fiction’ (Meillassoux abbreviates this to XSF) concerns itself with the possibility of worlds in which the very practice of science is impossible (and, as such, XSF may be said to broadly fit into William’s third category of SF: ‘space anthropology’). To a certain extent these XSF worlds are chaotic, precisely unpredictable, hence, crucially, the question of whether they are narratable and can be written as fictions at all (insofar as, narrative (Meillassoux also refers to ‘plot’ and ‘storyline’) requires certain laws that relate actions and consequences). In terms of Jameson’s temporal (and ontological) paradox the issue becomes: is it possible to think – but also write – these XSF worlds from the perspective of our own world governed as it is by science (that is certain laws) and, indeed, inhabited, as it is, by human subjects that are constituted by these laws (not least in the production of consciousness).

In fact, we might say this is an isotope of a larger philosophical question for Meillassoux (and, indeed, within Western metaphysics more generally) about the possibility of thinking an ‘Outside’ to subjective experience (Meillassoux’s argument is pitched against what he calls ‘correlationism’ – simply, that any access to what he 350 synth

5 also calls ‘the great outdoors’ is compromised by being correlated with a given human subject). This Outside, it seems to me, is also the future, when this is understood as not simply involving the extension (and repetition) of already existing knowledges and logics (including science). In his key philosophical work After Finitude Meillassoux demonstrates this it is in fact possible to map out the conceptual coordinates of this Outside – that it is indeed thinkable – albeit it is not a place as such, but, rather, a radically contingent ‘hyper chaos’ (Meillassoux 2008).

We might note here that Jameson’s own ‘solution’ (to the ontological problem of the future) – the trace – is, in fact, not so different from Meillassoux’s description of the ‘archefossil’ as that which is within a world (or within the correlationist subjective circle) but points to something anterior to that world (and, as such, operates as a problem for any correlationist position that refuses to speculate on an Outside). However, Meillassoux’s analysis does not stop at what he calls this aporia, but proceeds from it. Access to ‘the great outdoors’ is not a question of traces or archefossils, but of demonstrating (in a series of philosophical manoeuvres) that the undecideability about the existence of a radical Outside to our own experientially closed circle is not a question of lack of knowledge, but more to do with the ‘nature’ of this outside – again, as pure contingency. It is here that we can return to and note the connections with Meillassoux’s XSF situation: the future is also pure contingency (or ‘hyper chaos’) in this sense.

In the XSF essay Meillassoux uses Hume’s example of the inherent unpredictability of the trajectory of a Billiard ball once hit by another ball (Hume is interested in questioning our common sense ideas of cause and effect and offers up a ‘thought experiment’ in which the ball moves in an unpredictable manner), and the responses to this ‘problem of causality’ offered by both Popper and Kant, in order to map out the various positions and possibilities of SF and XSF (in fact, he also uses the short SF story by Issac Asimov, ‘The Billiard Ball’, to further ‘flesh out’ his argument). In brief, for Meillassoux, Popper misunderstands Humes’ problem as being about the limits of any given scientific theory (or, simply, that if we had sufficient scientific knowledge we would be able to predict the movement of the apparently random movement of the ball), when really, for Meillassoux, it is about something larger – the very possibility of science in general. Kant, on the other hand, addresses Hume on his own grounds, but, for Meillassoux, lacks a certain ‘acute XSF imaginary’ insofar as he is unable to untether science from consciousness (the Kantian argument rests on the idea that a world without science would also be a world without consciousness, thus the very set up of Hume’s example (in which the ball moves in a wholly random manner after being hit) is, by definition, unknowable and unthinkable).

Meillassoux’s essay is then as much about philosophy as it is fiction, or, in Meillassoux’s terms, concerns itself with the possibilities of the ‘philosophical imagination’. In fact, in his own exercise of the latter he demonstrates that XSF worlds of a certain type are not just thinkable, but also narratable. At the one extreme synth 351

6 – where no laws hold – there is just chaos and collapse. At the other there are worlds, possibly much like our own, where although there is contingency there is also enough regularity to allow prediction, and, crucially, the repeatability of experiments that constitutes science. The middle point between these two, where some stability is maintained but there are significant uncertainties, is characteristic, for Meillassoux, of properly XSF worlds insofar as they are metaphysically valid and practically narratable but science per se is impossible (beyond what Meillassoux names a kind of ‘chronics’ that works through the positioning of relatively loose parameters for experimentation and prediction). In these ‘Type 2’ XSF worlds there is a stability of consciousness but not enough stability or regularity in the laws of nature to allow science as we know it to operate.

To back track slightly, for Meillassoux a key issue with XSF is that contingency rules and thus – in terms of writing fiction – there is the fundamental issue, or risk, of the ‘rupture’ of narrative. Meillassoux suggests various ‘solutions’ to this: that an XSF story might be about just one inexplicable rupture (and then narrate the consequences; one is reminded here of Williams’ SF category of the ‘externally altered world’); that the story might exhibit multiple ruptures and, thus, effectively operate on some level as nonsense (albeit, crucially, still held within a story); and thirdly, that the XSF story might exhibit a certain ‘dread uncertainty of an atmospheric novel’ (Meillassoux mentions Philip K. Dick as an example of the latter).

The striking thing, at least for this reader, is that these different XSF fictions are all understood at the level of content, or, to say the same differently, XSF is held within typical, or at least familiar, narrative form. In fact, it seems to me that it is really at this level of form – and especially in terms of style and syntax – that fiction might offer genuine XSF possibilities. Indeed, as Meillassoux quite rightly points out, narrative is the handmaiden of science (both necessarily proceed through cause and effect). It follows that XSF (at least in its acute form) will also need to break with narrative schema and, especially, the logical sequencing of sentences and so forth in order to properly ‘portray’ XSF worlds (but, in fact, would this still be a question of portrayal?). Here one thinks of William Burroughs’ cut-up SF novels rather than those by Douglas Adams which Meillassoux himself invokes as example of XSF ‘nonsense’.

This, it seems to me, is crucial. Certainly one can think through the possibility of an XSF imaginary in terms of narrative (and, one might say, those forms of thought – again, involving logical sequencing – that are narratable). These are fictions or stories about XSF worlds. But to really deploy this XSF imaginary, to make it real as it were, cannot but involve a rupturing of such narrative schema. Does this mean a haemorrhaging out of sense? Certainly, as this is typically understood insofar as good ‘sense’ is one of the crucial factors in maintaining the consistency of a centred and coherent self (fiction can and often does offer a reassuring mirror of and to a subjectivity already in place in this sense). That said in this other kind of more radical 352 synth

7 fiction a ‘minimum consistency’ is often still maintained – one thinks again of Burroughs – through fragments of sense, laid alongside a non-sense that might nevertheless contain the germs of new kinds of sense. This consistency, a kind of ‘holding’ or patterning of non-sense, might, in fact, operate at the level of the ‘book’ or even an author’s name (to reference Foucault).

Certainly this can bring about its own problems and paradoxes. Not least the question (gestured to above) about whether SF/XSF is simply the portrayal of another world or whether it can – in its very form – also summon it forth (to use Deleuzian terminology). Indeed, is this when SF leaves the realm of fiction per se to become something else? A ‘performance fiction’ perhaps?3 At any rate, one thing is clear: the XSF genre needs must engage with some formal experimentation least it become compromised by its very narrative (or, put differently: there is the risk that it offers up a world in which science is impossible, but portrays this in a type of writing that follows from science).4

This all has implications for Jameson’s future trace, or for those elements that are in our world but not exactly of our world. The problem is that SF – or XSF for that matter – must be written in the present, using the materials at hand (indeed, what else is there?). For Meillassoux, as I have suggested, it is then a question of developing a philosophical imaginary in order to think these worlds – from our own perspective as it were – that are nevertheless not like our world (or, in terms of Meillassoux’s After Finitude to begin the task of mapping out the coordinates of an ‘Outside’ to subjective experience). Strictly speaking Meillassoux does this philosophically – following Hume, and especially Kant (whereas, as I mentioned above, it seems to me a writer like Jameson remains at the level of diagnosis). And yet when it comes to the crucial question of narrative (as a determining factor of our world), typical (scientific) schema remains in place. Meillassoux’s XSF definition is indeed a genre within a genre insofar as its gesture to a beyond SF is nevertheless formulated within the very terms of SF.

We might say then that Meillassoux is guilty of a similar kind of mis-reading that he claims Popper gives of Hume’s paradox (or, more simply, he does not follow through the radicality of his own thesis). He positions the problem of XSF at the level of content (to say it once more, Meillassoux is interested in stories about XSF, which, as

3 For more on performance fiction as a kind of genre in contemporary art see David Burrows’ ‘Performance Fictions’ (Burrows 2011). 4 In terms of the history of SF one might draw attention to the formal experiments of the ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s and 70s, not least of J. G. Ballard and Samuel R. Delany (and the way in which both of these looked to Burroughs) as opposed to the prior tradition of ‘Hard SF’ that focused on extrapolating science – and which is still present in the post New Wave movement of ‘Cyberpunk’ which also (generally speaking) holds its fictions with recogniseable narrative form. synth 353

8 such, must be necessarily held within sense), when, really, it seems to me that XSF is a question of form. A more acute XSF imaginary (to echo Meillassoux’s critique of Kant) would push the XSF category further. In fact, I think this critique might also be applied to Meillassoux’s larger project of thinking ‘the great outdoors’ – which is really the question of how reason and rational thought can think something that, on the face of it, is non reasonable and irrational. Meillassoux suggests that such an Outside (or, again, XSF worlds) can in fact be probed by reason (or, in terms of XSF, articulated in a narrative).5 But is reason really the best kind of probe for exploring this Outside? In fact, is it not also the case that the latter has already been probed by experimental forms of subjectivity (or, simply, bodies), just as XSF worlds have been produced from within this one, not through narrative, but through formal experimentation?6

In our own experimental take on Meillassoux’s argument could we then add a further category to SF and XSF, that of or X(SF), which would name this more radical break with typical narrative (and, as such, science). We might, following Meillassoux’s lead, even lay out our own matrix of X(SF) worlds, for example: Type 1 in which there is just occasional formal experimentation and breaks with sense; Type 3 when there is just non-sense, pure chaos; and Type 2 between these, properly X(SF) worlds in which there is a certain kind of consistency and coherence, but not as we typically understand it. Once again, Burroughs’ cut-ups would be exemplary here – involved in randomness and chance (that is, contingency), but also a certain amount of deliberate editing and selection.

To recap my argument then: X(SF) fiction is not just about a non-scientific world, but, we might say, is an example of it (or attempts to instantiate – or embody – it in this world). X(SF), in this sense, is of the imaginary (afterall a fictional world is produced), but also of the real. Is this perhaps the difference between fiction and fictioning?7 Or the difference between a fiction that is simply in the world and one that fictions another one?

It is worth noting that these brackets themselves suggest a further and continuing ‘bracketing function’: afterall, why not X(X(SF)) or X(X(X(SF)))? On the one hand each X simply announces a more radical Outside, but the brackets also point to a

5 Narrative might be thought of as itself a kind of Promethean probe in this sense. But, again, it seems to me that it will be more experimental types of narrative that are really able to probe contingency. 6 For a more sustained reading – and critique – of Meillassoux along these lines see the ‘Conclusion: Composite Diagram and Relations of Adjacency’ of my On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the finite-Infinite Relation (O’Sullivan 2012: 203-22). 7 Meillassoux also uses the term fictioning in relation Kant’s imaginary construction of ‘a world in which science has become impossible’ (Meillassoux 2014: 7). 354 synth

9 ‘nesting’ characteristic of the most interesting fictions.8 The positioning of fictions within fictions within fictions, that themselves point to the always contingent nature of any ‘reality’, that the latter is simply a fiction that might itself be bracketed in the positioning of a superior ‘reality’ (that is then itself simply another fiction for another reality and so on).

In a return to Williams we might suggest that these forms of X(SF), often found as much in art practice – again, ‘performance fictions’ – as in literature per se (and, especially, in certain kinds of ‘art writing’), are very particular examples of ‘space anthropology’ (albeit we are gesturing here to the limits of the human sciences, or, which amounts to the same thing, drawing a distinction between the latter and more creative research).9 But, in fact, we might also gesture to a larger category of fiction that also partakes of this strange posthuman and utopian ‘science’: the Modernist experimental novel. Indeed, in this will to break typical narrative and invent new forms – and with this to produce new worlds and modes of being adequate and appropriate to them – authors such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are as much SF writers as William Burroughs and J. G. Ballard.

3. Science Fiction and Afrofuturism

Another response to Williams’ four fold matrix of utopia and SF is to explore how the third category, ‘technological determinism’, might in fact also operate to provide specifically different counter-futures to those typically on offer (I gestured to this above in relation to what Williams calls utopias of the ‘systematic’ type). Here technology becomes the very means of producing something different to the predictions of more market-driven capitalist futurology. Kodwo Eshun writes well on this, from his pioneering work on and of Sonic Fiction More Brilliant than the Sun (a book that is itself experimental in its form, structure and syntax) to his ‘Further Considerations on Afrofuturism’ where he identifies Sun Ra (alongside George Clinton and Lee Scratch Perry) as key sonic exponent of this mobilisation of ‘future’ technology (alongside more imaginary presentations, such as space travel and the colonisation of other planets) against a present in which Black subjectivity has been emiserated.

8 Robin Mackay writes well on the idea of plots within plots (within plots), and, more philosophically speaking, the r eciprocal relations and transits between local and global circuits and territories (see Mackay 2015). 9 I look at what might be called an example of ‘proto-art writing’ – that is also SF – in my Conclusion, but other more recent indicative examples of SF art writing are Mo-Leeza Roberts (Head Gallery 2016) and Virus (Stupart 2016). Art writing itself is a broader (and somewhat un-defined) ‘genre’, but, for indicative examples see the work of Maria Fusco, Katrina Palmer and, especially, Neil Chapman. There is also an increasing amount of SF ‘theory-fictions’ being written, the progenitor of many of these being Reza Negarestani’s magnificent Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Negarestani 2008). synth 355

10 For Eshun, Sun Ra’s ‘myth-science’ involves both a reengineering of the past (away from that typically written in and by White history) and a projection forwards into an alternate future. In both the above texts, but especially the book, it is Black music – again, sonic fiction – that is crucial in constructing this view from elsewhere (although, as others have pointed out the visual imaginary is also crucial to the production of this alter-destiny: in relation to Sun Ra: the album covers, films (especially, Space is the Place) and such like – as well as the costumes and other visual aspects of the performances).

In contra-distinction to Williams there is no explicit struggle to bring about this utopia insofar as these future myths – at least on one level – are disconnected from any human agency (Sun Ra does not identify with the human at all). Indeed, it is this disconnection that constitutes their power (they refuse the logic of the existent and the ‘way things are’ (including typical history and future projections – as well as already- existing (oppressed) subject positions). Following my reading of Meillassoux we might say that there is a refusal to think the future in the terms provided by the present (subjection) and a concomitant turn to other myths of the future: precisely a turn to SF.

In fact, for Eshun the actual terrain of SF has recently changed with the emergence of futures markets, and, more generally, a situation in which ‘power operates predictively’ through the ‘envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures’ (Eshun 2003: 289). The future, we might say, is increasingly the new terrain of capitalist expansion (with these future visions then operating to call forth the very future they predict). Is this also something different to Williams’ utopian impulse? Certainly, for Eshun it signals the end of the ‘utopian project for imagining social realities’. Instead, SF becomes concerned ‘with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present’ (Eshun 2003: 290).

In Eshun’s understanding the terrain of contestation for Black subjectivity is then no longer simply the past, with the project of a counter-memory that attempts to reclaim a history for those that have been written out of it, but also these other possible and specifically different futures that have a very real traction in the present. Hence the continuing importance of ‘Afrofuturism’ (Mark Dery is the first to coin this term in 1994) in order to combat the dystopian manner in which more dominant future narratives tend to cast the African continent (as the shadow – always on the brink of collapse – to a bright shiny (and Western) new future). Eshun suggests his own tripartite field of possible future interventions here: 1. Mathematical simulations: this is the future modelling performed by the markets; 2. Informal descriptions: as in SF and other less formal future predictions and projections; and 3. Black vernacular myths of the future.

The first of these, although clearly the terrain of neoliberalism, also bears some resemblances with recent calls by the Left to re-purpose existing technologies (what 356 synth

11 has become known as ‘Left accelerationism’).10 The second is also as much the terrain of SF writing as it is expert futures consultancy (indeed, it is sometimes difficult to tell these two apart and Eshun himself remarks on the existence of formal- informal hybrids). The last involves a revisioning – or ‘reversioning’ – of previous future myths (or ‘vernacular futurologies’) and Eshun gives a role call of these which includes, of course, Sun Ra. There is often a further kind of hybridity – in this case temporal – in these last cases where a pre-historical (and non-scientific) past meets a post-historical (and supra-scientific) future. Ancient Egyptians travelling through space and time. Or, again, in Sun Ra’s term: myth-science.

It is also here that Eshun turns directly to art practice (broadly construed), and, in particular, to the sonic as an expression of these subjectivities-to-come. Again, it seems to me that with these practices we have not just the portrayal of other worlds (they are not simply utopian in this sense) but something else – more embodied perhaps? These ‘sonic fictions’ are not just about a different world, but, formally we might say, are of that world. Could we also call them X(SF) in this sense, when the X announces this performative aspect?

In the Black Audio Film Collective’s The Last Angel of History Eshun remarks that jungle, for example, as a particular studio produced music, does not have referents, as it were, on the street, but conjures up more imaginary spaces and places (it does not represent something or somewhere pre-existent). This abstract ‘portrayal’ is achieved by the new kinds of sound made available by new technologies (sampling, but also certain drum beats). Indeed, in another moment of The Last Angel of History Eshun remarks on the way in which Black musicians have always been involved in releasing the potential of technological instruments, in exploiting their capacities, often, precisely, in using them against their intended purpose (paradigmatically – in terms of the subject matter of the film – with turn tables and scratching).11 One thinks again of Burroughs and the cut-up, but, more generally, the disruption of typical linear sequencing and causality – typical space-time – that involves a concomitant production of new blocks of different space-time.

It is also here that we return to the alienating effects of technological development insofar as many recent Afrofuturist ‘visions’ are enabled and, indeed, proceed from these effects (the ‘man-machine interface’). We might briefly return to Williams’ tripartite SF schema here and note that the first, ‘putropia’, can also be understood as

10 For more on Left accelerationism, especially in relation to fiction, affect and the Promethean impulse see m y ‘Accelerationism, Prometheanism and Mythotechnesis’ (O’Sullivan 2014b). 11 For a compelling account of how Sun Ra’s arkestra was involved in the building of new sonic worlds via the manipulation of ‘tone colours’ and the programing of ‘sensations without names’ see ‘Synthesizing the Omniverse’ in Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun (Eshun 1988: 154-63). synth 357

12 a fiction of alienation, but, in contradistinction to Williams’ own take, here it is the very ground on which Afrofutrurism develops its liberatory fictions. Eshun quotes Greg Tate from The Last Angel of History:

In ‘The Last Angel of History’, Tate argued that ‘the form itself, the conventions of the narrative in terms of the way it deals with subjectivity focuses on someone who is at odds with the apparatus of power in society and whose profound experience is one of cultural dislocation, alienation and estrangement. Most science fiction tales dramatically deal with how the individual is going to contend with these alienating, dislocating societies and circumstances and that pretty much sums up the mass experiences of black people in the post slavery twentieth century. (Eshun (quoting Tate) 2003: 298)

As well as a documentary on Black music (from the Blues to Detroit techno) and its connections to Black SF writing (Greg Tate is interviewed, but also Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delaney), The Last Angel of History is also itself a work of SF: it involves a fictioning of the archive (of Black history) that involves its own loops backwards and forwards in time (the narrator of the film – or ‘datathief’ – is sent back from the future in order to research the ‘mothership connection’). The film is also an example of the sampling and reversioning that it looks at. It is a sampling – or citational – work (reflecting the music it looks at, but also the intellectual horizon of its moment of production: Derrida and deconstruction). Fiction here becomes a method to re-work consensual reality and its attendant increasingly standardised subjectivities.12

Afrofuturism is then always already alienated, or, more specifically, it doubles the latter, offering up an alienation from alienation. We might think here again of the nesting function of X(SF), with the X announcing an alienation – or, more simply, an outside.13 In fact, as Tate suggests in the quote above (and Eshun makes explicit in his own reading of Paul Gilroy), African subjectivity has always already been SF (The Black Atlantic is a major work of SF). Slavery is positioned at the heart of modernity (its founding myth) with the ‘middle passage’ figured as the first alien abduction (hence the importance (in terms of Afrofuturism) for Eshun and others, of the techno producers Drexciya who mobilise the myth of an aquatic race born from the pregnant

12 In relation to film as a kind of fictioning of the real – or ‘docu-fiction’ – see also Eshun’s collaboration with Angelika Sagar, the ‘Otolith Group’, and, in relation to Afrofurturism, their film-essay Hydra Decapita. 13 In fact we might say, more accurately, that there are Afrofuturist SF novels that are about this alienation, i.e. XSF, but also novels that foreground this alienation in their very form. Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren springs to mind as an example of this X(SF). See also my comments towards the end of the footnote below. 358 synth

13 African slaves thrown overboard).14 Indeed, the issue of writing the future from the present – Jameson’s temporal paradox – is less relevant here in a situation in which SF is, as Tate remarks, the lived present for many. X(SF), in this sense, might be understood as a response to a SF situation: it offers a ‘way out’.

4. Financial Fictions as Future Instruments

In his short essay on ‘Hyperbolic Fictions: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction’ Steven Shaviro generally follows Fredric Jameson (who he quotes) in suggesting that SF offers a ‘psycho-social-technological cartography’ of the present via the setting up of a different perspective on it (Shaviro’s essay concerns two SF novels: Market Forces and Moxyland) (Shaviro 2011). Indeed, for Shaviro, this is SF’s raison d’etre: it can offer a purchase on the various ‘hyper objects’ that increasingly determine our lives but that are too vast to ‘see’ (we might say that this is an isotope of a larger problem of how to represent the abstractions of capitalism).15 Through cognitive – and affective – mapping SF allows us to grasp the increasing complexity of our own time.

But Shaviro, like Eshun (and, indeed, Meillasoux) is also attuned to the more speculative function of SF and especially the way it might offer up an alternative account of the future to those increasingly being engineered by hedge-fund managers. Indeed, SF’s capacity to surprise – again, to offer a different future – is, for Shaviro crucial.16 That said the importance of these other futures is still understood in terms of the present insofar as their importance comes down to the way that they demonstrate – in their very portrayal of difference – that the present idea of the future has, precisely, been managed (SF show us the bars of our cage as Shaviro puts it).

14 See also Edouard Glissant, ‘The Open Boat’: ‘The first dark shadow was cast by being wrenched from their everyday, familiar land, away from protecting gods and tutelary community. But that is nothing yet’ (Glissant 2010: 5). For Glissant, despite the horror of the middle passage, poetry (and what Glissant calls ‘relation’) is also born in this forced exile (Glissant 2010: 5). Stefano Harney and Fred Moten also address the imaginary that is produced by the middle passage – and especially containment in the ship’s hold – in their book The Undercommons, and, not least, how this extreme alienation produces collectivity. In terms of Glissant The Undercommons also exhibits an opacity of sorts insofar as the style resists easy synopses or, indeed, straightforward comprehension. It does not give ground to its readers and, indeed, might be said to be an expression of the very undercommons it writes about. 15 See also Toscano and Krinkel 2015. 16 For further thoughts on this different future in relation to Deleuze’s philosophy of time (and as opposed to a future that is simply a representation of the same) see Chapter 4, ‘The Strange Temporality of the Subject: Life In-between the Infinite and the Finite (Deleuze contra Badiou)’, of my On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (O’Sullivan 2012: 125-68). synth 359

14 It does seem to me that this understanding of SF as an optic on the present has its limitations insofar as it restricts the genre and, again, formal experimentation becomes less foregrounded (insofar as it is the image or vision of the future that is crucial). I will return to this below. That said, and like Eshun, Shaviro does point to another compelling understanding of SF in terms of ‘financial fictions’ – or derivatives – and how these work to actually produce the reality they predict. Here fiction operates as a feedback loops and, as such, begins to have a very real traction on the future. Following Shaviro then we can certainly identify an increasing amount of SF narratives about these financial instruments (Market Forces for example), but what about the idea of SF as itself a form of derivative?

It is here that we might briefly turn to a more recent essay by Fredric Jameson, ‘The Aesthetics of Singularity’, that also concerns itself with the strange temporal logic of these futurological instruments and, indeed, gestures towards a similar logic that is evident in recent literature (Jameson 2015). For Jameson this new kind of fiction is one in which form has itself become content (Jameson mentions McCarthy’s Remainder). In relation to art practice per se, it is also one in which the singular event has superseded the object.

In his essay, and turning to financialisation more generally, Jameson follows Giovanni Arrighi’s periodization of Capital – identifying a third stage (our own) in which any new regions of expansion have been exhausted, resulting in a situation in which Capital must feed back on itself – double its existing territories – via speculation on futures. A derivative does just this, operating as a highly specific ‘locus of incommensurables’, a temporal mapping of various risks involved in various projected events and ventures (indeed, this is why there can be no generalised theory, as Jameson points out, each derivative being unique – hence the singularity of his essay’s title).

As Jameson also points out this interest in the future is not in itself new (there has long been a predictive, futures market), but what is new is both the way in which these futures feedback – or have a ‘reflexion’ – in and on the real (they are, to use another term, hyperstitional) and also that they are now incredibly complex (the various variables are only able to be calculated by computer) which means they are also already properly post human (Jameson follows Donna Haraway on this compelling insight).17

We can deepen this account of derivatives (especially in relation to what we might call their temporal structure and, in particular, their futurity) by looking to Suhail Malik’s recent essay ‘The Ontology of Finance’ (Malik 2014). Indeed, Malik offers a further – and radically different – inflection on Jameson’s temporal paradox of an ‘archaeology of the future’ (or how to predict the future when one is in the present)

17 See footnote 25 for a discussion of hyperstition.

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15 insofar as time, following Malik’s reading of Esposito, is figured in terms of systems theory, and, as such, is not to be understood as the backdrop to the operation of derivatives but, rather, as produced by them (time is system specific in this sense). The solution to the temporal paradox of SF is then that time is not separate from the fictions that are its circuits and loops. When laid out flat as it were – as cybernetic system – different pasts, presents and futures are all involved in different reflexive and recursive operations.

Malik’s own thesis is developed on the basis of a key logic of derivatives (understood at their most simple as temporally based contracts (to sell or buy an asset) between two parties), that they tend to operate essentially divorced from any underlying asset (or, rather, via the deferral of the underlying; the contracts are rarely cashed in as it were), and, as such, their pricing is arrived at through a complex network of differential prices (that begins with the difference between price paid for the derivative and the predicted price of the asset at a future date). This is a network that spreads throughout space (and, as such, operates contra state boundaries), but also through time. Indeed, to all extents and purposes the ‘terrain’ of colonisation is infinite – not just because of the progression into an ever more distant future (involving ever further complex mathematics), but also, crucially, because these differential networks become nested as derivatives of derivative of derivatives are written.

Malik offers an impressive amount of detail on the various mechanisms and logics at play in these and other financial instruments, but ultimately, following Derrida, names this logic (of differance) the ‘arkhederivative’ – pointing out that the latter is not simply the logic of a certain kind of financial instrument (derivatives and the like) but also the very principle of financialisation and the new form of ‘capital-power’ attendant on this. The metaphysics of the market – which trades on the presence of an underlying asset – is always already in deconstruction in this sense.

Of particular interest for my purposes is the way in which financialisation operates a particular kind of time management, for example in the designing of predictive technologies. Malik discusses some of these – such as the ‘Black-Scholes Model’ – but also offers up a compelling counter argument such that the very unpredictability of the market – its volatility – is, in fact, constitutive to the successful working of derivatives that precisely need different horizons of possibility in order to multiply (the nesting function I mentioned earlier). We might note briefly here that this nesting of fictions – a kind of trading in representation without origin (or, at any rate, an abandonment of direct reference) – does not mean there is no traction on the real. Indeed the real (at least, the real in terms of the financial markets) is produced by these fictions.

In fact, for Esposito, in Malik’s reading, the time management (or ‘time binding’) of financialisation also has a very real traction on the reality insofar as it inevitably has synth 361

16 implications for social organization. As Malik remarks: ‘all forms of time binding have social costs, because they […] also bind the opportunities and perspectives of all other operators’ (Malik 2014: 719). The financial markets, although divorced from the material world in one sense, nevertheless have a concrete impact on politics and the life of different societies and individuals more generally.

To return to Jameson’s paradox we might say that the logic of derivatives allows a wholly different take on the future (or, more precisely, on time itself). Like Meillasoux’s ‘great outdoors’ the future is not a place as such but a pure contingency. Just as Meillasoux demonstrates that one can begin to say certain things about this outside (it is thinkable) so with derivatives and other financial instruments one can begin working on a future that then becomes as predicted (as Malik suggests, following Esposito: ‘descriptions of the world change the world described’). As Malik also remarks, following Elie Ayache (a key pre-cursor to his own thesis), derivatives are then technologies of the future (or, precisely, a ‘medium of contingency’).18

Early on in his essay Malik remarks that what he offers up is a ‘general theory of price largely dedicated to the identification of capital-power’s complex constitution and organisation’, but also that this might be considered preliminary work, following Left accelerationism, for a ‘revectoring required to provide the requisite political tasks’ (Malik 2014: 639). One can speculate on what such a revectoring might involve – in particular an intervention of some kind perhaps in the already existing derivatives market? Sabotage per se is ruled out by definition insofar as such interruptions and ruptures are part of the very system – its volatility – or, to say the same differently, more typical strategies that might work in terms of sabotaging investment and so on, are rendered ineffectual in a derivatives market that can itself be premised on counter production (as Malik remarks: ‘Unlike in investment, in speculation gains can be made by decreasing profits, a market crash, or a food shortage, if that is what the contract stipulates and regardless of any other consequences (Malik 2014: 668)). Could then a form of acceleration of these logics effect a successful revectoring

18 Ayache’s The Blank Swan involves a critique of probability and possibility as the key factor s in market ‘predictions’. Indeed, Ayache recasts the very idea of the market as itself a space yet-to-be-written (or, himself following Meillassoux, as a space of contingency) and thus not about prediction – or pre-vision – at all (and, as such, what he calls ‘contingent claims’ are proritised over derivatives per se). Crucial here is the idea that the market operates outside chronological time (or as Ayache puts it in the penultimate paragraph of his book: ‘possibility and chronological time come after contingency and are only incidental to it’ (Ayache 2010: 448)) – and, equally, that the technology of speculation adequate and appropriate to the market is writing (or, as Ayache remarks at the very beginning of his book, this ‘medium of contingency’ ‘is also the ‘medium of the creation of literary work’ (Ayache 2010: xvi)). 362 synth

17 perhaps?19 Indeed, what would it mean to accelerate the derivative? To nest its fictions beyond the reasonable (or the cash-in-able)?

Another kind of revectoring might be to think the logic of the derivative – how it folds time inside its own structure and, indeed, brings about a certain future – in relation to other non-financial practices. To return to the question I posited above, could certain forms of SF, for example, be thought as being similar in structure to derivatives? To a certain extent (and following Meillasoux) the need to be readable (as in SF literature) restricts the possibilities, but in art practice (broadly construed), this nesting function can be taken further. Derivatives of derivatives of derivatives can be pushed beyond the sensible and common-sensical. These ‘performance fictions’, derived, but ultimately disconnected from the world, are constituted by the nesting of fictions, the recycling and reusing of motifs and fragments of motifs, the construction of complex avatars from the what-is but layered so as to become unrecognisable (and, as such, they gesture towards a specifically different future).

Conclusion: Science Fictioning (or Case Studies of Practice)

The question of science fictioning (that leads on from my previous reflections on X(SF)) might then be stated thus: how to artistically manifest these different future fictions in the here and now, whilst also giving them a kind of traction on the latter (or even: how to present something in the world – and that has an effect on it – but that is not entirely of it)? Below, in conclusion to my essay, I present two possible ‘case studies’:

i Ryan Trecartin’s Centre Jenny

As I suggested above it seems to me that there might well be art practices that comment on, or intervene in, the new financial landscapes of prediction and contingency (or, indeed – as with Shaviro’s discussion of Moxyland – those that are ‘about’ these new territories) but, more interesting might be those in which a similar temporal structure (to the various instruments of the markets) is in play albeit instantiated in a different form.20 An example of this kind of science fictioning – future fictions that are, as it were, materially incarnated, is the practice of Ryan Trecartin. Indeed, in a film like Centre Jenny the future has already arrived and is operative in the present as a kind of ‘future shock’.

19 See, for example the Robin Hood Cooperative at http://www.robinhoodcoop.org/DEMOCRATIZING_THE_POWER_OF_FINANCE (accessed 2 February 2016). 20 An interesting case study of an art practice that is both about and an intervention of a kind (and that also utilizes some of the logics of financialisation) is the collaboration Goldin and Sennersby. See http://www.goldinsenneby.com/gs/?page_id=3 (accessed 2 February 2016) and especially, the novel Headless (K. D. 2014). synth 363

18

In fact, Trecartin’s own description of what is in play in his films (in terms of their structure) could equally be a description of derivatives (especially as Jameson describes them in their singular yet also very complex character) as ‘proposed realities that inhabit themselves via structural collaborations and then disperse when they’re no longer needed by the entities involved’ (Trecartin 2011: n.p.). For Trecartin this also means that the characters (or perhaps they should be called avatars) of his films operate in and as what he calls ‘an affective possibility space’ in which existence is simply the ‘temporary state of maintaining a situation’ (Trecartin 2011: n.p.). The avatars are events that gather various temporal circuits alongside certain affective vectors (or, in Deleuzian terms, becomings) giving them a minimal (and often precarious) consistency. To quote Trecartin:

The future and the past can be equally malleable; I don’t think they go in opposite directions. Memory is more an act of memorisation than recalling: you’re creating something that doesn’t really exist behind you, it exists in the same place the future exists. In my videos the characters try to treat that idea as fact. (Trecartin 2011: n.p.)

As Trecartin’s interlocutor (the novelist Hari Kunzu) suggests – in the interview from where the above quotes are taken – there is then an adjusting of the past from the future but also, of course, the continuing re-adjustment of a future from the present. Indeed, following Malik, to see time as system specific – again, as cybernetic – means any time can impact on any other time. In the patchwork temporality of Trecartin’s films different loops and circuits connect and feedback on one another producing a temporally complex structure – at times bordering on an opacity – that, on the other hand, is also very immediate with a strong affective charge.

Trecartin’s films are digitally recorded and edited (ultimately they are ‘written’ as code), but, in terms of the material instantiation of fiction and, indeed, the nesting function I outlined above, they also involve ‘real’ actors (that are very much Trecartin’s collaborators) in ‘real’ locations (they are not animations) – and, in fact, the films are also often installed in physical gallery spaces (alongside sets and other sculptural elements by Lizzie Fitch).21 Indeed, it seems to me that one of the key

21 See, for example, Priority Infield (and book/catalogue of same name) (Fitch and Trecartin 2015) . The installation of the films as a series of different ‘levels’ harks back, it seems to me, to Matthew Barney’s own Cremaster film series – indeed, in both, the fiction is created and sustained through a series of chapters (precisely, a sequencing). In the interview with Ossian Ward (in Priority Infield), Fitch remarks that the movie sets are always 360 degrees, but also that they are first computer modeled – bringing a further fictioning – or re-presentational – character to the exhibitions (Fitch 2015). Trecartin also remarks on the collaborative character of the work in which the performers (friends and other artists) contribute to the script. The collective character seems important in the production of a different world, and especially in terms of one that is not reducible to the expression of a single self-possessed artistic ego. 364 synth

19 interests of Trecartin’s work is this virtual-actual hybridity, a layering of different fictions (or different circuits of ‘reality’) that can extend to the gallery space itself as a certain kind of theatrical set-up in which to enter the fiction of the films (which, again, contain nested narratives or, as Patrick Langley remarks, ‘screens within screens’). As another commentator, Christopher Glazek remarks, a film like Centre Jenny also blurs the lines between pre and post-production with the film itself depicting the production (behind the scenes as it were) of the fiction. Indeed, the variety of perspectives and different cameras used (especially the hand held) also adds to foreground the films status as constructed fiction. Glazek also makes one aware (in his essay ‘The Past is Another Los Angeles’) of the very particular context of the films: the ‘make-believe’ culture of that city which is itself a patchwork of different fictions and performances.

On the other hand however, the films are also digitally disseminated (Trecartin makes them freely available via YouTube and vimeo channels). The work overspills the typical boundaries of the spaces and places of art; indeed, they have as much in common with various popular and sub cultures as they do ‘high’ art (if this latter term has any real currency in today’s post-post-modern world). There is then a kind of formal ‘enclosedness’ (or even sense of autonomy) of the films (they bring a whole world with them) and yet, also, this openess to a wider connectivity beyond the rarefied worlds of art.

In terms of the actual content of the films it is the layering of text and imagery that is also compelling (and that help produce the very particular affect of the film I alluded to earlier – a kind of amphetamine and hallucinogenic rush). The visual composition of the avatars, for example, arises from a linguistic or discursive complexity: ‘logos, products, graphic design, interfaces’ that produce a certain density in which an image – or name – contains condensed within it the parts from which it is made (a ‘history’ written on its surface as it were). Indeed, the different avatars might be thought of as compressed files, or blockchains in this sense.22 Or even as sigils.23 A strange kind of fragmented digital subjectivity is at play here (characters tend to proliferate across different actors, just as individuals ‘play’ multiple parts), one with an agency, at least of a kind (the avatars, for example, reflect on their own ‘history’) albeit radically distributed (there are a multiplicity of ‘Jenny’s’ in Centre Jenny for example). We might say, in this sense, that Trecartin’s films ‘reveal’ the fiction of a fixed (and centred) self in our digitalised present.

22 As with derivatives, there might be art practices – broadly construed – that directly use the logic of the blockchain and especially the idea of a decentred network that can operate as a catalogue/record of transactions (as in bitcoin). See, for example, ‘ethereum’ that uses blockchain technology to allow for the drawing up of contracts, the recording of various transactions, and so on, but without a central hub. 23 David Burrows has developed the idea of brands as sigils in a published talk on magick and art practice (Burrows and Sharp 2009). synth 365

20

Formally speaking, there are also the different speeds of a film like Centre Jenny. The quick cuts for example (as Trecartin remarks: ‘every year we acclimate to a faster pace’), and the acceleration (and manipulated character) of the dialogue (verging, at times, on a non-sense – again, one thinks of drugs) (Trecartin 2011: n.p.). Despite the real locations I mentioned above the films also exist in a strange non-time (and non- place) that is also an ever now (and every place) – not least insofar as the filming is itself ‘decentred’ with no overall perspective or even any fixed anchor points to orientate the viewer. As Trecartin remarks: ‘every individual moment becomes the work’s centre’ (Trecartin 2011: n.p.).

As Kenneth Goldsmith has suggested in his essay ‘Reading Ryan Trecartin’ the dialogue (as especially evidenced in the published scripts with their very particular syntax, punctuation and typography) also harks back to modernist experiments in materialising language, and especially to figures like Getrude Stein and James Joyce. Goldsmith also mentions Burroughs and it seems clear that the cut-up is a key precursor to a film like Centre Jenny, with its breaking of linear causality and sense – albeit not completely (the film presents just enough cohesion and consistency and, as such, works to present a different block of space-time).

In fact, it seems to me that in Trecartin’s films – and Centre Jenny is entirely indicative – theform is content just as the content is form (in the same way in which Jameson describes the formal aspects of Remainder as its content). Or, as Trecartin puts it: ‘the way something is contained in a frame is just as valuable as the content inside’ (Trecartin 2011: n.p.). Indeed, it is not just the offering up of a future fiction (a utopia or dystopia – depending on your perspective) that makes the films so compelling and, indeed, affective, but the very way in which this is presented in a very particular mode of fictioning the real: Trecartin’s films are very much ‘of’ the future that they depict in this sense. ii. o[rphan] d[rift>]’s Cyberpositive

Cyperpositive is a SF novel (at least, of a kind), with different characters and avatars located in different land and cityscapes, following different plots and narratives (often resembling game-space-scenarios). In terms of this content the ‘book-assemblage’ (as Suhail Malik calls it in his ‘Forword’ to the recent 2012 re-issue) looks to other recent SF writing, for example by William Gibson, Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson (alongside Burroughs and Ballard), as well as films such as Bladerunner and Predator. It also turns to other writers and non-SF filmmakers – Thomas Pynchon and Maya Deren for example – where it finds the necessary resources to flesh out its particular view from elsewhere. The writing references all these – at times, interspersing quotes from these sources – to produce a dense inter-textuality bordering on an opacity. The book also looks to other non-Western cultures (it involves a spatial 366 synth

21 as well as temporal syncretism), specifically voodoo (hence the Deren), with the loa- spirit world interacting with other virtual and more futuristic ‘shadow operators’.

But Cyberpositive is also composed of more philosophical references, sometimes explicit, at others more implicit: Georges Bataille, Jean-Francois-Lyotard, and, especially, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (to mention only the most obvious). It is also, itself, a book of philosophy when the later is understood as a form of future- orientated concept production. Indeed, following Deleuze and Guattari, we might understand this concept creation as itself a form of fictioning insofar as it involves a different thinking of the world ‘beyond’ typical subjects and objects (thinking is not, as it were, a line drawn between these two). Fictioning, then, names a different individuation in and of the world, but also other – stranger – causalities and transits (a ‘crossing the universe in an instant’) (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 201-2)).

Cyberpositive is also a difficult read, partly because of this content, but also because of the particular style in which it is ‘written’. Indeed, ‘pattern recognition’ rather than any kind of interpretation seems most appropriate when engaging with it. The reader is reminded (if this is not too ‘high culture’ a reference) of Jacques Lacan’s claim that his Ecrits was not a book to be read (for ‘meaning’). A less high culture reference would simply be the effect on the body of electronic music (or, more specifically, techno), a ‘genre’ that clearly had a determining effect itself on the book’s genesis. This difficulty is not least because the book is partly written in code, or, at any rate, in a non-typical syntax – a kind of stuttering and stammering of the key board (indeed, some pages are made up of just 0’s and 1’s). It reads as if written by the very machines and Artificial Intelligence systems it predicts (which, in some senses, following the philosopher Nick Land (one of the contributors to the book) and his idea of temporal feedback loops, it is).24

Cyberpositive also contains words from other languages, actual and invented (it can read like Antonin Artaud’s peyote ‘poetry’ in this last sense), and, at times letters are voided – glitches occur – leaving words and sentences incomplete (again, as Malik remarks in his Foreword, it predicts texting, twitter, and so forth in this particular character). The book is not, however, non-sensical even though sense – straightforward meaning and narrative – can and does break down. The content is still held within a minimum consistency (and, of course, within the covers of a book).

The science fictioning then operates on two levels: of content (the narrative and philosophy) but also form. Indeed, Cyberpositive is both about and of the future it

24 In fact, Land has experimented with this kind of writing elsewhere; see for example his essay on the Chapman Brother’s art ‘A ZiiGothic X-Coda (Cooking Lobsters with Jake and Dinos)’ (Land 2011). In terms of the latter, Jake Chapman’s Meat Physics (Chapman 2003) also performs its content in a very particular use of syntax that is reminiscent of Land’s writing (and indeed Cyberpositive) (albeit the narrative content is more horror than SF). synth 367

22 predicts (its is written in 1996 but from 2012). It arrives from a different – machine – consciousness, but it is not simply a story about the latter, a representation (in our familiar language) of this other thing. Indeed, again, it seems to me that the book is written ‘by’ the very machines it writes about (and, in this sense, it resonates with that other experimental SF-theory of the 1990s: Manuel DeLanda’s War in the Age of Intelligent Machines). Cyberpositive is a future shock in this sense, a fragment of something-yet-to-come smuggled back into our own time in order to engineer its own genesis. The book is about a schizoid out of place and out of time, but is also out of place and out of time itself.

This is also evidenced in the ‘look’ of the book: the font and typesetting, the cover – as well as its size (over 400 pages), shape (narrower than a typical novel) and, indeed, whole ‘object’ feel.25 There is something about this material thing, a throwback to a previous technology that indicates a future one, something about code being written on paper (the book as proto-digital codex). It is also a collaboratively produced text insofar as there are, alongside the writers mentioned above, a whole set of contributors who were part of a particular ‘scene’ that Cyberpositive emerged from, but also helped cohere. It is, to use a term associated with its authors, a swarm written novel. Again, Malik draws attention to the way in which this sampling of different voices, very much a ‘cut and paste’ construction, produces a very particular kind of text, and one that is itself incredibly prescient in terms of the writing practices of today premised as these are on the edit functions of word processors. But this collaboration – or hive-mind – also suggests a stranger, more alien, collectivity from which the book emerges.

25 In this respect it is also interesting to note the original context and point of production of the book. As Maggie Roberts (of o[rphan] d[rift>]) and Delphi Carstens remark at the beginning of their own reflection: ‘Cyberpositive beings as a text collage to an installation’ (Carstens and Roberts 2012)). Their essay attends to the collaboratively produced nature of the writing, but also its character as feedback loop. It also lists some of the key influences, pro-genitors and fellow travellers that it samples, describing the book – convincingly – as a ‘psychogeographical drift through the SF imaginary’ (Carstens and Roberts 2012). For a text on Cyberpositive that resonates more with the fiction-status of the book (and, again, its character as predictive and prophetic) see Nick Land’s ‘Cyberpositive’ (from where the aphorism that begins my essay is taken). After Cyberpositive (the show and the book) o[rphan] d[rift>] embarked on a series of performances and audio-visual presentations, often with accompanying texts, culminating in the complex ‘Syzygy’ collaboration with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) (see footnote immediately below). Although not within the scope of this particular essay a ‘reading’ of that event – conducted over 5 weekends at Beaconsfield art gallery in London and involving the ‘manifestation’ of demons/avatars themselves premised on Ccru’s particular ‘calendric system’ – might also be understood as a form of science fictioning. 368 synth

23 Does this perhaps tie into a certain mythos of o[rphan] d[rift>] and there sometime collaborators the ‘Cybernetic Culture Research Unit’ (Ccru)?26 I have written about the latter – and the ‘hyperstition’ mythos – at more length elsewhere.27 Suffice to say here that a myth-system needs a collectivity (even if this just the collectivity of one). It needs to come from some other place/time (even if it necessarily emerges from a scene that is located in a particular space-time). And it needs objects and images as well as words to cohere and successfully maintain its consistency – and give it traction in the real (there is good reason, it seems to me, that Cyberpositve is actual as well as virtual, concrete as well as abstract).

‘Liquid Lattice’, a more recent piece of writing and collaboration between o[rphan] d[rift>] and Ccru also has this fictioning quality (Ccru/o[rphan] d[rift>] 2014). On the one hand it is, again, SF – in this case moving from an account of Madame Centauri, her tarot pack and a Black Atlantean magic tradition (with segues of the Cthulu mythos) to more recognisably SF landscapes, cityscapes and seascapes, themselves populated by alien and aquatic hominids. It also has the character of a sampled text, written in different styles (and with different forms of inscriptions, from type to hand written), but also including drawings. Once again ‘older’ analogue technologies are brought into conjunction with newer digital ones.

And yet, on the other hand (as with Cyberpositive) it is not exactly a narrative and, certainly is not always an easy read. Different words (from other languages and myth- systems) are included and there is also mirrored writing this is all but indecipherable. There are also repetitions, the running through of different permutations of the same elements (reminiscent of the I-Ching) that stymies straightforward linear comprehension. The cut-up character of the text both prevents meaning, but also suggests new meanings, producing snap shot visions and images of another place and

26 The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) was a kind of para-academic research laboratory set up by the cultural theorist Sadie Plant, and then ‘led’ by philosopher Nick Land after her departure from academia (both Plant and Land contributed to Cyberpositive). A key concept for the Ccru was ‘hyperstition’ defined as both ‘element of effective culture that makes itself real’ and ‘fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device’ (Ccru a). In relation to the nesting of these fictions see the Ccru text ‘Lemurian Time War’ that identifies Burroughs as a key exponent of what it calls ‘hyperstitional practice’:

Diagrams, maps, sets of abstract relations, tactical gambits, are as real in a fiction about a fiction about a fiction as they are encountered raw, but subjecting such semiotic contraband to multiple embeddings allows a traffic in materials for decoding dominant reality that would otherwise be proscribed. Rather than acting as transcendental screens, blocking out contact between itself and the world, the fiction acts as a Chinese box – a container for sorcerous interventions in the world. The frame is both used (for concealment) and broken (the fictions potentiate changes in reality). (Ccru b) 27 See my ‘Accelerationism, Hyperstition, Myth-Science’ (O’Sullivan 2014c). synth 369

24 another time. Indeed, is this not the goal of all art? To produce something that is both of you and not of you at the same time? Something that ‘speaks back’ to you from an elsewhere?

If Cyperpositive has a certain urgency, a certain rush, then ‘Liquid Lattice’ is more hallucinatory. The drug references are inescapable: both read, to use Sadie Plant’s phrase, as ‘writing on drugs’ (see Plant 1999). Again, they are both about and from a different space-time. But in their very existence as objects, in their textual density as print, they are also firmly rooted in the present. This is the temporal paradox my own essay has been concerned with (how to be in the world but not wholly of that world). It is the move from SF to science fictioning, where ‘to fiction’ is not simply to tell a story about the future (or offer up a representation of it) but, to call it forth. Indeed, there is no longer an attempt to solve the temporal paradox of SF theoretically; instead, it is made manifest – presented as fact – in the here and now.28

Works cited:

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Burrows, David and Andy Sharp. 2009. Sex, Magick, Utopia, Finance (Stanley Picker Public Lectures on Art, vol. 2). London: Kingston University.

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28 ‘Liquid Lattice’ was published in the third volume of John Russell’s Frozen Tears project – itself an example of fictioning, or a book of different texts and fictions but also an object that worked as a kind of performance (not least in its particular length (the size of large ‘door- stop’ air-port novel) and the variety but also density of its contents) (Russell 2005). 370 synth

25

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26 K. D. (Goldin and Sennesrby). 2014. Headless: A Novel. Berlin: Sternberg.

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27 O’Sullivan, Simon. Forthcoming 2017. ‘Myth-Science as Residual Culture and Magical Thinking’.

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Fiction as Method, Introduction

INTRODUCTION 5 Jon K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison

DARK JESTERS HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT 73 David Garcia

HALF 10K TOP-SLICE PLUS FIVE 103 Matthew Fuller

PROFILES OF YOU 121 Erica Scourti

TO PROTECT US FROM THE TRUTH 171 Dora García

THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGE CANNOT EAT 193 Delphi Carstens & Mer Roberts

GREEN CHILDREN 235 M. John Harrison

ON THE MATTER AND FICTION OF ADDRESS 251 Tim Etchells

NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE 277 Simon O’Sullivan

BEYOND PLATO’S CAVE 325 Justin Barton 380 synth – FICTION AS METHOD –

Null Island

At the center of the world there is a fiction; a fictional piece of land a meter wide by a meter long. It has not been thrown up from the depths; not from the violence of lava bursting up and cooling, though there is violence in its history. It is called Null Island, and you cannot travel there.

Null Island is where the planet expressed as nature and the world expressed as culture seem — however fleetingly—to be extricable into natural and artificial, given and made. It is where the equator meets the meridian. The equator: the middle of the planet, the line girthing the earth halfway between its magnetic poles; a line determined by probes and sensors, by investigation of a scientific kind. A line more found than made. The meridian: a line inscribed on the globe, centering that globe on the capital of a faded empire whose persistence is still felt, whose ghost ships still sail the commercial routes. It is a line stolen from another empire, equally faded, and equally haunted by its historical cruelties and its grandiose myths. It is a line on which we set our clocks—that noisiest and most draconian of devices through which a symbolic imposes itself—and through the ticking of its clocks, this line hides reams of stories of cultural violence.

The point where the lines meet, 0° North, 0° East, baffles the machines. Computers need a piece of land there on which to ground their calculations. So we feed them a fiction, throw an island out into the ocean, tell the machines a story about the land at the origin of the world; and in return they run the numbers for our GPS, guiding us home safely at night, leading us to shoals of fish to eat.1 From this unreal center, the machines can tag our photos to

– 6 – synth 381 – INTRODUCTION – map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via this fictional island; the missiles our governments launch in our names track abstract lines of their trajectories through it. From there, where the world begins.

Through the stories and numbers of Null Island, this tiny piece of land without a sovereign, we see a fiction deployed as a method. The objectively untrue is brought into operation within the everyday. In several of the contributions to this book, theorists and artists look at how this “everyday” is constructed through the deployment of fictions to form and direct every part of our lives—from fictions in newsrooms and the twittersphere (David Garcia and Erica Scourti), to fictions backlit by the JCDecaux lightboxes that illuminate our streets (Tim Etchells), to fictions that maintain the happy face of the nuclear family (Dora García). In addressing the role fictions have in our everyday lives, these pieces show how fictions can be used as means of revealing the hidden workings of a state of affairs, and even of establishing a certain agency within it. Far from being an escape from the world, then, here fiction takes us to its symbolic center, and might allow us to establish some leverage within the tangled contingencies and hidden conventions that lie there.

To pass through Null Island again: it could be said that we find an inversion of sorts at work. Where it was once the unknown outside that was filled with fictions—those corners of the maps as yet uncharted, populated by chimeras and cautionary tales that “here there be monsters”—with Null Island it is the very center of the world that is fictionalized. Both the cartographer’s

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caution and the computational checksum are very functional uses of fictions, but they proceed by seemingly opposed routes: by ultraprecise calculations balanced on the objectively untrue, on the one hand, and on the other hand by stern warnings concerning the chimerical unknown. These latter can be deeply wise, if unscientific, modes of knowledge mapping an area’s dangers, its bounties, or marking the boundaries of its unexplored territories. It is a knowledge that is marked on maps, that passes through word of mouth, through embodied practices like walking the terrain, and through modes of feeling that materialist- scientific objectivism struggles to deal with—or is disinclined to. Yet, as several of the essays in this collection demonstrate, there is a great deal at stake in finding ways to turn toward these unexplored, under-explored, and often denigrated territories of thinking and awareness. These stakes concern the role of fiction in moving us beyond the impasses of the present, in opening to the radically new, embracing or reinvigorating the incoming future, and of turning toward the abstract, even numinous, outside. In these cases, fiction names both a method and a destination, one associated variously with non-philosophy (Simon O’Sullivan), with the digital-virtual (Delphi Carstens and Mer Roberts/0rphan Drift), and with luminescence, dreaming, and the abstract (Justin Barton).

We have at least two strands of fictions as method here: those that reveal structures and gain agency in the construction of the everyday, and those that are deployed as holes to let in the “future” or “abstract-outside.” But these two modalities of “fiction” are often inseparable. This is particularly true in the areas of the globe where the operations of the everyday lifeworld have not been given over in their entirety to materialism and the

– 8 – synth 383 THIS WANDERING NEVERTHELESS RETURNS, IF ONLY THROUGH A GESTURE, TO THE CONCRETE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF ITS GENESIS 384 synth – FICTION AS METHOD –

law of the market, those places still inhabited by chimeras and spirits whose presence have a real effect—whether one “believes” in them or not. If art can be thought of as tarrying in such an outside, it is equally embroiled with the other mode of fiction laid out above, that of hegemonic structures and operational contingencies to be exposed, critiqued, and counteracted.

Institutions

The year 2003 saw the founding of the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind. And yet over a decade later the museum has yet to open its doors. Those eager to visit the collection can turn their attention to the ongoing cycle of global art festivals: so far the museum has participated in biennials in Istanbul, Venice, and Sharjah, giving us a clue as to the status of its creator, Khalil Rabah, an artist and the author of the museum’s seasonal newsletter.

According to Rabah, a frequent response of visitors to the museum’s recent instantiation in Athens was, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Is it real?”2 With this question we can presume visitors were not embarking on a voyage of Cartesian doubt and questioning their eyes’ ability to deceive them. The question seems instead to be one of seeking guidance on whether the museum should be considered a more-or-less stable institutional frame designed to deflect attention onto the cultural objects whose job it is to house (which would make it a “real” museum—a museum one can take for granted); or whether it is rather taken as a central component of the artwork, a prospect that directs one’s attention to something that may subvert expectations. If unreal

– 10 – synth 385 – INTRODUCTION – in the first sense, then hallucination or illusion are at play; if the second, then we enter the realms of fiction in its capacity to loosen signs from the stable moorings of their referents, without allowing them to drift away entirely. The same question might be asked of any number of fictional museums invented by artists, from Marcel Broodthaers’s Department of Eagles (1968–71) to Meschac Gaba’s Museum of African Art (1997–2002). While each of these three examples lack one or more of the basic criteria typically used to define a museum—to varying degrees they lack a permanent home, do not support active acquisition or conservation programs, and for long stretches of their lifespan remain inaccessible to the public—this does not automatically oblige us to consider them unreal. Rather, these museums assume the reality of a fiction, and in doing so they acquire new possibilities for action specific to the circumstances of their creation. For example, the fact that the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind does not have a permanent base in Palestine, where the Israeli military has demolished almost 50,000 buildings since the 1960s, might ensure a longevity otherwise difficult to achieve.3 Here fiction facilitates a peripatetic wandering, but this wandering nevertheless returns, if only through a gesture, to the concrete political circumstances of its genesis.

The recent proliferation of fictional institutions in the field of contemporary art can be viewed as an outgrowth of a loose cluster of practices grouped under the banner of institutional critique. Stretching from the 1960s to the present day, the first wave of institutional critique is often portrayed as an attempt to escape from overbearing institutional frameworks that Robert Smithson described as centers of “cultural confinement.”4 Sometimes this search involved a literal move away from the

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metropolitan centers of art consumption, as in the case of Land art, and sometimes it involved a close scrutiny of the institutional structures that made these centers politically and economically conservative, if not downright corrupt. Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real- Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 serves as an emblematic example of the latter, insofar as it exposed the ethically dubious business practices of the slumlord Harry Shapolsky in such detail that it was deemed by the board of trustees of the Guggenheim too sensitive to show to the public, partly for fear that the same board of trustees would be implicated in Shapolsky’s web of corruption. In the now established narrative of institutional critique’s development, the ambitions and strategies of this first wave are repositioned by a second wave that emphasized the impossibility of walking away from institutions entirely, at the same time as it introduced questions of subjectivity as a complement to the predominantly economic and political focus of the first wave. It is Andrea Fraser’s practice that often serves as shorthand for this second wave, insofar as it literally invites reflections on the institutional fabric of the museum—playfully exaggerating descriptions of museum architecture for example, in Little Frank and His Carp (2001), or subverting the function of the museum tour guide in Museum Highlights (1989)—but also through an accompanying theorization that emphasizes the hopelessness of escaping an art system that is all-encompassing, in Fraser’s words, “because the institution is inside of us, and we can’t get outside of ourselves.”5

Where are we to locate the proliferation of fictional institutions in this historical lineage? Do they comprise part of a third wave, a wave still in the process of formation?

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Marcel Broodthaers initiated Department of Eagles as early as 1968, which suggests that the strategy of creating fictional institutions is present in numerous waves of institutional critique, generating different effects in different periods. In the last fifteen years it has become increasingly difficult to view fictional institutions as withdrawals or alternatives in any straightforward sense, both because these creations are often deliberately nested within larger institutions—such as Gaba’s Museum of African Art, which currently takes pride of place within Tate Modern’s monolithic extension—and because such institutions have become increasingly corporate in the face of diminishing public funding. Nevertheless, the use of fiction does represent a focal point for the renewed enthusiasm for experimenting not simply with the lexicons and display strategies of institutions, but with different forms of instituting.6 A form of instituting is not the same as an institutional form: while the latter tend toward stasis and structure, the former comprise a central element of what Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray call “instituent practices,” which develop new processes for linking disparate creative moments and inventing new “qualities of participation” that can occur inside and outside existing institutions.7 In this sense, fiction could be considered an instituent practice, and when incubated within the body of art institutions, it can sometimes create space for improvisatory variations from the structures that sustain it, allowing the institution to differ from itself, thereby opening up an otherwise rigid framework to a plurality of desires.

It is political desire that breathes life into Ian Alan Paul’s concept of the Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History, another fictional institution, discussed by David Garcia in his chapter

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for this book. The museum comprised a significant element of an exhibition curated by Garcia, together with Nat Muller and later with Annet Dekker in 2017, entitled “How Much of This Is Fiction,” that makes extensive use of “as if” propositions. Garcia is careful to distinguish works that operate on the basis of “what ifs” from works that act “as if,” arguing that while the former lead to “satirical acts designed to unmask the workings of power,” the latter are “more utopian, leading to forms of activism that, rather than demanding change, act ‘as if’ change has already occurred.” The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History operates in this second mode, and in doing so takes its place alongside a number of other fictional museums that, by experimenting with new forms of instituting, create conceptual spaces to contemplate the possible and incubate political desires.

On a more general level, fictional institutions are merely the artistic exemplars of a fact that is both scandalous and well known: that institutions of all kinds are underwritten by fictions. Karin Knorr Cetina argues that we might think of “fictionality” as referring “to the inflationary introduction of layers of organization and order which increase the viscosity and texture of modern institutions,” and this is true of myriad social institutions and administrative norms, Guantanamo included.8 Indeed, fictions are operative in the foundations of cartographies, currencies, and nations, in the earliest forms of double-entry bookkeeping, in physics labs, and law courts. When the legal rights of a corporation to be treated as if it were a physical person are upheld, one can be sure one is in the presence of fiction. When a married couple are treated legally as one person in English law, to the exclusion of unmarried couples, fiction is certainly at play. When the international

– 14 – synth 389 A MODE OF BELIEF THAT IS NON- EXCLUSIVE, THAT DISPENSES WITH THE LOGIC OF CONTRADICTION IN FAVOR OF THE INCLUDED MIDDLE 390 synth – FICTION AS METHOD –

monetary system abandons the gold standard and begins trading on fiat currencies, one is in the presence of multiple fictions, or rather, one witnesses a regime change between the fiction of gold’s intrinsic value and another fiction based on money’s relational value. Many institutions would simply be unable to function without fictions lubricating their organizational machinery. And yet there are also cases of fictions causing institutional machinery to shudder to a standstill—fictions that can be just as inconvenient as truths, and no less profound in their ability to shed light on current predicaments and institutional hegemony.

Roads

From the browsed and beaten landscapes of Iceland to the fecund banks of the Waikato river running through New Zealand’s North Island, several infrastructure plans have been disputed and redirected over the past few decades. In New Zealand, Ngāti Naho people built their objections to road plans around a defense of the habitat of their people’s own protective spirit, a taniwha; and in Iceland four proposed routes threatened the natural environment of the huldufólk (literally “hidden people”), who often dwell in the gnarled volcanic rock formations that jut through the island’s ashen topsoil.

There is considerably more at stake here than was reported in much international press at the time: to dismiss the intrusion of folklore into civic engineering projects as the authorities giving ground to a product of make-believe would be to simplify the matter; just as it would to attribute a devout faith in

– 16 – synth 391 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – huldufólk to Icelanders. An explanation for the phenomenon lies somewhere between the two poles: it would seem that the majority of local inhabitants do not so much believe in huldufólk as entertain a belief in them.9

“Entertaining belief” should not be taken as a synonym for considering an idea in a casual or trivial manner, although it may be both. Rather, it isolates a mode of belief that is nonexclusive, that dispenses with the logic of contradiction in favor of the included middle. There is a clear difference between belief and entertaining belief, and yet when it comes to a reckoning of effects, they could be said to exercise roughly the same power: the objective truth or falsehood of the existence of huldufólk is irrelevant to the real effect they have had on the road plans. One thing which this book’s focus on fiction as method enables us to concentrate on is the operative effect of something, irrespective of its objective existence.

Certainly it may be objected that the real motive for protecting huldufólk habitats is the power they hold over the imagination of tourists that visit Iceland: the notion of an enchanted island is at the core of its tourist-board strategy, and even if they are not directly capitalized upon, the preservation of huldufólk habitats feeds into this image. But if the desire to preserve physical traces of this cultural heritage on the island’s landscape does support the marketing image, it is far from being the sole motive. As Icelandic polymath Eiríkur Benedikz has suggested, there is a powerful desire on the part of Icelanders themselves to preserve such geological platforms for their imagination. Here, the entertaining of belief is not simply opposed to the physical materiality of the rocks, but entwined

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with them, such that it has been claimed that the landscape itself suggests the existence of huldufólk. As Benedikz argues, “The imagination fastens on[to] these natural phenomena.”10 If Icelandic emigrants living abroad are less inclined to believe in much of the country’s native folklore, it could be that a weakened identification with their cultural heritage is not simply the product of displacement from a cultural ecology that fosters this heritage, but rather the prolonged separation from a landscape that is redolent of huldufólk’s existence.11 In this way, it would not so much be a case of fiction fastening onto a landscape as a case of emanation.

The project to protect the taniwha in New Zealand is more closely tied to a colonial history: to the denigration and destruction of one culture by another. The ongoing debates and legal clashes concerning the protection of Māori spirits and sites has frustrated a number of infrastructure construction projects, from prisons to TV masts to roads. In 2002 a case was carried to divert a planned highway at Meremere around the habitat of the taniwha Karu Tahi, related to the Tainui iwi (people). In part, Karu Tahi has a function analogous to the “here there be monsters” of old Western maps: for example, stories of him discourage foolhardy children from swimming at particularly treacherous parts of a river. But more generally, taniwha protect their section of river, and to build into the riverbed will invite their retribution.

As with huldufólk, to call taniwha a fiction both allows us to recognize the extent to which its existence might partake in something not yet known by—or, indeed, de facto unknowable to— materialist science, and to observe the real effects they have regardless of any determination of them as real or unreal.

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As academic folklorist Allan Asbjørn Jøn has noted of Māori taniwha and their effect on planning projects more generally, “An element of the spiritual and cultural beliefs of the indigenous population is being moulded and reformed as an integral part of the legal landscape, and official interactions with the landscape.”12 Indeed, as he goes on to argue, in this way, such beliefs are extending into the “bi-cultural nature” of New Zealand, becoming New Zealand outlooks, not exclusively Māori ones.

Recently, this bi-cultural approach has begun to extend into the statutes of the country. In March 2017, south of Karu Tahi’s Waikato, another New Zealand river, the Whanganui, was granted legal personhood status and assigned two legal guardians, one from the Whanganui River iwi, the other representing the State. The river’s rights include ownership of its own riverbed.13 Statutes of personhood have also been passed in India on behalf of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers—legislation based in part on Ecuador’s 2008 constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature (or “Pachamama,” Mother Nature), which includes the possibility for Nature to be named as a legal defendant.14 We will have cause to return the question of ascriptions of personhood and fictioning, below.

As well as these real effects on engineering projects, legal frameworks, and the identities of societies, these beings and stories of beings reveal something about the valences of fiction as method. First, that fiction is most interesting when understood in its broadest sense—where it recognizes the power of that which acts but which exists outside of our ken. Second, that there is an important role for both material location and

– 19 – 394 synth FICTIONING CAN BE THOUGHT INSTEAD AS AN INVITATION THAT WE STRATEGICALLY EXTEND TO THE RADICAL UNKNOWABILITY OF THE FUTURE synth 395 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – for continuity and repetition in maintaining these fictions as powerful operative forces in the world. The New Zealand Tohunga Suppression Act was in place for little more than fifty years (1907–62), but this was enough to break uncountable threads in the passing down of tohunga wisdom.

If fiction can be so susceptible to a generation of silence or, with the Icelandic emigrant, to a few years of expatriation— so brittle and quick to fade—it equally takes on more and more strength through iteration.15 But it is not only folkloric traditions that strengthen fictions through repetition and insert them into the world as operative agents. Indeed, at least since the collapse of the gold standard, it has become common to discuss economics and finance in terms of their fictitious bases. One of the earliest decisive moves in the direction of recognizing economic and financial fictions was the work of economic thinker Karl Polanyi. As he argued in his book The Great Transformation, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the emergence of a market economy was primarily modeled on what Polanyi calls “fictional commodities.”16 This market of fictional commodities is worth further attention in this context—both in itself and in the more recent instantiation of financial fictions, namely, our current economy of speculative financial products that employ fictions to model, and to determine, the future.

Commodities and Futures

In his 1944 critique of market economies—in particular the myths and dangers of self-regulating (that is, deregulated) markets— Karl Polanyi identified three “fictitious” commodities: “Labor,

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land and money,” he argues, “are obviously not commodities.”17 To think that they are commodities simply because they can be treated like commodities—that they fit the “empirical definition of a commodity”—is mere syllogism.18 The market’s “fictioning” of commodities, then, deploys a simple “as if” function: these commodities have not been produced for sale, but can be sold; they are treated “as if” produced for the market. From this follows the great danger of marketization as Polanyi saw it: the introduction of this “as if” fictioning to the relation between the market and the social-material conditions of life has real effects; it means no less than “to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market.”19 The fictionalization begins as an empirical error (treating labor, land, and money as if commodities), but begets a new deterministic relation such that the demands of the market come to shape the matter and relations of life.

In the Thatcher-Reagan years, widespread deregulation led to higher volatility and—along with the increase in power and availability of computation with which to process complex mathematics—the derivatives market took on its contemporary form. Simply put, derivatives price risk and trade it in parcels. In this process the uncertainty of the future—its radical unknowability—is replaced by a model and spread into something that, if not fully knowable, can nonetheless be turned into a surplus through the spreading of risk in a portfolio. Through this hedging of multiple, contradictory “what ifs,” volatility can be turned into pricing; the radical unknowability (or fictionality) of the future is deferred—it becomes interminably inaccessible behind an iron curtain of precarity—and a (fictional) model of the future is made available in the present to be priced,

– 22 – synth 397 – INTRODUCTION – traded, and capitalized on.20 Here the “as if” function of the fictional commodity meets the “what if” function of speculation and modeling. Through the concatenation of these modes of fiction, the future itself comes to be manipulable by finance, and potentiality—the future as properly unknowable—is permanently deferred. As Frederik Tygstrup has it,

When the present is increasingly engrained with virtuality, and the more we bet on, issue promises for and insure our contingent futures, speculation increasingly emerges from the shadow of the otherwise more robust sense of the real and becomes a predominant mode of agency and orientation.21

Fiction is thus both a part of the genealogy of, yet quite opposed to, the derivatives portfolio. Which is to say both that the history of the cancellation of the future by neoliberal financialization has advanced through the market’s deployment of fictions—the “as ifs” of fictional commodities and the subsequent “as if” effects of the “what if” models of the future— and that in the situation as it now stands, any alternative to such “capitalist realism” must be instantiated at an ontological level—that is, fictioned.22

Rather than reducing the future to its calculable financialization in the present (reaping surplus from volatility), fictioning can be thought instead as an invitation that we strategically extend to the radical unknowability of the future. In a neoliberal present, then, the stakes of fiction as method are once again revealed to be the highest: no less than the reinvention of the future beyond the impasses of the present; and thus, a figuration of the future as not always

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already determined by the present—the future as unknown. As sociologist of finance Randy Martin put it, “The derivative operates through the conditions of generalized uncertainty as a bearer of this ongoing contestation over value in which the relation between knowledge and non-knowledge is governed.”23 It is this same relation which fiction, too, intervenes in, creates from, or turns toward. The derivative siphons from this surplus— profiting from non-knowledge—and thus neoliberalism, as the economic ideology of the derivative, now has a vested interest in denigrating both the expert and the fictioneer. Where the expert seeks to reduce the surplus of knowledge—and would thus reduce profitable volatility—fiction turns toward the unknown without seeking to legislate or capitalize on its relation to the knowable; indeed, fiction precisely encourages the impact of the unknown as unknown on the known and its persistence therein. This is the ability to remain open, or “negative capability”—“of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason”—that Keats famously identified as Shakespeare’s core talent (and found so lacking in Coleridge).24

Over the past forty years, through the derivative, Capital has moved toward abolishing any regulatory outside, any “elsewhere” from where it might be mapped and controlled: most obviously it has removed the teeth of policy and the efficacy of the State in relation to it. Here, again, are the stakes of fictioning: it becomes a matter of accessing, inventing, and turning toward an outside that has not been colonized by Capital, and through which the world could be thought and become otherwise. If, as Simon O’Sullivan has argued, Capital has now “colonised the virtual,” fictions and fictioning ask and enact how other “effective virtualities” can be found and actualized.25 If none of the

– 24 – synth 399 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – writings in this book explicitly address derivative markets, all the pieces are certainly firmly lodged in the present, and each responds to the urgency of the question of this power over the relation between the known and the unknown, and its related ontologies and ethics.

This emptying out of value from knowledge or expertise, and the wider question of a shift away from regulating the passage of non-knowledge to knowledge toward capitalizing on the paralysis of this flow, is equally associated with the latest form of governance which we are beginning to see emerge: that of “post-truth.”

Farming News

It would be difficult to edit a book on the subject of fiction in 2017 without mentioning the much-discussed term “post-truth”—a term upon which Oxford Dictionaries conferred the dubious accolade of “Word of the Year” in 2016.26 This decision rode on a tidal wave of political commentary that made use of the term in the wake of the US presidential elections and the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. Oxford’s decision can be considered one thread of a collective narrative that is still in the process of construction, a narrative that has both attempted to make sense of the term “post-truth” and that has, in the process, elevated it to a descriptor of an entire era of political history. Given that most other threads in this collective narrative originate from the comment sections of established newspapers (newspapers, lest we forget, whose very existence is threatened by the emergence of online “alternative” news sources), trusted sources on the

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subject of post-truth are hard to come by—which, ironically, is part of the predicament the term describes.

Behind the term post-truth there is the implicit assertion that there was once a time “pre” post-truth, a time in which politics hewed more closely to a reality taken to be objective. Taking a longer historical view allows us to see that there are precedents to the current situation that complicate the narrative of a pre-post-truth world. The contemporary anxiety induced by our inability to distinguish news from fiction echoes, in many ways, a similar anxiety that accompanied the establishment of the border between the two in the seventeenth century. In that period and previously, “newes” was delivered by means of the newes ballad, printed single-sided onto sheets of paper in their thousands and often sung for the benefit of the illiterate. Lennard Davis writes of the news-novel matrix, pointing to numerous instances where the word “newes” was applied as much to recent events as to supernatural happenings, fictional events, and folklore.27 Davis argues that it was from this undifferentiated discursive field that the novel gained traction as a literary form in eighteenth-century England, as ballad writers hid behind the concept of fiction as a means to escape charges of slander. As the century progressed, the audience for fiction spread beyond those within earshot of the balladeer, and a new literate audience gradually became accustomed to the idea of fiction on the page as nonreferential, a development that has been called “the rise of fictionality.”28 Catherine Gallagher, for example, charts a trajectory from Daniel Defoe’s insistence that Robinson Crusoe was indeed a real individual in 1720, to Henry Fielding’s contrasting claim that his characters bore no connection to specific people in 1742, and on to the end of the century, by which time readers had

– 26 – synth 401 – INTRODUCTION – been thoroughly accustomed to viewing the novel as a “protected affective enclosure” in which they could emotionally invest in characters with little or no risk of the vicissitudes of those characters’ lives becoming entangled with the readers’ own.29

Between the rise of fictionality in the mid-eighteenth century and the supposed inauguration of the post-truth era in the early twenty-first, a near untraceable series of discursive shifts, ruptures, and metamorphoses have occurred in the way we experience fiction. For one, the borders of the “protective affective enclosure” that fiction once represented have become more permeable. Fictions proliferate in all aspects of our lives, unconstrained by the novel as a specific form of art. In one sense, then, the term “post-truth” simply describes the spread of this paradigm into a media space that was presumed to be insulated against its effects. And with the opening of the protected affective enclosure of fiction, it could be argued that there has been a corresponding increase in the risk that accompanies the emotional investment it solicits—the risk of reputational damage caused by investing one’s belief in a news story subsequently revealed to be false, for example, or the risk of investing one’s emotional energy in the construction of an online profile that can no longer be seen as a sacrificial layer superimposed upon an offline existence. Such concerns enter the discussion of online profiles in Erica Scourti’s contribution to this book, in which the effects of her fictional memoir The Outage, penned by a ghostwriter fed only by the breadcrumb trail of Scourti’s online activity and password-protected data, are considered in terms of the strategies they make available for revealing and resisting logics of online capture.

– 27 – 402 synth THE PREVALENCE OF HIGH-TRAFFIC VIRAL STORIES IS THE LARGELY UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCE OF A VAST DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE UNDERWRITTEN BY LOGICS OF CONNECTIVITY, ORDERING, AND VISIBILITY synth 403 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON –

The Outage also embodies a shift in how we are encouraged to experience fiction by some of those who actively create it. If the birth of the novel several centuries ago had the effect of accustoming readers to certain protocols for discerning fiction from fact, many of the chapters of this book redirect this didactic aim. Instead of setting out boundary stones along the perimeter of a fictional space, many of the chapters instead demonstrate the diverse registers in which fictions operate, encouraging a knowing investment in fictions that cannot be defined on the basis of nonreferentiality alone. Here it is no longer a case of establishing the truth about post-truth, or of cleaving fiction from fact, but making tangible the idea that truth and fiction are dynamic concepts that are both produced and productive.

This didactic aim opens out onto what is perhaps the most significant factor in the emergence of post-truth as a conceptual category: not fake news stories themselves, but the means by which they are mediated. If the news-novel matrix served as the accidental midwife to the modern understanding of literary fiction, it did so through means that were, strictly speaking, extra-literary, and which were in part conditioned by legal frameworks that made it possible to criminalize slander. Likewise, fake news stories are mediated by an assemblage that is heavily determined by an underlying logic of circulation—a logic that advertising technology and fake news farms are incredibly adept at exploiting. The prevalence of high-traffic viral stories is the largely unforeseen consequence of a vast digital infrastructure underwritten by logics of connectivity, ordering, and visibility. Confronted with the scale of the problem, spam filters on social media are relatively ineffective.

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It is for this reason that numerous tech companies and research institutes are currently looking for technological solutions to combat fake news. The most prominent of these is Google’s development of a system for assigning a “knowledge-based trust” score to web sources, with the ability to extract statements of fact and gauge whether they fall outside the limits of an algorithmically determined consensus, bringing a new meaning to a sentence in Matthew Fuller’s chapter for this book: “State the fucking obvious. It will become the real.”30 It remains to be seen whether these innovations will spell the end of the post-truth era, but it seems unlikely that a purely technological solution can solve a problem that, while heavily determined by the digital infrastructure of the Internet, is caused by an assemblage altogether more varied in its constitution. Some elements of this assemblage are legal: in the same way that laws on slander helped give rise to the category of fiction in the seventeenth century, the apparent ease with which fake news has penetrated political debate is partly due to the fact that political claims fall outside the jurisdiction of the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK and similar authorities overseas.

Recognizing the complex way information is now mediated not only makes it possible to distinguish the mechanisms that facilitate fake news today from those of the newes-novel matrix in the seventeenth century—the differences are fairly plain to see: the infamous fake news story about Islamic mobs setting fire to a church in Dortmund was not delivered by means of a newes ballad sung on street corners, it was cooked up in the bowels of the online news network Breitbart—it also allows us to disentangle the current situation from media regimes of the more recent past. The online infrastructure described above means that there is

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something different about how we experience news today compared with as recently as fifteen years ago. The lies circulating in the run-up to the war in Iraq and the lies circulating during the 2016 US presidential election campaigns were, fundamentally, not circulated in the same way. By extension, we can be sure that the news that weapons of mass destruction could be launched from within Iraq in less than forty-five minutes would not percolate through the same infrastructure if it were spread today, even if we can only speculate that it would not have the same effect.

It is both the distinctiveness of and the precursors to post- truth that Garcia discusses in his chapter for this book, as he seeks to establish a distinction between early interventionist artists associated with tactical media in the 1990s—many of whom used hoaxes, hacks, and deception as part of their toolkit—and the alt-right appropriation of the same strategies. What emerges is a powerful lesson in media literacy, allowing us to see that the categories of fact and fiction are always conditioned by the materials used to craft, frame, and distribute the discursive objects that scroll down our screens in a blur of epistemological indeterminacy.

Semiotic Strata

On March 3, 1995, a handful of friends met in a park in Mumbai to rhythmically contract their diaphragms and let out a series of noises—noises commonly recognized as laughter. As the weeks passed by the group grew in size, and bystanders began to realize that there was something different about the peals of laughter produced by those assembled: they were voluntary, as opposed to

– 32 – synth 407 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – spontaneous, produced in the absence of any external stimuli that could be considered funny. Over twenty years later more than 10,000 such groups meet regularly all over the world. A typical Laughter Yoga class starts with a series of warm- up exercises that include making eye contact and speaking in gibberish, after which members of the class begin to laugh, chuckle, or giggle unaided by comic incitement. This laughter, although at first a simulated fiction, soon becomes contagious, spreading through the group as the class gets into full swing. The social effect of this fictitious trigger is also accompanied by a physiological effect, stimulating the pituitary gland to produce endorphins, which pass from one neuron to the next until they reach the limbic system, the part of the brain neuroscientists believe responsible for emotion.

The popular pastime of Laughter Yoga invites us to reflect on the semiotic terrain upon which fiction can be said to operate. Here we can witness a fiction involving multiple semiotic forms, from the signifying utterances of the yoga instructor’s directions to the group, to the laughter itself, and ending in the sign systems of the neurotransmitters that produce the “happy chemistry” practitioners seek as an end result. While it could be said that it is a fiction that sets this chain in motion, it does not automatically follow that each semiotic interaction can itself be described as fictional, even if it were possible to parse the interactions in a way that isolated them from one another. Indeed, Laughter Yoga is predicated on the notion that the human body cannot tell the difference between fake and genuine laughter, which implies a break in the chain somewhere between the laughter itself and the neurological and chemical signals it helps produce. This is not a break in the chain of sign systems themselves; with

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a sufficiently stocked toolbox of concepts drawn from social and biosemiotics it would be possible to follow it link-by-link from the cultural sign systems that promote positivity, through to the social interactions at the level of the group, and on to interactions at the level of brain chemistry.31 Rather, it implies that in a chain composed of a variety of semiotic forms, some will have the ability to “carry” fiction while others will not. To borrow terminology from the work of Félix Guattari—and in particular the hybrid semiotics he develops by drawing on the work of Louis Hjelmslev and Charles Sanders Peirce—we could say that at some point in the chain the semiotic forms become either “a-semiotic” or “a-signifying.” While the a-semiotic represents the formalization of untranslatable material intensities such as hormones, enzymes, and DNA, the a-signifying comprises a range of diverse methods for connecting signs to things directly, without recourse to representational paradigms, and include musical notation, mathematics, and machine language.32 A-semiotic and a-signifying semiotics have the capacity to register and transmit the effects of fiction to varying degrees, but are not themselves able to launch fictions into the world.

This is not to suggest that fiction—here understood primarily through the mode of simulation—is restricted to the written or spoken word. In this example it is arguably laughter itself that carries the full force of fiction, rather than the verbal instructions of the leader of the yoga class. And laughter, lest we forget, is both signifying and a-signifying, both meaningful and nonsensical; it is simultaneously a language, a music, and a noise.

The polysemiotic character of laughter shows that the model of a semiotic chain is itself somewhat misleading, implying a linearity

– 34 – synth 409 – INTRODUCTION – that is not able to describe accurately the nature of the processes at play. A fiction can send semiotic ripples in multiple directions at the same time, spreading its reach deep into the material intensities of the body. Instead of a chain, then, we might think of fictions as creating strands in what Tim Ingold calls a “meshwork,” where lines don’t serve simply to connect points, but constitute paths along which growth and movement are lived out.33 From this perspective, the power of fiction as a method could be seen as creating new meshworks involving diverse semiotic forms. Fiction thrives as a process that is synthetic in the sense that it gathers into its orbit a number of agents that progressively fill out its content. Indeed this is the very strength of fiction—that it is not purely analytical.

The synthetic aspects of fiction become readily apparent in Dora García’s chapter, in which she weaves together several examples of fictions constructed as protective shields against truths too difficult, traumatic, or incongruous to bear. The most tragic of these examples is the true story of Jean-Claude Romand, a French family man who spun a web of deception stretching back eighteen years, involving made-up qualifications, investment schemes, and a job at the World Health Organization. When his fantasy finally looked like it would be found out, Romand took extreme measures to ensure the survival not of himself, but of the fantasy life he had built brick by brick, killing his parents, wife, and two children before attempting to commit suicide. While extreme, the example involves a vast fictional meshwork spanning numerous semiotic strata, one that was lived so fully—and yet yoked together by an underlying ideal so static—that it took on a life of its own, a life deemed so important it was worth sacrificing numerous others to protect.

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In his contribution, Tim Etchells discusses a range of fictional constructions in his work as artistic director of the theater company Forced Entertainment as well as in his solo performances and artworks. Here fiction is again shown to operate upon numerous terrains: at the level of the performance that deliberately miscasts its audience as if they had come to see another genre of entertainment altogether, at the level of the individual utterance—which for Etchells, “in its own unique fragmentary content carries a kind of deep-level code concerning (and constructing) speaker and listener, speaker and addressee”—and finally in the deployment of a nonverbal vocabulary of gesture, eye contact, and body movements that give the relations between Etchells and his audience new accents, “shifting the proposition in a rolling dialogue, conflict, and parallel track with the text.”

The issue of how we both construct and are constructed by fictions has over recent years had an increasing influence on thinking about the future of human relations with technology—from artificial intelligences to robots—expanding and displacing older theories around the simulation of life and consciousness (simulation being, of course, a mode of fictioning).

Cybernetics, Social Media, and Trolls from the Dungeon

In his “Chinese Room” thought experiment, John Searle employs a distinction between “as” and “as if,” using it to distinguish between strong (or conscious) forms of artificial intelligence and weak (or merely consciousness-simulating) forms—the former, for Searle, being an impossibility.34 Through Searle, the question of a machine’s intentionality has been placed at the center of

– 36 – synth 411 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – many debates on the problems of cognition and consciousness: even if we can imagine an AI so sophisticated that it passes the Turing Test (in Searle’s example, an AI that can convince a Chinese- speaking human that it, too, is a Chinese-speaking human), this would not constitute a strong AI, because the program can act only “as if” conscious. A capacity for simulation, Searle argues, no matter how advanced and empirically convincing, does not constitute a mind.

More recently, Johanna Seibt has pursued the “as if” question of AI and social relations further in her study of robotics, in particular the potential uses of AI robots as “caretakers and tutors”—which is to say, robots as carers, mentors, and, indeed, “‘friends.’”35 For Seibt, friendship with robots (or other relations of care) takes place “on the basis of neurophysiological mechanisms shaping social cognition below the level of consciousness.”36 Posthuman sociality is possible, it seems, because the as-if behaviors of robots have real neuroplastic effects in humans, just as we have seen that simulated laughter can have real neurochemical ramifications, producing “real” laughter and a concomitant socializing effect.37 For Seibt, reassessing the ontological categorization of robots through attention to their social interactions, rather than through the metric of intentionality adopted by Searle’s AI research—so in terms of what they do and the interactions they become involved in, rather than what they can be said to be— shifts the terrain of the simulation problem.38 Seibt argues that extending the use of the term “person” to robots can reasonably be predicated on the fact that robots are enacting care in social situations—regardless of the fact that they are programmatically simulating descriptive predicates, such as “faithful” or

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“companion.”39 As she argues, “person” is not a description, but an “ascriptive predicate” that is “tied to a certain speech act and establishes an absolute, non-gradient commitment.”40 Put another way, to call robots “persons” is to enter them into a normatively regulated social contract—and let us remember that both the performativity of the ascriptive speech act and the normativity of the convention-regulated social field can well be described as fictions.

Moving further into the problem of human–machine sociality, Seibt addresses the question of whether we “Could not only treat something as a friend but also interact with it as if it were a friend.”41 In order to address the problem, Seibt argues that a distinction must be parsed between “make-believe” and “fictional” interaction, a distinction that turns on the presence or absence of reciprocity in a given interaction: in a “make- believe” scenario, there is no reciprocity, and the “analogical projections”—we might say, fictions—that are made are based solely on our own agency and imaginings. Seibt gives the example of a driver greeting her car, and the vehicle showing no reaction on which she might hang her make-believe of a caring intimacy between herself and the machine. On the other hand, in a “fictional” interaction, there is a reciprocity, and both agents “behave in ways that resemble the actions and reactions prescribed by the interaction template [of friendship].”42 Crucially, Seibt argues that it is not necessary that both agents be aware of (that is, conscious of or intentionally embroiled in) the normative, fictional convention; what is important is that both agents are successfully simulating the model of friendship. This simulation requires neither that both agents be intentionally invested in the convention, nor that they be

– 38 – synth 413 – INTRODUCTION – intentionally simulating the convention. While her car cannot return Seibt’s salutation, her dog can hold up its end of a reciprocal, fictional exchange of greetings—not because it is a speaking dog, or because Seibt believes it to be consciously interacting with her in a person-like friendship, but because she can “analogically project” onto the dog’s actions a resemblance to a greeting. Here, both agents are found to be acting “as if” the encounter is one of friendship, regardless of their own conscious capacities or their beliefs about the other’s conscious capacities.

While a real social interaction of friendship or care can take place through simulation—can be established and maintained through “as ifs,” so long as there is a reciprocity in play—Seibt notes that friendship is a descriptive predicate (as described above). The category of personhood, on the other hand, is not descriptive, and for Seibt the ethical question grounding the future of a philosophy of social robotics rests on the ascriptive, declarative nature of personhood. While ascriptive declarations are, of course, normative and performative (and thus do engage in certain modes of fictioning), Seibt argues that they cannot be simulated: one cannot sensibly say, “‘It is as if I hereby promise you.’”43 As such, she continues, “From a philosophical viewpoint it is a category mistake to assume that we can interact with anything—whether robot or human—as if it were a person.”44 Personhood, and therefore the sociality that is necessarily predicated on it, is always to treat something as (and not “as if”) a person. Yet, by thinking in terms of human–robotic mutual sociality, Seibt argues, the traditional opposition between “as” and “as if” (and, in particular, reciprocal fictional “as ifs”) instead becomes the two poles of a spectrum. The simulation of

– 39 – 414 synth THERE IS A STRANGE INTIMACY TO THIS ALGORITHMIC GAZE, AND IT IS ONE THAT MANY OF US ARE ILL-EQUIPPED TO RECIPROCATE synth 415 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – fictional, reciprocal models of sociality (i.e., friendship) is imbricated here with declarations of personhood, since personhood is given as the necessary condition of sociality. It is across this gradated intermixing of “as” and “as if” that Seibt lays out her five “varieties” of action simulation. The fictionally grounded social relations that Seibt describes do not so much suggest a willingness to be duped, but, rather, open us toward a sociality based on acknowledging the opacity of the other’s subjectivity.

Many of the scenarios which Seibt’s research relates to lie in a future many years off in terms of robotic development, but clearly our social field is already constituted at a fundamental level by human–technology interactions. We might think, for example, of the increasing role of virtual “personal assistant” artificial intelligences and the interactions had with them— which seem both intimate and cold—from the FBI agent character Dominique DiPierro’s desultorily mumbled question “Alexa, are we friends?” in the Netflix series Mr. Robot, to the use of these AIs as companions by people on the autistic spectrum, such as Gus Newman.45 Two things are immediately noticeable about these virtual assistant AIs: first, that they use the voice as input and output—that is, they are voice-activated and respond to inquiries through speech, simulating one of our most uniquely human attributes—and second, that the four most widely used virtual assistants (Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana) all simulate a female voice by default.46

Much as we might hope to glimpse, here, connections to an affirmative history of the roles of women in cybernetics—a pioneering role which, in the person of Ada Byron, is as old

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as mechanical computation itself—this characterization of a servile machine as feminine is clearly, rather, a sad symptom of the persistence of gender stereotyping in technology and wider culture. A recent example of the explicit cruelty with which this stereotyping is defended is briefly discussed in both David Garcia’s and Erica Scourti’s essays, namely the archetypal trolling activity around “Gamergate,” in which female game developers and critics, including Zoë Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian, were grievously harassed and threatened for daring to express an opinion.

It is interesting, in our context, that social networks as we know them today can be genealogically traced back to a fictional— indeed, fantastical—virtual space. If the earliest pioneers of Internet socializing like Richard Bartle—whose 1978 game/ platform Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), cowritten with Roy Trubshaw, is perhaps the earliest Internet forum with an avowedly social dimension—conceived of their work as explicitly political, it was because, for Bartle, MUD allowed anyone to be anyone: “In this true meritocracy,” Bartle wrote at the time, “Everyone starts off on an equal footing.”47 Certainly Bartle and Trubshaw’s regional accents (they hailed from Yorkshire and Wolverhampton respectively) marked them out for derision in a southern English university, and these accents and dialects were absent from the on-screen text and rigid syntax of MUD’s interface. But while such forums might flatten out the hierarchical relations between working- and middle-class white, Western males, in the decades since MUD at least two things have become clear about anonymized social networks: first, as evidenced by the Gamergate affair, the protection and freedom that anonymity brings will just as readily be used for abusive ends, especially toward non-male and non-

– 42 – synth 417 – INTRODUCTION – white people; and, second, that if we can indeed invent ourselves through the Internet, then we are just as much invented by it.48

Scourti addresses this latter point by drawing on Michel Foucault’s study of ancient Greek “self-writing”—practices such as diary-keeping and letter-writing—which allows her to recognize social media, too, as a “technology of the self.”49 But if these online platforms offer us new ways of constructing ourselves, they are equally reworking the ways in which it is possible to do so. As Scourti shows, the new protocols of self-presentation and the new ways of conceiving of privacy that social media have brought are substantially rewiring our notions of intimacy and sincerity. What would seem to be the least fictional parts of our lives—from falling in love to familial relations—are revealed in Scourti’s practice to have become deeply enmeshed in the genealogically and performatively fictional world of social media. But, contrary to Bartle’s designs of free elaboration of the self in online forums, Scourti also reveals a world in which forms of control indigenous to “real life” have supplemented those proper to the online world and continue to affect people of color and female and trans users disproportionately.

In her discussion of privacy, Scourti notes how profiling algorithms—used by online platform companies to generate reams of saleable data—make no distinction between public and password-protected data. There is a strange intimacy to this algorithmic gaze, and it is one that many of us are ill-equipped to reciprocate. The complexity and speed, indeed the profound otherness, of these algorithms requires a significant speculative leap—or act of fictioning—to allow us to form any kind of image of them. It is just such a leap that Matthew Fuller makes in his

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imaginary exploration of a millisecond in the life of a search engine. Fuller brings together speculation with chopped and sped- up syntaxes to form contact of a sort with nonhuman intelligence. Interestingly, by way of comparison, Simon O’Sullivan remarks in his essay on the importance of new grammars in the project of non-philosophy and, as he has written on elsewhere, in the general breaking out from what he calls the “fictions of control.”50

Mambos in the Matrix

Making contact with nonhuman intelligence through speculative means is also the main concern of Delphi Carstens and Mer Roberts’s essay. In particular, they are concerned with exploring the work of the art collective 0rphan Drift through its immanentization of the relation between material and virtual energies. This involves the creation of circuits between the two, often extending across time and into both the virtual-real of the future and the digital-virtual of the screen. In finding and creating the confluences of these two, the group’s work overtly demonstrates its indebtedness to science fiction film and literature, and especially the early cyberpunk novels of William Gibson and others. As Dani Cavallaro points out in her Cyberpunk and Cyberculture, Gibson avers an “animistic infrastructure in cyberspace,” in particular its “infiltration” by Vodou loa.51 The Vodou culture is superadded, in 0D’s work, to elements from the southern African myths of the Xhosa and San peoples—and the title of Carstens and Roberts’s essay, “The Things That Knowledge Cannot Eat,” is a translation of a Dagara proverb concerning the supernatural.

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From these animist influences, 0D developed a series of performative and formal techniques of invocation, calling in various agents, beings, and circumstances from the abstract outsides encountered in their demonology and travels in the digital-virtual. Alongside this, the future-as-outside is also called in, through practices of what has been called “hyperstition.” Indeed, to echo a phrase from one of the primary practitioners of hyperstition, in 0D’s practice, it is “as if a tendril of the future were burrowing back.”52

No summary, however brief, of twentieth-century theoretical deployments of fictions would be complete without mention of the method of hyperstition. Developed in the mid-1990s, hyperstition involves a sensitivity to and activation of those elements of the pure immanence of the future that are operative—at a lower intensity, or without full integration—in the present. Hyperstition deploys fiction as a technology to set up positive feedback cycles of actualization. For example, as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) observed in 1999, whether or not computers would all crash at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the quintessential millennial disaster that is “MBug panic” had already had real effects: fictional or not, these effects were tangible, and often costly.53 As the Ccru wrote: “It’s not a matter of waiting for Y2K […]. Hype and panic cannot simply be thought of as precursors to events: they are the event already happening.”54

If the “counter-chronic arrival” that hype-fiction effectuates was one of the cornerstones of Ccru’s toolkit, the arrival was always “from machinic virtuality,” that is, a future in which the impersonal, extraterritorial, and ahistorical were fully realized.55 Through the positive feedback loops of hyperstition

– 46 – synth 421 – INTRODUCTION – this future-singularity (in which product and process are fully immanent to each other) was made present: an opening to the future in which the subject cedes its sovereign executive functions in the name of an acceleration of the arrival of the abstract-real. Here, contact with the future can be understood as a case of what Roberts—a fellow traveler of the Ccru—has elsewhere called “everting the virtual.”56

In the years since the Ccru dispersed from the University of Warwick, the practice of hyperstition has been allied with two very different political ends. On the one hand, Nick Land has identified the singularity that hyperstition invokes with AI and a hyper-accelerated Capitalism hostile to the retarding effects of the human—a direction that is leading him to increasingly ally himself with alt-right and white supremacist positions such as those of Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin). On the other hand, a younger generation have deployed elements of hyperstition toward more leftist agendas—perhaps most famously Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s “#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics.”57

As Simon O’Sullivan (who also appears in this volume) and his collaborator David Burrows observe in their Mythopoesis/Myth- Science/Mythotechnesis, what is generally overlooked in leftist deployments of hyperstition, including Srnicek and Williams’s, is the central role of mythos.58 The original Ccru description of hyperstition characterizes the practice as “a call to the old ones,” a reference to the Cthulhu mythos of H. P. Lovecraft’s early twentieth-century stories, some of the fundamental cornerstones of the “weird” genre.59 These “old ones” are not simply being referenced in an intertextual weave, nor are they

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being taken on as conceptual personae in the way that Deleuze and Guattari speak through Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, for example.60 Rather, the “old ones” are being invoked as denizens of the abstract outside that have a capacity to move between the noumenal and phenomenal, and, indeed, to immanentize these two— in a similar fashion perhaps, to 0rphan Drift’s practice of the invocatory “everting” of digital-virtual demons. There is also a connection, here, to the abstract-outside which Justin Barton speaks of in his chapter in this book. But where Land associated the outside with an inhuman and inhumane transcendental—a “fanged noumenon”—Barton is concerned with turning away from the cold, gothic line to the outside (which he associates with “transcendental north”), and toward a direction of “Love-and- Freedom” (or “transcendental south”).61

The Outside

The most recent 0D piece discussed in Carstens and Roberts’s essay, the video work Green Skeen (2016), is precisely an eversion of the outside. It involves the ritualized creation of a “composite technoanimal” with a capacity to draw in a shimmering digital-virtual through blocs of the dawn-lit city. The video was made in collaboration with another art collective—one similarly invested in the exploration of ritual and the digital as means of raiding, redesigning, and reorienting our affective relations toward the outside—named Plastique Fantastique, founded in 2004 by Dave Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan. In the inaugural manifesto of Plastique Fantastique (a piece originally written by O’Sullivan for the catalogue of a solo show by Burrows) the group is fictioned into existence through the performative ascription

– 48 – synth 423 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – of the manifesto to them. The manifesto insists on the importance of actualizing virtualities, and especially on the use of ritual to effect a shift from utility and “work time” to “sacred time” or “play.”62 This shift in subjectivity is expressed in explicitly Deleuzian terms as a refolding of the outside, and not least of “‘new’ folds of silicon with carbon.”63 O’Sullivan’s essay for this book, “Non-philosophy and Art Practice (or, Fiction as Method),” outlines his initial forays into the work of François Laruelle, in particular the notion of non-philosophy and its pertinence to aesthetics. Again, the question being engaged with is how an outside can be dealt with directly, without the prioritization of a lower-order inside. In the Plastique Fantastique manifesto this inside is a risable humanist subject (“we howl with laughter at interiority and so-called ‘essence’”64); in O’Sullivan’s essay on Laruelle, it is the interiority of philosophy itself—which determines and speaks for (or “ventriloquizes”) a more profound and strange thought of the outside—which O’Sullivan looks to move beyond. These are two notions of interiority that Barton also aims past in his essay here, “Beyond Plato’s Cave: Escaping from the Cities of the Interiority,” in which “lucidity” is given as a mode of thought beyond the rationalizations and self-aggrandizing myths of philosophy and religion.

Perhaps the most notable element of O’Sullivan’s essay is the particular use he makes of diagrams, which he describes as “a form of speculative fictioning.” Indeed, the use of diagrams as themselves a mode of thinking—as opposed to, say, illustrative devices—has been characteristic of O’Sullivan’s oeuvre at least since his 2012 book On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite–Infinite Relation.65 Through these diagrams, O’Sullivan posits non-linguistic kinds of thought, and

– 49 – 424 synth TO DENY PHILOSOPHY’S CAPACITY TO GRASP THE REAL IS TO RECAST ALL PHILOSOPHY AS FICTION synth 425 – INTRODUCTION – art is demonstrated to be itself always already a mode of thinking (and, we might add, theoretical work is widened out to become a practice in its own right).

In O’Sullivan’s approach to Laruelle, this turn to modes of thought beyond the traditional discipline of philosophy is associated with a certain kind of fictioning. The term Laruelle uses for this is “heresy,” an operation that signals the refusal to make a decision, that is, to produce a cut between a “real” (or outside) and a philosophical procedure that would comment on or determine that real. Just as the diagram seeks to put to work a mode of nonlinguistic, nonrational, and nonrepresentational thought, so non-philosophy seeks to think from rather than about the real. To heretically refuse the validity of the philosophical decision—to deny philosophy’s capacity to grasp the real, for it has always already effectively determined it—is to recast all philosophy as fiction. Non-philosophy is understood as “swerving” between these decision-fictions, producing a “clinamen” that touches on multiple perspectives (both philosophical and otherwise) without selecting any of them as a more true take on the real. In this way, non-philosophy not only reveals any given philosophy as a fiction, it also makes a fictional leap itself, to operate from (rather than on) the undetermined real. Again, we find a distinction here between modes of control or determination that operate through fiction, against a more profound outside that is considered a fiction more real than reality. The task of non-philosophy, then, like the task of ritualized eversion, or of hyperstition, is to immanentize this more real outside, and it is in this way that these various practices and approaches—all operating on and through fictions—each stake a relation to the most political of fictions: the outside as incoming future.

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If Barton’s transcendental south is, again, a direction away from the interiorities and all-too-human self-aggrandizement of Enlightenment philosophy, religions, and hero-narratives, it is equally a movement that—in his essay here, as well as in his 2015 book Hidden Valleys—Barton associates with leaving the cities and moving toward immanent relations with the fullness of the Planet. The joyful encounters that this turn calls out to differ greatly from the necessarily horrifying immanence of Land’s Lovecraftian position, and we thus find foregrounded in Barton’s work a pure immanence or singularity—namely the Planet—and a set of comportments—of lucidity—that stand against the accelerated horrorism of Land’s more recent, Neoreactionary and hyperracist, writings.66

As David Garcia’s essay in this book makes clear, in recent years Neoreactionary politics has been making very effective use of various kinds of fictions, and one of the stakes of any discussion of fictioning today—this book included—concerns consciousness- raising and tactical development of its uses and abuses as a method in sociopolitical contexts. But fictioning also involves imagining and practicing new social relations beyond those overcoded by fictional commodities and future-modeling financial-fictions. It is noteworthy that many of the writers in this collection also work as artists, and that they do so in collaborations. As Mark Fisher—who collaborated with Barton on two audio essays, On Vanishing Land (2013) and londonunderlondon (2005)—observed at the conference that seeded this book, “The true collaborator is the outside,” and we can often see this outside seep in whenever a collaboration is at work—a fact that William Burroughs and Brion Gysin were clearly aware of when they wrote of a “third mind” emerging, or otherwise present, in their

– 52 – synth 427 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – own artistic and literary collaborations.67 Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that three of the chapters in this book reference the I Ching, an ancient technology of bibliomancy, or harnessing chance to allow the outside to speak. In the nonhierarchical, productive sociality that is collaboration—with human and nonhuman others—possibilities emerge for different relations to the future, different assemblages of kinship, and different relations to the Planet. Far from “mere” escapism, then, the stakes of thinking of fiction as method are, again, the highest.

Encountering Fictions

Shortly before the turn of the century, Charles Platt, one-time graphic designer for and editor of the seminal New Wave science fiction magazine New Worlds, proposed the notion of “quantum fiction.”68 While, as Christina Scholz has noted, Platt is rather prescriptive in terms of the experimental aesthetics he advocates—his examples draw heavily on collage aesthetics such as Burroughs’s cut-ups—there is also some mileage in the term, especially in Platt’s call for texts to acknowledge the reader as an “active participant” (just as the observer of a quantum event has a determinant, though by no means necessarily intentional, effect).69 Of course, assertions as to the reader’s role as co- creator pre-date Platt’s essay by several decades, most famously in work by Roland Barthes, Foucault, and Umberto Eco.70 But, as Scholz argues, the term has a particular resonance for a genre of writing explicitly engaged with science; and, we might suggest, for an age in which—as Suhail Malik has observed—undecidability is the dominant aesthetic paradigm.71

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In particular, Scholz draws on Platt’s term “quantum fiction” to discuss M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract books, a trilogy which Carstens and Roberts acknowledge their deep appreciation of. On one level, the term “quantum fiction” is pertinent because of the books’ recurring figure of the Kefahuchi Tract, described in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as “a kind of light-years-wide interstellar honeypot, whose epistemological and ontological mysteries have created rifts/riffs in reality that have haunted Alien species for aeons, and humans more recently.”72 But more fundamentally, for Scholz, it is the affective impact on the reader of Harrison’s work that is “quantum,” because it has the capacity to produce a superposition of modes that could be seen as mutually exclusive: the work produces a singular admixture of the weird and the hauntological, and their attendant affects of awe and horror.73

The piece that Harrison has provided for this collection, and the short story that he read at the “Fiction as Method” conference— an extract from his forthcoming novel, and the story “Yummie,” respectively—contain this superposition in a much quieter, though no less joyfully, eerily disconcerting way.74 They depict characters caught in eddies, not entirely participants in their own lives. There is nothing so spectacular in scale as the eerie maw of the Kefahuchi Tract, only the commonplace occurrences of what Michael Hamburger called “non-events.”75 Into these lives enters something small but disconcerting—“erupts” would be too strong a word. Although those “somethings” are not in themselves agents of perturbation—indeed, in “Green Children” they are as much humorous interludes as transformative events— the strangeness of these lives’ contingencies appears; and we had, we realize, felt it all along. These scenarios reveal a deep unease running through the lives of their protagonists, a

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weirdness at the heart of things that is as devastating as it is quotidian. We find a reality that, we realize, has always already been transfigured; where we were never truly at home— again, the horror and awe. Given this coextension of the everyday and the “epistemologically and ontologically mysterious,”76 we do indeed find in Harrison’s work what Scholz has recognized as the superposition of escapism and an “anti-escapist sense that possibility is a reality.”77 Here, in these pleasurably disconcerting récits, aesthetic and political forms of fiction are both in effect.

In a comparable way of working, Tim Etchells discusses one of the techniques of his “postdramatic” theater whereby audiences are addressed as if they were the audience of a different occasion, and through which “the position, implication, and even role of the public is drawn, redrawn, intensified, and manipulated in producing the dramaturgical journey of a work.” Simon O’Sullivan comments that his own experience of Etchell’s performance at the “Fiction as Method” conference (in which Etchells reworked material from “Yummie,” the story M. John Harrison had just read) felt as if the “real” itself were breaking through—not because Etchells had some sort of preternatural, direct access to the real, but because of what emerges when the event and that which structures the event are made simultaneously apparent. A collection such as the one you are reading now, which features a variety of approaches—from artists’ writings, to philosophical works, to fictions—can, we hope, offer manifold possibilities for such encounters.

In a broad sense, all acts of reading become embroiled with fictioning. There is what we might call a “post-literacy” at play,

– 56 – synth 431 – JON K SHAW AND THEO REEVES-EVISON – here: not in the sense in which Marshall McLuhan envisaged—of a society moving into a multimediasphere in which reading is no longer a necessary part of everyday life—but a post-literacy in which the very act of reading appears as an interrogable set of attitudes and affections that can be both immanently lived and critically appreciated.78 When the questions at hand concern fictioning—and when the terrain is as varied as even this small collection demonstrates—the complex adventure of reading is all the more at stake in our actions, reactions, and abreactions of the style, personae, and gambits of the writing.

With these works of and on fictioning, then, we are constantly looping into and out of, and stacking up, manifold registers of criticality, credulity, and “entertaining belief” in the text—a fact that Dora García exploits to its utmost in the conclusion to her essay. Whether through our engagement with the scenarios, characters, or the consistency of a text’s concepts, the act of reading moves us through, and superposes, various gradations of imagination, criticality, insights, outsight, and so on. And this shifting of registers, and their superposition, both sharpens our faculties and widens our horizons—both inside the dream, and on waking from it. In this vein, Félix Guattari finds an evocative image in Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love. Genet pictures a boiler, producing vapor which “steams up a window, then gradually disappears, leaving the window clear, the landscape suddenly visible and the room extended perhaps to infinity.”79 Fictions can take us in both of these directions, clouding the windows to subtract us from the smooth functioning of the world, or opening us out to those (“perhaps”) infinite vistas. Crucially, as Guattari observes, this steaming and clearing is not a single movement for Genet—it is not, for example, the

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Pauline promise of direct contact with the transcendent (“through a glass darkly; but then face to face”80)—rather, it is an ongoing and deepening “oscillation.”81 Indeed, for Guattari, all of Genet’s little “eclipses” and becomings-imperceptible—and surely we are becoming-imperceptible when we are “lost in a good book”—leave behind trails that, like dreams or fictions, are “stroboscopic after-images of other universes.”82 These are not merely fantastical universes to which we have escaped and which we now hazily recall; nor are they mere “mystical revelations.”83 Rather, they are the apparition and invention “of new existential dimensions”; new worlds, and their concomitant new modes of being.84 This is not so far, perhaps, from the revitalization of potential that, as we have seen, Scholz finds at work in M. John Harrison’s escapist–anti-escapist, “quantum” sublime.

Be vigilant, dear reader, as you move through these tactics, histories, warnings, analyses, confessions, tall tales, invocations, promises, and dreams; and as they move through you. The opportunities for steaming up the windows, and for the windows to clear—to escape and to return with a deepened sense of reality and possibility—are manifold in the chapters that follow. Fictioning appears, in these pages, as a means for encountering others in all their irreducibility, and for re-enchanting reality with the buzz of possibility.

– 58 – synth 433 Artifact of Hope

“There is in young people and in erotic personalities throughout their lives a kind of intransitive mental feeling of being-in-love, which its objects enter retrospectively…This temperament can extend far beyond the mere state of mind…the more sensation contents and imaginative contents are added to this, the more clearly these intransitive mental processes will also become related to objects and transitive: just as vague craving passes over into wishful contents by imagining its something, so the emotional world is now all the more governed by love of something, hope for something, pleasure in something”

—Ernst Bloch

Carla Harryman 434 synth

DAYDREAM X A game of hope

The concrete of hope goes to and will be at school. Then there is a change and the concrete utopia breaks up. Does it vanish? Does it make way for something new? Does the dust left from the crumbling of hope light on a thought, infiltrate a desire? Does the desire make a play? (Is it going to be for pay?)

Its expression is arrested, falls flat. Violence is on the horizon and here we are on it. The red bud too. The red buds curl up the branches, hugging them tightly, fur-like. Then one day, leaves appear on the tips where the buds have already dropped. There is an instant of looseness, contrasting textures, and soon all the tight red flowers will drop. The tree fights for space. Wild weather can make it break apart, but it adapts more easily than most. The budding image is full of potential and indeterminate. My not looking or looking beyond the energy gathering in it. When the “darkness of the just lived moment” that Bloch seeks to penetrate by our capacity to “look far into a distance” is assigned a distance limit, such as the date 2020, potential is a new and strange thing. What do I know of the redbud when I can’t imagine the date of what’s beyond it?

A latency, the latency

Dear R,

I had been looking for a quotation that would explain the missing. larks the lost congeries of what. I am conveying to you. I don’t mean that what is absent would be. explained, no. no, only that a pattern would be observable, its fragments arrayed. the pattern itself would be enough. to lace a lack of lark what isn’t there. as if it were lacey.

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DOCUMENT

A.

“Bloch, caught in his gender-blind spot, may be quick to dismiss feminist activism ... But the history of feminism might more appropriately be read as compelling evidence of the tenacious hope that the “badly existing” is not the only possible world... It is this very hope that relates feminist and gender theory to the central category of Bloch’s thought. The Principle of Hope demonstrates that expressions of hope, while they are unthinkable apart from the prevailing social reality and bound by the constraint of this reality, testify to a continued resistance to, and transgression of, these constraints.” 1

—Caitríona Ní Dhúill

R—

What I mean is—the badly existing from which expressions of hope appear is in an accelerated mode that causes an out-of-synch in which the leavings of our hope seem to be sinking below the horizon though that nature metaphor may be up to no good in my head

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DAYDREAM 1

The child is awakened to beauty through her mother, while the father’s aura is that of a magician. That’s the encapsulation of a sequence of memories elevated to abstraction, symbol, and summary. Back in memory she desired skills—to drive her father’s car, an army green Hudson, and to know the name of every bone in the human skeleton. Simultaneously beauty surrounds her and there is nothing to possess. When things go wrong, she runs away, forgetting beauty, fascination, adoration. But, truly, she wishes to run away for the sheer pleasure in it rather than a concocted cause: call this running away for its own sake, that is running away for the power in it and to know the presence of its power. Running away drives a desire to run for no reason. To run across asphalt and grass, up and down chain link fences, through road mud, on athletic fields and after a horse. There are no castles in the air and they are not necessary. While the photographs in National Geographic are of no interest whatsoever. The glossy exotic faces and bodies on its pages belong to maligned subjects some constrained employee was paid to capture in images. She does not imagine a tour of the jungle nor desire a ride on a jeep. These experiences could never compete with running away or with a waning memory of a mother’s beauty. If a photographer got near either of them she would laugh right at the camera. The castle in the air sheds its frequencies.

Once upon a time, neither the commodity nor the contemporary present forced the sentence to adapt to their requirements. It would run away at will, while blobs ever- in-motion under a paternal microscope offered magical explanations to the life secrets on her mother’s face.

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Dear R,

This mélange is directed first to you: the paper I wrote after my bringing The Principle of Hope to The Public School that incorporated work done at your school two years later, the letters to your students I wrote to introduce to them Bloch’s Hope or rather to introduce myself as an artist importing into our meetings the work of Ernst Bloch, and there are the daydreams I wrote after Bloch’s, which I had intended less as “works” than as “demonstrations” to encourage collective experiment with the daydream as genre. My first example included an early memory of my mother. Then arrived the daydreams I didn’t stop writing…well after class was over, as our national policings- policy climate got meaner and sicker. These bludgeon the wistfulness of the earlier ones. Written as they are under the sign of goon or Nobodaddy. Like this:

DAYDREAM 8 Knight of the long knives Or dirty grandpa who can’t keep his mouth shut

A fist rises from proverbial pockets And two Ooofs fall out of the media bus “like Gerald Ford”

one fawning on the rotten and glaring wishes for revenge of the other. God,

help us when they “move in on the bitch.” It is no guarantee after the election that the fist

will be faithful to the Ooof, itself inconstant as a furniture store in Palm Beach.

The Ooof of the it, she, I vocab (furnishings) knows a zero or two inside take-all-or-nothing futures,

their surrogate equipment branded dirty grandpa, which is itself identical to the Ooof itself, with one difference: 7 438 synth

the dirty grandpa is a familiar cliché and the Ooof— the grammatical rubbish of riches and violence rotting within.

Its poison nourished by tic tacs and media outlets has nowhere near been fully excreted.

Will their fists devices pocket their devices fists “when the dirty grandpa who can’t keep his mouth shut”

is no longer provided a free night on the town by those at the network’s top?

October 2016

Years before the current manifestation of proto-fascism, I named this endeavor “How to Read the Principle of Hope.” It was a project of time, people, places, and of abbreviated eventfulness that gave itself to certain practical accommodations in an open-ended fashion: it also struggled with the question of the space and time required for its experiment and the question of the value of the subjective thought-space of hope as impetus for collective reflection and activation. I had given it the “how to” title as a playful designation of shared activity: a collective reading and discussion practice that I had imagined branching out into a practice and study of pedagogy beyond the initial plan. Although it was predicated on interims, I could not anticipate the events that would lead to the discontinuities that gave it the odd form it has become: as document and memory text. Or as fractal of “the ending of occupy was traumatic.” This was a phrase from our first class Sarah Riggs recorded in handwriting for a drawing-text published with Duration Press,

which, I note, leads off with your “all work is small.” 2 So easily do the small, concrete utopias slip into hope’s privatizations, its atomizations within individual consciousness or within collective practices that become unsustainable. I am not referring to the threadbare rhetorics of hope in the dominant political sphere. 8 synth 439

And what about hope’s unacknowledged dimensions within politicized spaces of collective mourning such as a speaker’s insistence on “bearing down on hope” at a gathering for Alton Sterling? Its unacknowledged insistence signaled by hijab born by choice in spheres of hate? And the untold experiments, whether activations or thought pieces, that make it out of the laboratory one person at a time? The person may be the contradiction of hope, “holding a piece of plank before his face”—to cite another of Sarah Rigg’s text-drawings, this one of Reznikoff ’s words. Hope may be as indiscernable as one’s ability to see one’s own face absent a reflective surface, although it can be observed in what is made of it. And the place of hope may sometimes necessitate a form that cannot be elucidated in or illuminated through the public/private binary.

Yours, C

April 2017

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In which the already more contoured expression and form is prepared and concocted 3

The epistolary is a slow medium, but one that doesn’t require I stay on topic 4

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Greetings Writers,

I am writing to you from Detroit and environs. My life requires that I move around in a circuit of more and less shared spaces between city and suburb and city and town, hence “environs.” This week is particularly circuitous… If I were messaging from a cell phone, I could send photos instead of all these words. What I am writing to you about, though, originates pre-cell phone. We are going to be doing a reading-writing project together, via an encounter with a small portion of a grand, three-volume book, The Principle of Hope, composed between the 1940’s and 1960’s. For its author, Ernst Bloch, “hope” is an intellectual, or philosophical, emotion and it is associated with the utopian imagination. It is important to understand that for Bloch, utopia is not a contained environment or perfected world with eternal and hence unchangeable laws but rather it is a construct that enlists a process through which one engages with a “world full of propensity toward something.” The improvistory and performative aspects of writing that can enable transgression of categories and boundaries of thought and genre seem to me, potentially or provisionally, to be emerging from or agents of such processes. In one of my letters, I will tell you a little about what compelled me to read Ernst Bloch in the first place, but just now I want to explain as simply as possible why I have returned to reading Bloch with increased concentration. At some point in the last seven years, I found that my imagination of the future, or my feeling for the future, was disappearing: I have yet to assess how personal or depressive was my attitude—or how shared with others, but the impersonal and numbing Bush Era is an aspect of the social ecology that precipitated this experience of “disappearing.” The accelerated destructiveness of global capitalism, climate change, and the intensified cognition of the Anthropocene as out-of-control actuality may still loom as impossible abstractions, but not without vivid and palpable material effect, including the physical and biological effects that grand abstractions can motivate, negatively, in a person. Around 11 442 synth

2009, I felt that I was slowly being absorbed in a death-drive vortex that shocked me into repurposing my relationship to “the future.” At a certain moment, the horizon (of future? of imagination?) was not receding but getting way too close, and it was not utopic but rather a quasi-blinding obstruction. This reminds me of the way the poet Jackson Mac Low has described history:

Not as any kind of upward-tending line or spiral but as an irregular three- dimensional curve that is as likely to sink definitively below the horizon as to mount to the zenith.5

What I like about Mac Low’s description is the sense of curving, dimension, and horizon that are not predicated on a single track that moves up and down. What is “under” the horizon may be brutal, but it may be something else as well. I can also imagine historical form as even more irregular than what Mac Low has described with stuff in it that can’t get out, ever-increasing pressure on any potential narrative. Later, in a different context, I encountered a curious refusal to engage such thoughts: such graphing of negative or ambivalent possibility produced the wrong political response. This is something I am still thinking about, but not because I agree. In Bloch, what is missing in the world and not-yet conscious in ourselves are the negative conditions in which the hope-drive delivers the goods of fantasy to reality. Realized change is never an end in itself. Any concrete realization of hope would be an aspect of a process that renders the concrete utopia subject to emergent critical consciousness.6 I am grateful to the group at the Public School in Oakland who helped me conduct an experiment with The Principle of Hope for a month in November 2013, as we were able to construct a chorus of singular voices all approaching the text and our hopeful work together differently, or, in “the singular plural.”7 Our gathering at Pratt springs from this initial experiment with Bloch, even as we will be focusing on one or two aspects of the work instead of the entire text.

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Yours, Carla

P.S. this first letter was written out of order and continuously revised as I went along.

August 2015

Dear Writers,

I have been thinking about the intersection between philosophy and “creative” writing as one of potentially productive agitation, since around the time I returned to Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. Recently, Theory A Sunday, a book originally released in Canada in French in the 1980s, was published in English by Belladonna Press. It makes available a valuable collective-feminist discussion on the topic of writing and theory in the form of cogent, inventive essays and samples from creative works. It is an instance of the many works of poetics in the last half of the 20th century that undermine strictures that place the creative text in a category separate from the critical text. I strongly recommend it, as it not only demonstrates the usefulness of theory to radical experimental feminists in Quebec at a significant historical moment, but it also exemplifies a collective form for learning and for making art that can encourage collaborative activations in the present.8 I wish to refer to “Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work,” the essay I cited from Jackson Mac Low (1922-2004) in my first letter, which speaks directly to poets’ productive misuse of philosophy.

Although, I “majored” in philosophy in the early 1940s at the University of Chicago and I have continually read philosophical works since then, my competence as a student of philosophy has never been very great. But possibly this very incompetence has been fruitful. That is, philosophers may have influenced my work meaningfully 13 444 synth

through misreadings or through misapplications (or skewed applications) of concepts (or even dogmas) gained from more or less valid readings and from oral teaching.9

I would draw a generality from Mac Low’s comment about his personal engagement with philosophy—Eastern, Continental, and American—that poets often use philosophy for aesthetic purposes that do not conform to the discipline of philosophy, and this gap between the poet’s reading of philosophy and the discipline of philosophy is generative of the writer’s poetics. This may seem to many of you like a self- evident comment, but it is nonetheless relevant to our encounter with Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. In his little essay, Mac Low describes his first encounter with the Poetics when he was in graduate school at The University of Chicago. In that period and in decades previous, Aristotle’s Poetics were held up as the exemplary poetics for all drama, thus producing a model by which dramatic works following the classical Greek tragedies were deemed lesser works, including those of Shakespeare. The Poetics were proof of the West’s fall, beyond the classical period. However, at Chicago, Aristotle’s Poetics, widely taught in many disciplines, were interpreted as “an analytically descriptive back-ward looking work, rather than as a prescriptive forward looking one.” With this view, “it would follow that one would have to develop a somewhat different poetics for different types of tragedy e.g. Shakespeare.” Mac Low goes on to attribute his experimental poetry and performance to the understanding he derived from Richard Peter McKeon’s approach to the Poetics at the University of Chicago, as the necessity for leaving the classical mandate behind became apparent through the new interpretation of Aristotle. I have gone on long enough with my example of the poet’s potential relationship to philosophy—and there are so many versions! It’s time for me to get to the daydream, which is the entryway to the philosophical principle of hope. Through his Little Daydreams, Ernst Bloch opens his investigation to the everyday wish-maker and the reader of fairytales. These folksy pieces mixed with allegory lead us to Bloch’s 14 synth 445

powerful introduction to “anticipatory consciousness.” The daydream might offer one an insight into this future-tending consciousness, illuminating the signs of hope stirring within its commonplaces and oddities. Simultaneously, it manifests the social conditioning of the imagination and thus its limitations in any given present. I should clarify that Bloch’s daydreams are simultaneously the rendering of actual fantasies and interpretations of political desire or content that can be reinterpreted through a revolutionary political perspective. They are not political in the way that politicians these daze use the tropes of hope or dream to get us to believe in their run for office. Through the daydream, Bloch was able to reflect upon developmental phases of a human life and the way that life phases are experienced or understood apart from as well as joined to the social and discursive narratives that attach themselves to the meaning of “childhood,” “youth,” or “old age.” The imaginatively limited daydreams that Bloch portrays, some of which are derived from interviews with friends, are treated as emanations of the “Not-Yet,” a catalyst within ourselves “that would take us from a static concept of being to one of becoming.” Bloch holds in tension the positive and negative aspects or projections of fantasy of the cultural objects he investigates in order to unlock the possibility latent within their iterations. This tactic seems to me akin to what a lyric artist might do when they construct aesthetically compelling surfaces, which deploy discordant or dysphoric content.

You bathe yourself this side of the most discordant cries on the dreamy spumes of grass when fire is exhaled from the widow boat that consumes the cape of the echo’s flash —Aimé Césaire10

Although many of the daydreams Bloch documents convey wishes almost benignly inscribed within commonplaces of class culture (to be a hero following discordant cries from the grasses 15 446 synth

of leisure), he does not ignore the spume of the more malignant daydreams. “Night of the Long Knives,” which appears partway through the daydream sequence, remarks on a proto-fascist sensibility:

Not so far from here are the various dreams that are fond of getting their own back. They are particularly delicious, revenge is sweet when merely imagined, but also shabby. Most men are too cowardly to do evil, too weak to do good; the evil that they cannot, or cannot yet do, they enjoy in advance in the dream of revenge. The petit bourgeoisie in particular has traditionally been fond of the fist clenched in the pocket; this fist characteristically thumps the wrong man, since it prefers to lash out in the direction of least resistance.11

Here he is glossing or characterizing a generic form of daydream, while placing it within the abyss of brutality through which Hitler murders officials in the Nazi party in order to consolidate his power. It is as if he is observing the psychical past from which violence draws itself out in an actual event. In transposing the event into its pre-existing daydream, Bloch both enlarges and allegorizes its potential meaning beyond or other to the event. Such glossing is more and less his modus operandi throughout the daydream series, as Bloch is constructing an allegorical narrative that yet offers the reader an open space of potential identification, disidentification, critique and interpretation. I am drawn to this allegory of the shabby, proto-fascist because it so aptly describes common human behaviors and their psychological dimension in joining them to the most frightening form of modern populism. While as a philosopher Bloch is recognized for his literariness, a contemporary writer will note many dated qualities of his writing. As is common until recent times, Bloch’s pronouns privilege the masculine, while his references to women are also typically skimpy and reductive when they do arise. The conventions of outdated pronoun usage should not be conflated 16 synth 447

with Bloch’s blind spots regarding gender. In Cruising Utopia, a critical incorporation of Bloch’s Hope into the framework of queer studies, José Muñoz notes, “…it has been rumored that Bloch did not hold very progressive opinions on issues of gender and sexuality.”12 I think you will find such “opinions” are coded into the language of Bloch’s Little Daydream reflections, and in the absence of reflection on the gendering of fantasy material. Muñoz takes the rumor and opinion of biographical information to be “beside the point”; whereas, I see it (as well as other prejudice) in the content itself and thus take an alternative view, which allows antagonism its place. I follow Munoz, however, in his attitude toward “using Bloch’s theory not as orthodoxy but instead to create an opening.” Bloch’s theory of hope, paradoxically, significantly contributed to my own feminist poetics. In other respects, Bloch’s language (while noting we read in translation) can seem annoyingly old-fashioned and stilted, especially when he is drawing from fairy tales and folktales as he does in his daydream book. In the quote above, I paused over a number of phrases, and most particularly this platitude, “most men are too cowardly to do evil, too weak to do good.” I have begun in a low-key fashion to respond to Bloch’s Little Daydreams by writing daydreams. I will include several in my letters to you. Perhaps together we should create a genre of the daydream, a genre that has no restrictions on what might pass for “daydream.”

DAYDREAM 7

“You can’t move off the dime.” That was a voice from nowhere, the clear signal that it was necessary to move if one wished to know what was concealed on the ground under the shoe. Now the dime is exposed, shiny still gleaming in the summer day sun. It could be this way forever, with the meaning of a small event suspended in a light that one relishes and longs for all at once. A parent gives courage to the child who returns the gift with joyful bonds. She is on her way to a better school across the bridge in a mostly white world. In the middle of a bridge 17 448 synth

she dropped a dime, a small token glistening on a bridge at the midpoint between two worlds.

Daydreams can arise from undesirable presets. This one may be symptomatic of foreclosure or the foreclosure of property’s fixed status. The fallen dime radiates an audacity beyond the values of token economy is a thought-wave figuring the wish. The wish also washes the imagination in grueling details that are difficult to discern here, at the midpoint, and are yet to be incorporated into the account of the wish—at a remove, at a later date, or elsewhere in words that spring forth from someone else’s mind. Much of this began as a radio transmission on the topic of re- segregation.

How many technologies said to be out of date still imprint themselves on everyday life and consciousness?13

Yrs, Carla

August 2015

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Thinking means venturing beyond14

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DAYDREAM 9 If I had a hammer

Against the dark-light trope, I brain the hammer. That is, I apply my thoughts to a tool. Or I knock the sense out of it such that its utility is beyond my grasp. My hammer and I dance on the edge of the world amorously kicking up nonsense, but the brains of the hammer seek a wedge. So where the edge meets the nothing that exposes its physical existence to abstract thought, the hammer claws a bit of the edge away from the nothing. So we can crawl under the edge and stay between it and nothing.

February 18, 2017

DOCUMENT B

PAPER

How to Read The Principle of Hope Report on a collective reading practice and its contexts14

Introduction The good new is never the completely new—Ernst Bloch

The Bay Area Public School is an affiliate of the international project identified as The Public School. The front page ofits website refers to its origins in Los Angeles, its international scope, and its politics of learning:

The idea of the Public School originated in 2007 at Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles as, “a framework that supports autodidactic activities.” Soon there were Public School outposts around the world holding a variety of classes in miscellaneous spaces and gathering people to learn together outside of official educational institutions through the Public School website. 20 synth 451

The Bay Area Public School arose as a response to the dismantling of Occupy Oakland and as an extension, in new form, of the transformative experiences that Occupy activists sought as the means toward “making another world possible,” an affirmation stressed by poet Sarah Larsen in her report on Oakland Occupy presented during the ASAP Conference in Detroit two years ago. Existence of the Bay Area Public School, or BAPC, is dependent on a group of people who can fund and/or raise funds for a space in which “absolutely” free education can take place. The financial backers of the school are also active participants in this democratic, horizontal approach to teaching and learning, an approach that envisions a theoretical “anybody” participating in the school as either teacher or student. Proposals do have to be submitted and vetted by a volunteer group. A class taught by Diane di Prima on myth, a class on film theory, and several language classes were among those offered during the three weeks of the seminar I “facilitated” in November 2013. The coordinates of Public School pedagogy are complemented by a system of governance in which people take turns running meetings, setting agendas, and in which anyone can be a voting member after attending one meeting. Since the time of my Bloch seminar, which took place in a downtown Oakland building shared with a hacker group, the Bay Area Public School relocated to the Omni in the Temescal area of Oakland. The Omni is a collective neighborhood anti- gentrification project that employs “radical sharing” in its support of art, education, and social projects. An article in the East Bay Express identifies it as “one of the largest and most ambitious projects for arts, science, and activism in the Bay Area…an effort by a group of multidisciplinary collectives to pool creative and political resources into a free public space in a building that has stood in Temescal since the 1930s.”15 This risky move to a larger shared space is not without its battle scars as some of the poets who initiated the post-occupy project have left it, and it appears that the project is changing its educational focus. Co-organizer (and co-founder) David Larsen’s association of The Public School with the lineage of Black Mountain College, Naropa, and New College of San Francisco suggests an alignment 21 452 synth

with institutions of private sector economy, as if the wish for free, non-monetized education could be seen as a fulfillment of the educational freedom students pay for in the progressive private school. While I am not prepared to tease out the affinities and contradictions of the free school and the private school just now, I note that the reputations of those schools I have mentioned partly depend on the aura, authority, and even authoritarianisms of “the artist” and “the poet,” capital A and P. This to me is one of the more agitating contradictions between the horizontal format of the Bay Area Public School and what it once saw at its legacy. This contradiction presented itself to me as I committed myself to an experiment in reading Bloch, one in which classroom dynamics were entirely open to change at each meeting, determined by what people brought to the session, and in which anybody could attend whether or not they had read or prepared anything—except me— whose self-chosen mandate, predicated on the time an academic leave afforded me, was to read everything.

The Principle of Hope is the three volume, opus magnus in which Ernst Bloch makes an extensive attempt to “bring philosophy to hope, as to a place in the world which is as inhabited as the best civilized land and as unexplored as the Antarctic.”16 This hope or “expectation toward possibility that has still not become” is a “principal in the world,” while its actual utopian expression in the world is “unilluminated explicitly” and its “future tense,” historically repressed. Bloch compares this to the suppression of the future tense in the first Latin grammars, something I key into here because of the Public School’s interest in dead languages. Bloch’s utopian project a-synchronically approaches what already exists in the world in terms of the imagined and potential better world. The hope-construct is characterized by the imagination of the possibility of a better life combined with a critical attitude toward any given concrete utopia, whether it is a product of the imagination or actualized in society. Bloch views utopia as always in a process of becoming. The Marxist thinkers of the West have sometimes misapprehended an intellectual who worked in East Germany during the Cold War for some period. Bloch’s critical 22 synth 453

stance toward the Soviet state as an incomplete utopian project and his insistence on free expression precipitated his departure from the University of Leipzig in the 1970s and his taking up residency at the University of Tübegin at the time in which the Berlin wall was erected.17 There are currently new developments in Bloch studies with an institute established in the UK. In the past several years, partly because of a prior, long-term interest in Bloch and especially his capacious interpretations of artworks in which he finds signs of utopian desire and futurity in even the most negative expressions, partly because of the way that “hope” gets bandied about in contemporary political media such that no one in their right mind dare use the term without circumspection, and partly because I found my own imagination stuck on a sense that the shifting horizon of possibility was getting very close to the point of obstructing my ability to think past an impossible climate changing financial freezing present, I decided to read Bloch’s opus and conduct some reading and writing experiments that derive from it. One of these, which I call “How to Read the Principle of Hope” involves engaging with open- ended reading and (sometimes) writing practices in a laboratory- like context. These contexts are ones in which I have personal and/or artistic connections: they involve educational projects that themselves are exhibits of hope, whose orientations are toward realizing a better world in an activist and political sense. Whether these are local, grassroots projects or programs that exist in established institutions—their economies and their prospects of survival are fragile.

At the Public School, we wouldn’t really read The Principle of Hope as students of philosophy. Our taking on what Frederic Jameson describes as “the vast and disorderly exploration of the manifestation of hope on all levels of reality was not a matter of pinpointing its relevance to a discipline.18 We would not seek to derive conclusions such as those made by Slavoj Zizek in his preface to The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, even as we did use Bloch’s text as an object for reflecting upon the actual concrete utopia of The Public School. 23 454 synth

Zizek considers Bloch’s Hope through a historical filter that takes into account our familiar contemporary assessment of revolution as that which is “betrayed by market reality.’” Beyond this commonplace understanding of betrayal is the real possibility of universal emancipation that is disseminated through “revolutionary explosion”:

In the revolutionary explosion as an Event, another utopian dimension shines through, the dimension of universal emancipation, which is the excess betrayed by the market reality that takes over “the day after.” 19

Absorbed back into the logic of capitalism, hope’s excess is “transposed into virtual states, continuing to haunt the emancipatory imaginary as a dream waiting to be realized.”20 Of course the experience of encounter in a micro-community like that in our free school classroom would conflict with such glosses, given the class discussions were not themselves virtual. How might one think about the modes in which the dream is sustained, fought for, carried forward among persons? Perhaps one can’t compare totalizing encapsulations such as Zizek’s to the strong particular identifications that arise in micro utopian classroom. The gap in scale is enormous. From the perspective of table talk in the funky institutional-green room of an unkempt building, where the elevator sort of works (if you can find it near the entrance of the somtimes unlit side door) and food is left out on counters for anybody that can access it, Zizek’s gloss on Bloch’s hope might seem more like a protective shield positioned against such incommensurate, multifarious desires as those emerging from the Public School site. Multifarious is a term Public School co-founder Sara Larsen associates with “the beauty of radical praxis...being multifarious and not myopic, this is the secret to what makes it WORK: everyone offers what they can, and hopefully also they teach and learn from others.”

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Class documents and report

Classes one and two: “Daydreams” (complete) and “Anticipatory Consciousness” (selections: 45-81; 82-113, 196-229); Select a passage, short or long, you wish to read from and discuss;” make a radical rewriting of one or more passages from “Little Daydreams”; dilated reading: choose one or two passages, phrases, sentences, areas and write or comment extensively. Saturate the response to the given segments until you can’t do more or until they break down, exhaust themselves, transform, burn out; write a performative work using keywords and phrasing as characters and mediums for dialogue; write your own theory of the daydream; what do you think about Bloch’s use of Freud?’ Prepare notes for a discussion of Bloch’s writing style. Class three: Outlines for a Better World (Construction): Choose from “Social Utopias,” “Technological Utopias,” Architectural Utopias,” or “Free Time” and prepare a response in the form of notes, annotations, questions, performance, thesis, micro essay, lecture, score, visual event or something else.

Our coming together, the seven to fourteen of us under the banner of no requirements (including attendance) and the aegis of The Principle of Hope, was a setup for a polyphonic conversation whose direction no one could anticipate, but which, as such was a kind of manifestation of “anticipatory consciousness.” More palpably, this was a game of alternate scanning and immersion, then lighting on something that would put us on pause without a fixed necessity of goal, direction, or instruction. I think of the quality of this pausing over the text as tracing back to the ontology of Occupy where for some a new space of living had dilated into a new way of living that would change them forever—whatever the disruption or trauma of Occupy’s demise and the consequences of this on the future forms derived from it. This trace of Occupy in the educational project that followed it was shared among the people in the seminar whether or not they had directly participated in the occupation. 25 456 synth

Each of us who brought in work would come to class having taken up something that was particular to that person’s interests. An artist became interested in a sidebar—the fact that Bloch and Walter Benjamin had opposite interpretations of Paul Klee’s twelve by eight inch painting, a possession of Benjamin’s, in which, as we all know, a rather small “angel of history” with curiously positioned, side glancing eyes floats on an abstract textured surface of paint. In a 1929 essay, Bloch interprets the angel “with horror in front of him and the wind of the future at his back.”21. “Where is the debris of history of Benjamin’s interpretation?” Or the sign of the Blochian future? If Marxists are concerned with materiality, she asks, how might one describe the materiality of the painting? What might one make of the abstract space on which the angel is suspended in Klee’s piece? While Kathleen Frumkin researched Klee’s Angelus Novis, I concentrated on Bloch’s use of Freud, his reversing of the concept of latency as future rather than past, collective rather than individually based. Laura Woltang, a poet and environmentalist doing a life-long field study of loons at a lake near where she grew up in Vermont, would deliver her notes on Bloch’s consideration of the pastoral in a forty-five-minute lecture. Here are some of her notes and quotes:

We spent some time wandering in the passage below, which I would like to re-engage/ spark discussion about with all who are interested:

Thus there is of course no synthesis between mechanical and landscape nature; a nature without qualities is far more alien to that of forests, mountains, and luminous stars than the Christian negated one was. And precisely Shiller’s non-synthesis between the mechanical and the qualitative particularly indicates the problem, the truth, not worked up as it were, of the pastoral view on bourgeois soil. It concerns a different sector of nature than that appertaining to mathematical natural science, but it relates to it in a pre-capitalist way. The pastoral view, the view into forests, mountains, and oceans, has -- like the public festivals -- kept alive a great, wonderful element of non-mechanical 26 synth 457

response which one day can and will enter into concrete leisure; however, the access to it is, as a pre-capitalist one in a capitalist age, still largely archaic-romantic. There is in it just as much conjuration of a submerged objectivity as astonishment and meeting of one coming up undischarged, i.e. of a truth of the pastoral on which precisely leisure has to prove itself and can prove itself. But only a no longer abstract economic system will bring, even in matters of nature-experience, that elimination of the differences between city and country which among its other consequences also contains the elimination of the dualism between urban and landscape physics (919).

I am interested in going back to the German here (with some help?!) to understand Bloch’s use of the idea of the pastoral with what we think of as other to that in wilderness/sea, etc. Is the pastoral here just the view, itself? The pre-capitalist archaic-romantic lens through which the spirit of ‘release’ is kept alive, that is still extant. A view we’ve brought with us, or appears as trace, for an experience of liberation, or a projection of a utopian, restful land. I wonder what the German word he is using for “pastoral” here. I will continue typing the rest of the page, as things keep shifting…

Poet Kit Robinson performed an exercise he titled “Sparks of Truth,” whereby he paired quotes from Bloch’s “Little Daydreams” and “Anticipatory Consciousness” with citations from other writers including Jack Zipes’ introduction to The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, Daniel C. Matt’s The Essential Kabbalah, the poet Bill Berkson’s Snippets, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,”—“Urge and urge and urge,/Always the procreative urge of the world”— ending his citational essay by paring a passage from “Anticipatory Consciousness,”

All definitions of basic drives only flourish in the soil of their time and are limited to that time. For this simple reason they cannot be made absolute, even less separated from the economic being of mankind in each age. 27 458 synth

with this passage from C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegards & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in:

Melville saw the tendency of things, and over and over again the words he uses bring to mind the contemporary millions who constitute the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the vast administrative machines that now dominate modern life.

With each pairing, Robinson creates a thought-piece that sparks agitation between the concepts of continuity and change. This tactic is similar to something he does in his recent poetry, whereby, in contrast to deploying a Steinian “beginning again” temporality, Robinson begins elsewhere in each line, “A stray dot appears above your name in the winter sky / Let me know if there’s anything I can get you.” 22 This elsewhere seems significant to what I am attempting to record, including the elsewhere of Bloch’s work from the artist’s use of it. If this is a sampling of what manifested or remains from the free school seminars, what does the sample suggest? How do I read the sample? The visual artist brings to a canonical reading a question about projection and what is being read. She raises the question of what are the stakes in the projection vs. what are the actual relationships between material and image in a painting, querying interpretive mechanisms. A poet points us in the direction of leisure and through this the relationship of urban to rural life as potential, catalytic views that we bear across epochs to retain an actual experience of liberation within psychic (as opposed to virtual?) life. Here the archaic-romantic is both a drag on our apprehension, a “mere view,” and trace of liberation born within us. The past is a strand of dead time with a motile, living tip on it. The basic drives are not gods but mortals, moving to Kit Robinson’s pairing of Bloch and C.L.R. James. We may think we live in the only era there is, but the past “hewers of wood” brought us to this point, to the “vast administrative machine” that draws on our attention. I end this wondering, what is the relationship of the 28 synth 459

administrative machine to the death drive? “Something important is missing so the dream inserts itself into the gaps.”

Coda

At a later moment, at Pratt Institute of the Arts we conduct an experiment in daydreaming, called the invention of the genre of the daydream. In addition to Bloch’s “Little Daydreams,” a creative critical text that opens The Principle of Hope, I present participants with examples of my own post-Blochian daydreams. We query how we can read him now. For some of us, it is difficult to get past his unhip literary language and stilted references to gender, his patriarchal subjectivity embedded in philosophy. But I encourage people to do what I have done myself, to make use of the text and not mimic it, to follow its multifarious possibilities. And thus, because Phoebe Glick’s daydream so thoroughly brings us into our All American negative present while sustaining a connection to the critical utopia and Bloch’s language, I shall end by reading her response:

MUCH TASTES OF MORE

now that the creators of fear have been dealt with, a feeling that suits us better is over due—Ernst Bloch

I’m standing in a gas station in Missouri off the interstate, 100 miles away from Ferguson on the anniversary of Mike Brown’s shooting. Last night I dreamt about police violence waking and reawakening, laying on the floor of the sticky tent, dripping out of myself and forming a person-shaped smear of warm water. I pick up white cheddar cheez-its and stroll mindlessly through the store’s 4 snack aisles. Daydreams vary based on the sociocultural environment of the individual. A man stands in line with 2 blonde boys. One of them points to the cashier, explaining to his father that you can’t steal, or you’ll go to jail. You have to buy things, or you’ll go to jail. You have to buy things, you’ll go to jail. He repeats it like a mantra. I loop around the donut holes. A restlessness bunches on interstate like a thick cloud of flies. 29 460 synth

Boredom is the motivation for daydreamers who have no antagonism to the notion of hope. The restlessness turns into a person and is allowed to act. The boy turns his pointer finger towards me. He tries his luck, it tastes forbidden. Fear breaks out if what we are used to runs away. He calls me a “boy lady.” The cheez-its and I stand still. I’m in the same aisle I went through before. My body sprouts new hair and the cheez-its heat up and start to burn my palm. I throw them. From here what we like doing best is playing and collecting window-views, deep and brief glimpses into otherness. The bag combusts in air and the crackers come shooting out of the blast as hot embers. Fire rains down on the store. Everyone ducks for cover and starts making for the door. It’s our jobs to see the person in front of us, but the imagination is an instrument of othering. Black people are dying because white people won’t police their own imaginations. The imagination of whiteness, the wild featureless jungle of no reality. The fascist daydream and the tremor of ignorance. Something important is missing so the dream inserts itself into the gaps. I follow the boy lady out of the convenience store and onto the interstate. We want to become artists, so we dream ourselves onto a mountain. The interstate breaks into pieces and burns for days. The mountain lifts her skirt and reveals the night sky. We go in to count the moons. The boy lady bounces from moon to moon, propelled out of physicality by the buoyancy of the dream. When someone dreams, they never remain rooted to the spot. We practice playing around in our names. We stir the fermenting day.23

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Dear Writers,

I would like to tell you something about the history of my interests in and engagements with the writing of our author of The Principle of Hope. When I first encountered Bloch I was looking for something to help me think about the connection between erotic desire, libidinal drive, and writing. Julia Kristeva’s discourse of the symbolic and semiotic aspects of language and her understanding of revolutionary aesthetics as transgressions of the symbolic (the stable language system) offered one of several useful feminist perspectives on both the artistic rebellion and transgression of the censored and the primary relationship between language and desire productive of avant-garde poetry and an emerging feminist poetics. I was drawn to many of the French feminists of the time, but I will not rehearse now all that drew me in—except to note that if you have not read Monique Wittig’s essay on The Social Contract in The Straight Mind, I recommend the text. As a potent critic of Freud and the patriarchal narrative derived from Freudianism, Wittig was the only one of these writers who addressed the question of utopia and the utopian imagination, the thing that I was grappling with along with this question of language and Eros. It was clear to me that utopian desire, language, and the Eros of language were connected. It was around this time that I concocted a scenario that opposed itself to male-centered, Sartrean freedom and also discovered the works of Bloch. It was at a quite felicitous moment because the figures in my poet’s novel, The Words: after Jean Paul Sartre and Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, were a collective of the very young who lived on the other side of the tracks in a world foreign to middle class individualism and who were narrated as a group or “we” whose playful, intellectual, and physical energies were governed by a preadolescent latency that motivated their transgressive border crossings (of physical spaces and intellectual systems). As this eroticized latency didn’t conform to Freud’s sense of buried sexuality, I tuned my attention to Bloch’s contingent understanding of the term. This latency of sexuality

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assigned to children was transforming into the latency of a wished-for imagination that could instigate a better world. Their polyvocal collectivity illuminated the Not-Yet of the world that they were in. I have to stop writing! And shall in just a minute. In light of the precariousness of recent global rebellions, philosopher and Bloch scholar Peter Thompson asks “whether hope can still exist in anything other than an atomized, desocialized, and privatized form?”24 He then appeals to Bloch’s concept of educated hope, which is predicated on failure, experience “and resistance to an everyday acceptance of reality.” Bloch’s is not the hope of cheesy political rhetoric or greenhouse emission advertising. His is a hope that itself seems to seek a new ontology, a new condition of being that yet is connected to traces within history and to our earliest movements, “I move. From birth on we are searching. All we do is crave, cry out. Do not have what we want.”25 Hope emerges from and is based in such primary activations. Bloch’s hope pivots between the consciousness of the most basic needs and the emergent consciousness of “the better world” that can satisfy them. The human or person as a hopeful being is situated within and between the basic need and the emergent consciousness. Thus, hope first seeds itself in craving and the transposition of something craved into wishing. Hope is cultivated in the environment established in the wish.

August 2015

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Dear R,

Yesterday I was a guest at a poetry reading in a women’s federal prison, officially identified as “correctional facility.” I am not inclined to write much about this, but rather to note it as an experience just now affecting my frame of mind. I heard the prisoners read their works—of poetry and experiment, of struggle and accomplishment, of bravery and vulnerability. Today each poet is still in jail. On the outside, I am anticipating their published texts. With all permissions in place, they will slip into public circulation. “I have come to the view that women should not ever be locked up,” says my friend Susan, who has taught in prisons. Coincidentally, what I had wished to remind you of before completing (or abandoning) this project, was Günderode, the novel-in-letters of Bettina Brentano von Arnim to her friend Günderode, the German Romantic poet I had mentioned to you whose life was constrained by a form of poverty bestowed on bourgeois women. Without means of her own, she was sheltered in a nunnery, free to leave but without the resources to do so. In her situation, there were few crimes she was able to commit, but she did resolve on at least one so-called crime, suicide. There was another, which was to love. In Brentano von Arnim’s version of this, love has more than one object and the objects themselves are the troubled vectors of a sex-gender system that can only be understood retrospectively. Bettina was ardent and fierce in her friendship, and the letters between them took flight as a writing-Eros, uncontainable in the epistolary form, which served as an open framework for any possible written expression. Through the letters their poetry, philosophical flights, and dramatic dialogues slipped into and accompanied passages of the self-reflection, confession, description of everyday life, and anecdote of the epistolary mode. I discovered the works of Brentano von Arnim through a scant reference in one of Bloch’s Little Daydreams, in which he invokes the wishful world of adolescence:

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Talking at this time is common and easy, writing hard, and if it is produced, the fruit appears precisely to the overflowing writer himself ‘like a shriveled plum, black and wizened’. Bettina von Arnim, who says this, and who all her life could not get beyond this adolescent feeling, thus mostly chose letters to express herself.26

At another time, I shall more fully explore the gift that Bloch’s sexist criticism of the author has brought to me. But here I note that if he had not cited von Arnim’s most apt and marvelous description of that which embarrassingly, disappointingly divides a sense of desire and possibility of the object to be made from that which one has actually been accomplished, I would likely never have encountered von Arnim’s body of work and followed what I could find of it in English. While this excursion into the work of Bloch begins in many other sources, my stumbling upon that brief citation changed its trajectory, at least a little. This stumbling upon is nested within some larger frameworks, which yet remain “small” in at least one of the senses of “small” I think Sarah’s citation of your words invokes. At present, no reprise is necessary.

Love, C

May, 2017

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Acknowledgements:

Special thanks to Kathleen Frumkin, Kit Robinson, Laura Woltang, Sara Larsen, and Phoebe Glick for permission to use their contributions. Additional thanks to David Larsen, Andy Joran, and all the Public School seminar participants. Thanks also to those who participated in the meetings at Pratt Institute as well as to Brian Whitener, for his invitation to discuss The Principle of Hope in a study group at the University of Michigan. 466 synth

Notes:

1 Caitríona Ní Dhúill, “Engndering the Future: Bloch’s Utopian Philosophy in Dialogue with Gender Theory,” in Privatization of Hope, eds. Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek, 155. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013. 2 See durationpress.com/sarah-riggs/ 3 Ernst Bloch.,The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Place (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986), 123. 4 From a paragraph deleted from Artifact of Hope. 5 See “Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work,” in A Guide to Poetics Journal, eds., Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten (Mass; Wesleyan University Press, 2013), 121. 6 For example, “Its space is the objectively real possibility within process, along the path of the Object itself, in which what is radically intended by man is not delivered anywhere but not thwarted anywhere either.” The Principle of Hope, 7. 7 “From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity. There is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up.” Jean-Luc Nancy. Singular Plural, translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 5. 8 As an example, Rachel Levitsky acknowledges the impact of the work of the Sunday theory writers on Belladonna press in the afterward to the volume. I quote this at length because of the way she takes the contrasting scale of global activism and activist cultural work into account: “today, 25 years later for the authors of this book, 14 years later for belladonna, we publish this translation into a new world for politics in general and feminism in particular, one in which “ism-ization” and group “identity” gathering have merged as fully suspect, threatening to the popular globalized idea of a human “we” that must get along, save the planet, meet in a flash mob, or in response to an emergent political necessity (anti-austerity movements, tahrir, occupies massive anti-rape protests in india, egypt, brazil, taksim square: cleared out by ergodan’s massive force this week), not offend to the point of alienation. yet, the feminist space of belladonna collaborative, our tender courage with each other to confront the challenges that face particular (women, poets) writers, and now to re- engage and confront racial segregation in our own group and in poetry, begs for the model of engagement of hunkering down, taking ourselves seriously, synth 467

making something together that Theory, A Sunday allows us to imagine, re- imagine.” Louky Bersianik et.al., Theory, A Sunday. (New York, Belladonna), 153-154. 9 A Guide to Poetics Journal, p. 119 10 “The Serpent “by Aimé Césaire is here translated by Clayton Eshleman and A. James Arnold and presented on Jerome Rothenberg’s Blog in 2010. Jerome Rothenberg, Poems and Poetics, January 13, 2010. 11 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 30. 12 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009), 2. 13 New post-election radio programs or stations of note in the Detroit area include Arab American activist Fatima Salman’s “Between the Lines,” established in March 2017 and Rustbelt Abolition Radio: soundcloud.com/ rustbeltabolitionradio 14 A shorter version of the paper was given at ASAP/7 (The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) held in Greensville, South Carolina, September 24-27, 2015. 15 Julian Mark, “Radically Sharing Temescal,” East Bay Express, (Oakland, California), January 21, 2015. 16 The Principle of Hope, 6. 17 For those interested, these and other aspects of Bloch’s life including his exile in the United States are discussed by Jack Zipes in a number of articles as well as his Introduction to the collection of essays translated into English, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature. 18 Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form, (NJ, Princeton University Press, 1971), 120. 19 Slavoj Zizek, “Preface” in The Privitization of Hope, eds. Zizek and Peter Thompson (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2013). xix. 20 Ibid. 21 Ernst Bloch, “On Images of Nature Since the End of the Nineteenth Century” in Literary Essays, trans. Andy Joran (Calif., Stanford University Press, 1998), 409.. 22 Kit Robinson, “Unconfirmed Report,” Across the Margin (May 27, 2015). http://acrossthemargin.com/two-poems-by-kit-robinson/ 23 Phoebe Glick, “Much Tastes of More,” Fanzine, December 18, 2015. http://thefanzine.com/two-poems-9/ 24 Peter Thompson, “Introduction,” The Privitization of Hope, 5. 25 The Principle of Hope, 27-28. 468 synth

Dreaming The Dark, two chapters Starhawk synth 469 470 synth synth 471 472 synth synth 473 474 synth synth 475 476 synth synth 477 478 synth synth 479 480 synth synth 481 482 synth synth 483 484 synth synth 485 486 synth synth 487 488 synth synth 489 490 synth synth 491 492 synth synth 493 494 synth synth 495 496 synth synth 497 498 synth synth 499 500 synth

Everting the Virtual an excerpt transcribed from a lecture on the realms beyond the physical. A video burns a hole in history of 0rphan Drift, 2016 my head hold on hold tuning you can’t do it from this kind of time you don’t want the distance anymore you watch the screens and mirrors they turn around 0rphan Drift happened to us. It arrived in 1995, a and blind you by sucking the detail out of everything. hivemind subsuming individual identity in the radi- Lust that is alive, lust that isn’t alive anymore, and cal experiment with artistic subjectivity to produce a the rest is lust that was never alive in the first place. singular artist avatar which operated out of virtual You need them all. Melting boundaries between zones from the start. Like a lot of art work, it move things. Melting things into boundaries. As an artis- beyond its maker but this condition was amplified by tic entity, 0rphan Drift was known for immersive our intention to make it so or to work from the point and visually lush and excessive complex works which of view that we were carriers of an insistent signal, used sample the remix extensively treating infor- a science fictional project produced out of cultural mation is matter, the screen as virtual space, and necessity, underpinned by African and voodoo re- the image as a unit of contagion. It produced video ligious systems. Whatever the trajectory, OD has and AV performance, collaged text and print works always addressed change and the unknown by mak- drawing heavily on cyberpunk fiction and polyrhyth- ing transparent the virtual and multiple webs that mic elektronika. Its mode of production questioned make up contemporary reality, exposing the workings art world conventions around labor and individual of that circuit, destabilising relations between the authorship as well as objecthood, preferring site spe- concrete and imagined. Fantasy leading to encounter cific fleeting temporary installations that belied the to experimental templates of desire and seduction. labor intensive production. In any presentation of the Our approach has always been pragmatic, offering earlier work something which formalized it is miss- up worlds where the future impacts on the present ing: A social context in which its shifting layers of and seemingly disparate frames of reference coexist frightening disturbing abject schizophrenic beautiful and bleed into each other. The production of realities deconstructive poetic unfragmented frequencies were open to virtual potential where abstract and concrete able to take effect. We wrote at the time, the OD contagions and catalysts are coexistent on surface project emerges out of the perspective of cybernetic and screen, creating liminal vertiginous an exotic encounters with the material. Early OD described the self haunted by sensory crosstalk of signals from Maggie Mer Roberts synth 501

culture which contests the commonly held assump- active participation both imaginary and real, expe- tion that cyberspace exists solely inside computer riences of the molecular, machinic, vegetative, and systems in the Internet. The cyberspace being pro- animal becomings. maps of the plane of consistency duced inside of computer systems has many parallel depict the shadowy interface between human culture manifestations outside of the boxes within which it and the great outside, where encounters between is supposedly contained. A cybernetic environment is the world of humans, animals, and assorted others essentially interactive and transformational, requir- such as machines, insects, atoms, spirits occur. Our ing reconfigurations of space, time, and agency. We tools for manifesting the virtual were haptic laby- want to make perceivable the evidence that virtual- rinthine synaesthetic immersive mimetic uncanny. ity has always been involved in human responses to Electronic music assembly tactics to alter space environment. From our perspective, new technologies and time. Loops rhythm repetition smear amplify. unlock fields of perception already existent, some- Fusing low-fi and digital textures. Ostranenie or times relegated to the subconscious and sometimes making strange. Possession, snake perception, ma- impacting as physical abstracts. Vision discovers its chine vision, the deployment of avatars, and the way physicality in virtual reality and in electronic music. stuff was sourced through sampling then woven into Tactile infection tactile immersion there is no tran- new context creating unhinged liquefying worlds. scendent elsewhere. The actual is expanded access We were imagining what the virtual would look like the fourth dimension. A form of sympathetic magic or could be because it wasn’t yet actualized it didn’t like music it affects in the convergence of corporeal yet exist we started working in the first decade of and immaterial space the inherently tricky eroticism the Internet at the time when computer technology involved in the relationship between skin and screen. and cyberculture were emerging for ordinary people So, to everting the virtual. We have always everted not just the military. cyberspaces was the biggest the virtual. I’m talking about the virtual described ripple of radical change. OD’s take on it was vision- by Deleuze and Guattari. There’s is an ontology ary, prescient, science fictional, voodoo. Now most involved more with effect than intellect. It has to do art looking at the tech world is about social media with smoothing out differences between seemingly or gaming situated in a world of excessive flow and incompatible domains such as science, superstition, image disposability. The virtual has been increasing- fantasy, and fact by searching out simbioses and ly mediated through its technologies. once defined as novel alliances between them. It involves a type of artificial senses elsewhere separate from our world nonlinear thinking where all cultural differences and now it’s incoming. VR will soon change the fab- and even differences of scale such as the macro and ric of reality and the world of daily experience. The the microscopic, the instantaneous and the eternal, recent surge and capability of VR headsets and body are flattened out out onto a single plane, the plane suits AR goggles and holograms is partly enabled of consistency or immanence. Access to the plane is by the runaway global success of the smart phone, gained by building bodies without organs. These met- driving the quality of tiny hi-res screens way up and aphorical submersibles or exploration devices require they cost way down at what cost to the environne- 502 synth

ment. gyroscopes and motion sensors embedded in did experience a beautifully weird VR world recently phones are borrowed by VR displays to track head which left me of course euphoric, in an intense state hand and body position and the processing power of of epiphany and still now craving more of the beauty a modern phone’s chip is equal to an old supercom- in the danger at the edge of the sublime. I tripped up puter. in 2012 a Kickstarter campaign was launched and fell over on level ground for two days afterwards. for the Oculus Rift headset. now magically is devel- oping animal or mixed reality where virtual reality is overlaid on the real world, transparent, allowing you to see your actual surroundings.

Incoming or everting, to make visible, turn inside out. A physiological term for turning a structure or organ outward or inside out. In evolutionary terms eversion was one of the early strategies used by animals just after nature evolved the eye. The first mouths and appendages, grasping limbs were everted organs.

So is this current eversion of the virtual the latest evolutionary strategy, also driven by the eye, for coping with a new kind of environment, looking for adaptive mechanisms for no more separation. VR as opposed to the virtual aims to generate an intense and convincing sense of what is generally called pres- ence. Virtual landscapes objects and characters seem to be there. The technology forces you to be present in a way flat screens do not. “In the experience of an event,” says the advertising. We have always tried to achieve presence in image. We’re heading for world of tech haves and have nots. Perceptual cogni- tive medical enhancements implants, genetic alter- ations will hopefully at some point focus on evolving a mutable transhuman species that can survive specific conditions of extreme weather, desertifica- tion, toxification, geo engineering and resource wars. Despite my cynicism and recognizing this deeply, I synth 503

Now icised, denounced. We live surrounded by a fog of commentaries and of commentaries on commentar- All the reasons for carrying out a revolution are ies, of criticisms and of criticisms of criticisms, of present. None is missing. The sinking of politics, the revelations that trigger nothing, except revelations arrogance of the powerful, the reign of the false, the about revelations. And this fog takes away from us vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry, any hold on the world. There is nothing to criticise rampant poverty, naked exploitation, ecological apoc- in Donald Trump. The worst that one can say about alypse – we are spared nothing, not even that of him, he has already absorbed, incorporated. He em- being informed. “Climate: 2016 breaks the record of bodies it. He wears as a necklace all of the grievances heat”, tells us Le Monde on its first page, as almost that one could ever imagine holding against him. He every year nowadays. All the reasons are united, but is his own caricature, and he is proud. Even the it is not reasons that make revolutions, it is bodies. creators of South Park throw in the towel: “It is very And the bodies are all in front of screens. complicated now that satire has become reality. We really did try to laugh at what was happening but We can watch a presidential campaign sink to the we couldn’t keep up. What was happening was much depths. The transformation of the “most important funnier than anything that we could imagine. We moment of French political life” into a grand game of therefore decided to give up, to let them play their massacre doesn’t render the soap opera anymore comedy, and we would play our own.” We live in a captivating. Koh-Lanta [French version of the U.S. world that has established itself beyond all justifica- “reality” show Survivor] could not be imagined with tion. Here, criticism can do nothing, no more than such characters, nor with such vertiginous twists, satire. They remain without effect. To stick to the such cruel trials, such general humiliation. The spec- denunciation of discrimination, injustice, and wait to tacle of politics survives as the spectacle of its harvest the fruits, is to be mistaken about our epoch. decomposition. The incredulity reaches to the very The leftists who believe that we can still raise some- landscapes of filth. The National Front, this political thing by working the lever of guilty conscience are negation of politics, this negation of politics very much mistaken. They may very well go into on the terrain of the political, logically occupies the public to scratch at their wounds and make audible “centre” of the smoking ruins of this political game. their complaints believing that this will excite sym- Humanity witnesses, bewitched, at its own pathy, they will arouse nothing more than disdain sinking, like at a first class spectacle. It is so much and the desire to destroy them. “Victim” has become taken that it does not feel the water lapping at its an insult in all quarters of the world. legs. In the end, it will transform everything into a buoy. It is the destiny of the shipwrecked to trans- There is a social use of language. No one believes it form everything that they touch into a buoy. any longer. Its price has fallen to zero. From which comes the inflationary bubble in global jabber. This world is no longer to be commented on, crit- Everything that is social is deceitful; everyone knows 504 synth

it from now on. It is not only those who govern, the One can speak of life, and one can speak from life. advertisers and the public personalities who It’s not the same language, nor the same style. It’s “engage in communication”. It is every entrepreneur also not the same idea of truth. There is a “courage of the self that this society aims to make of each of truth” that consists in hiding behind the objec- of us, persistent practitioners of the art of “public tive neutrality of the “facts”. There is another that relations”. Having become an instrument of commu- considers that a word which leads to nothing, that is nication, language is no longer its own reality, but an worth nothing in itself, that doesn’t risk its position, instrument in the service of operating on the real, to that costs nothing, isn’t worth much. All the criti- obtain effects according to different conscious strate- cism of gies. Words are no longer put into circulation except financial capitalism is a pale when compared to the to travesty things. Everything sails under false smashed window of a bank, tagged “Here are your flags. Usurpation has become universal. One does not updates!” [“Tiens, tes aggios!”] It’s not because of retreat before any paradox. The state of emergency is ignorance that the “youths” appropriate the punch- the state of law. War is made in the name of peace. line of rappers in their political slogans rather than Bosses “offer jobs”. Security cameras are “appara- the maxims of philosophers. And it is from tuses of video protection”. The executioners/torturers decency that they don’t take up the “We renounce complain that they are persecuted. Traitors protest nothing!” [“On lâche rien!”], that militants cry out their sincerity and their fidelity. Mediocrities are at the moment when they renounce everything. It cited everywhere as examples. There is the real is that some speak of the world, while others speak practice on the one hand, and on the other, the from the world. discourse, which is an implacable counterpoint, with the perversion of all concepts, the universal deceit of The true deceit is not that which one does to others, oneself and of others. Everywhere, it is exclusively but that which one does to oneself. The first is, in a question of preserving or extending interests. In comparison to the other, relatively exceptional. return, the Deceit is refusing to see certain things that one sees, world is peopled by the silent. Certain among them and refusing to see them as one sees them. True explode in acts of madness closer and closer to each deceit, are all of the screens, all of the images, all other by date. Who can be surprised? Don’t say of the explanations, which one lets between oneself anymore, “The young no longer believe in anything.” and the world. It’s the way that we daily trample Say: “Shit! They no longer swallow our lies.” Don’t upon our own perceptions. So much so, that as long say anymore, “The young are nihilists.” Say: “Fuck! as it will not be a question of truth, it will not be a If this continues, they’re going to survive the collapse question of anything. There will be nothing. Nothing of our world.” except this planetary asylum of fools. The truth is not something towards which we would tend, but The value of language has fallen to zero, and yet we a non-evasive relation to what there is. It is not a write. It’s because there is another use of language. “problem” except for those who already see life as a synth 505

problem. It is not something that one professes, but a anxiety that one tries to inoculate us with, day after way of being in the world. It is therefore not some- day, with armed military patrols, breaking news and thing that is possessed, or accumulated. It is given government announcements. It is what the amateurs in a situation, from moment to moment. Whoever of those funeral processions called “demonstrations” senses the duplicity of someone, the harmful char- cannot understand, those who around a glass of red acter of a representation or of the forces that move wine taste the pleasure of their defeat, those who beneath the play of images, will strip away whatever let go of a flatulent “Or else this is going to blow!” hold they have on them. Truth is the full presence to before wisely returning to their bus. In the street oneself and to the world, the vital contact with the confrontation, the enemy has a clear face, whether in real, the acute perception of the givens of existence. civilian clothes or in armour. S/he has largely known In a world where everyone plays, where everyone is methods. S/he has a name and a function. S/he is on stage, where one communicates all the more so additionally called a “functionary”, as s/he declares when nothing is really said, the single word “truth” soberly. The friend also has gestures, movements and chills, irritates or arouses sneers. Everything that a recognisable appearance. There is in the riot an this epoch contains of sociability has assumed the incandescence of the presence to self and to others, a habit of supporting itself on the crutches of deceit to lucid fraternity that the Republic is very well inca- the point of not being able to let go of them. There is pable of arousing. The organised riot is equally able no need to “proclaim the truth”. To preach the truth to produce what this society is incapable of engen- to those who cannot even tolerate slight doses of it dering: living and irreversible ties. Those who stop is only to expose oneself to their vengeance. In what before the images of violence always miss what is at follows, we in no way pretend to speak of “the truth”, play in the fact of together taking the risk to smash, but of the perception that we have of the world, of tag, confront the police. One never leaves one’s first what we hold to, of what keeps us standing and riot untouched. It is this positivity of the riot that alive. Common sense’s neck must be twisted: truths the spectator prefers not to see, and which in the end are multiple, but deceit is one, because it is univer- frightens her/him far more than the damage, the sally leagued against the least little truth that may charges and counter-charges. In the riot, there is the surface. production and affirmation of friendships, direct configurations of the world, clear possibilities of ac- We are kept up to date on the thousands of threats tion, ready to hand means. The situation has a form that surround us – terrorists, endocrine disruptors, and one can move within it. The risks are clear, in migrants, fascism, unemployment. And thus the contrast to all of the nebulous “risks” that govern- imperturbable routine of capitalist normality is ments take pleasure in making hang over our exis- perpetuated: against the background of thousands tences. The riot is desirable as a moment of truth. It of unsuccessful plots, hundreds of postponed ca- is a momentary suspension of the confusion: in the tastrophes. It has to be recognised that the riot has gas, things are curiously clear and the real is finally the paradoxical virtue of liberating us from the livid readable. It is difficult then not to see who is who. 506 synth

Speaking of the day of insurrection on the 15th of civilisation has not infected us. We are not neverthe- July 1927 in Vienna in the course of which proletar- less desperate. No one ever acted through hope. Hope ians burned the palace of justice, Elias Canetti said: is related to waiting, to refusing to see what there “It is what I lived closest to a revolution. Hundreds is, to the fear of breaking in on the present, in short: of pages would not suffice to describe everything to the fear of living. To hope is to declare oneself in that I saw.” It would serve as the inspiration for his advance without a hold on what one nevertheless chef-d’oeuvre Crowds and Power. The riot is forma- expects. It is to hold back from the process so as not tive through what it makes us see. to be held to the results. It is to want things to be otherwise without wanting the means to make them There was in the English navy this old toast, “Con- so. It is cowardliness. One has to know to what one fusion to our enemies!” Confusion has a strategic holds, and then hold to it. Even if to make enemies. value. It is not by chance. It scatters wills and Even if to make friends. As soon as we know what prohibits their renewed reassembly. It has the taste we want, we are no longer alone, the world peoples of the ashes of defeat, whereas the battle hasn’t yet itself. taken place, and probably never will. Each of the recent attacks in France is thus followed by a train Everywhere allies, those close by and an infinite of confusion, which comes opportunely to increase gradation of possible friendships. Nothing is close by the government discourse on the matter. Those who for one who floats. Hope, this very light but constant claim responsibility for the attacks, those who call impulse towards tomorrow that is communicated to for war on those who claim responsibility for them; us day by day is the best agent for the maintenance they all have an interest in our confusion. As for of order. We are daily informed of problems about those who execute the attacks, they are often the which we can do nothing, but for which there will children – the children of surely be solutions tomorrow. The whole crushing the confusion. sentiment of powerless that this social organisation cultivates endlessly in each of us is nothing but an This world that babbles so much has nothing to say: enormous lesson in waiting. It is a flight from the it is devoid of affirmation. Perhaps it believed that it now. There never was, there is not and there nev- thereby rendered itself unassailable. But it above all er will be anything but the now. And even if what placed itself at the mercy of any consequent affirma- was formerly exercises some effect on the now, it is tion. A world whose positivity arises from so many because what was formerly was never anything itself ravages well deserves that what is affirmed with except a now. As tomorrow will be. The only way to life first takes on the form of pillaging, smashing, understand something in the past is to understand rioting. We will not fail to be taken as desperate, on that it was also a now. It is to feel the weak breath of the grounds that we act, we build, we attack without air in which the women and men of yesterday lived. hope. Hope, here is at least a sickness with which If we are so inclined to flee the now, it is because it this is the place of the decision. It is the place of the “I synth 507

accept” or of the “I refuse”. It is the place of the logi- cal gesture that immediately follows perception. It is The epoch belongs to the resolute. the present, and thus the place of presence. It is the instant, ceaselessly repeated, of taking a position. To think in distant terms is always more comfortable. “In the end”, things will change; “in the end”, beings will be transfigured. Meanwhile, let us continue as This translation is different to the transla- we are, let us remain what we are. A spirit that tion in the Semiotexte edition. thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. S/he does not seek change: s/he avoids it. The current disaster is like the monstrous accu- mulation of all the deferred moments in the past, to which is added in a permanent landslide that of each day and of each instant. But life is always played out now, and now, and now.

Each one sees that this civilisation is like a train heading towards the abyss, and that accelerates. The more it accelerates, the more are heard the drunken hysterical hoorays from the discotheque car. You ould have to lend an ear to detect the petrified silence of rational spirits who no longer understand any- thing, of those anguished who bite their nails and the false accent of serenity in the intermittent excla- mations of those who play cards, waiting. Internally, many people have chosen to jump from the train, but they remain on the footboard. They are still beset by so many things. And they feel so held because they have made the choice, but the decision is lacking. For it is the decision that traces in the present the man- ner and the possibility of acting, of taking a jump that is not into the void. This decision, it is that of the deserter, that of stepping out of the rank, that of organising oneself, that of secession, be it impercepti- bly, but in all cases, now. 508 synth Non-Philosophy and Art Prac- tice– FICTION (or, AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHODFiction – as Method)– NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART –PRACTICE – In the followingIn the followingessay I want essay to introduceI want to introduceFrançois Laruelle’sFrançois Laruelle’s time necessarilytime necessarily attempting attempting to explain to everything explain everything within its within its non-philosophy—ornon-philosophy—or what he has what more he recently has more referredrecently toreferred as non- to as non- purview. Indeed,purview. each Indeed, subsequent each subsequent philosophy philosophy must offer must up its offer up its standard philosophy—withstandard philosophy—with a particular a particular eye to its eye relevance to its relevancefor for own exhaustiveown exhaustive account of account the real, of the“trumping” real, “trumping” any previous any previous art practice,art practice,when this whenlatter this term latter is very term broadly is very construed. broadly construed.1 1 philosophyphilosophy in an endless in an game endless of one-upmanship. game of one-upmanship. John Ó Maoilearca John Ó Maoilearca Although atAlthough times this at times essay this involves essay moreinvolves questions more questionsthan answers than answers puts this putsparticular this particular pretension pretension more strongly, more strongly,suggesting suggesting that that (and, indeed,(and, proceeds indeed, throughproceeds its through own circuits its own andcircuits overlaps), and overlaps), at at philosophyphilosophy itself is itselfa form ofis “thoughta form of control”“thought thatcontrol” attempts that attempts stake is thestake mapping is the out mapping of a speculative out of a speculative and synthetic and syntheticpractice practice to define tothe define very act the of very thinking act of throughthinking its through particular its particular of thought,of whichthought, might which also might be described also be describedas the deployment as the deployment of of transcendenttranscendent operations operations (more on these (more below). on these2 below).2 fiction asfiction method. as My method. essay is My concerned essay is concernedin part with in partthose with modes those modes of thinking—artof thinking—art included—that included—that occur away occur from awaythe legislative from the legislative Non-philosophyNon-philosophy pitches itself pitches against itself this against particular this particular apparatus apparatus and more standardand more frameworksstandard frameworks of Philosophy of Philosophy and Art History. and Art ToHistory. To of capture.of Notcapture. as an anti-philosophyNot as an anti-philosophy (as, for example, (as, for inexample, in move away movefrom awaythese from frameworks these frameworks is to call is for to a call practice for a thatpractice that Jacques Lacan’sJacques characterization Lacan’s characterization of psychoanalysis), of psychoanalysis), nor as nor as involves forcinginvolves encounters forcing encounters and compatibilities and compatibilities and, ultimately, and, ultimately, simply an simply“outside” an “outside”to philosophy to philosophy (at least (atas this least is as posited this is posited for experimentationfor experimentation with a terrain with abeyond terrain typical beyond ideas typical of self ideas of self by philosophy).by philosophy). Indeed, non-philosophy Indeed, non-philosophy does not turn does away not turnfrom away from and world.and In world.terms of In using terms fiction of using as fiction a method as more a method specifically more specifically philosophicalphilosophical materials materialsexactly, butexactly, rather but reuses rather or, reuses we or, we I am especiallyI am especially interested interested in how the in performance how the performance of fictions of fictions might say,might retools say, them. retools As Ray them. Brassier, As Ray Brassier,among many among others, many others, can operatecan to operate show us to the show edges us theof our edges own of reality, our own andreality, in the and in the has pointedhas out pointed (following out (following Laruelle’s Laruelle’s own suggestion), own suggestion), the the diagram asdiagram itself asa form itself of speculativea form of speculative fictioning. fictioning. My essay ends My essay ends “non” here“non” is more here like is morethat likeused thatin the used term in “non-Euclidean the term “non-Euclidean by drawingby some drawing of these some different of these differentthreads together, threads together,and laying and laying geometry”:geometry”: it signals it an signals expansion an expansionof an already of an existing already existing out six propositionsout six propositions or applications or applications of non-philosophy of non-philosophy to—or to—or paradigm; paradigm;a recontextualization a recontextualization of existing of materialexisting (inmaterial this (in this indeed as—artindeed practice. as—art practice. case conceptual)case conceptual) and the placing and the of placing these alongside of these alongsidenewer newer “discoveries.”“discoveries.”3 3

1. Definitions1. Definitions and Diagrams and Diagrams From theseFrom few thesesentences few sentenceswe can already we can extract already two extract key two key characteristicscharacteristics (or distinct (or articulations,distinct articulations, perhaps) ofperhaps) non- of non- In his workIn on his non-philosophy work on non-philosophy (comprising (comprising over twenty-five over twenty-five philosophy:philosophy: books to datebooks and to periodized date and periodized into five intodistinct five phasesdistinct of phases of development)development) Laruelle claimsLaruelle to claimshave identified to have identified and demarcated and demarcated 1. It involves1. It aninvolves attitude an andattitude orientation and orientation toward philosophy toward philosophy that that a certain aautocratic certain autocratic (and arrogant) (and arrogant)functioning functioning of philosophy: of philosophy: also impliesalso a implieskind of practicea kind of (or,practice at any (or, rate, at anya particular rate, a particular that it tendsthat to it position tends to itselfposition as itselfthe highest as the form highest of thought form of thought “use” of philosophical“use” of philosophical materials). materials). Laruelle alsoLaruelle calls also this calls a this a (enthroned(enthroned above all aboveother alldisciplines), other disciplines), while at the while same at the same performance,performance, as well as, as crucially, well as, crucially, a science: a non-philosophyscience: non-philosophy

– 272 – – 272 – – 273 – – 273 – Simon O’Sullivan synth 509

– FICTION AS METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE – – FICTION –AS FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART PRACTICE– –

In the following essay I want to introduce François Laruelle’s time necessarily attempting to explain everything within its is the “scienceis the of“science philosophy” of philosophy” in this sense. in this (Brassier’s sense. (Brassier’s i. The sciencei. The science of philosophy of philosophy non-philosophy—or what he has more recently referred to as non- purview. Indeed, each subsequent philosophy must offer up its writings onwritings Laruelle on attendLaruelle specifically attend specifically to this more to this“formal” more “formal” standard philosophy—with a particular eye to its relevance for own exhaustive account of the real, “trumping” any previous articulationarticulation of non-philosophy.) of non-philosophy.) For LaruelleFor allLaruelle philosophy all philosophy involves ainvolves common function—ora common function—or art practice, when this latter term is very broadly construed.1 philosophy in an endless game of one-upmanship. John Ó Maoilearca invariant—thatinvariant—that he names “decision.”he names “decision.” Put simply, Put philosophy simply, philosophy sets sets Although at times this essay involves more questions than answers puts this particular pretension more strongly, suggesting that 2. Non-philosophy2. Non-philosophy might be saidmight to be name said other to name forms other of thought—forms of thought— up a binaryup thata binary then thatdictates then itsdictates subsequent its subsequent operations. operations. It is It is (and, indeed, proceeds through its own circuits and overlaps), at philosophy itself is a form of “thought control” that attempts other practices,other practices, we might say—besideswe might say—besides the philosophical the philosophical always “about”always a “about”world that, a world in fact,that, itin hasfact, itself it has determined, itself determined, stake is the mapping out of a speculative and synthetic practice to define the very act of thinking through its particular (again, when(again, these when are thesenot simply are not positioned simply positioned and interpreted and interpreted posited asposited its object. as its In object. Laruelle’s In Laruelle’s terms (in termsBrassier’s (in Brassier’s of thought, which might also be described as the deployment of transcendent operations (more on these below).2 by philosophy),by philosophy), while in thewhile same in gesturethe same naming gesture a generalnaming a general somewhat technicalsomewhat technical reading) thisreading) is “an this act is of “an scission” act of scission” fiction as method. My essay is concerned in part with those modes democratizationdemocratization of all thinking of all (thinkingÓ Maoilearca (Ó Maoilearca would be thewould key be the key producingproducing a dyad between a dyad a betweenconditioned a conditioned datum and datuma conditioning and a conditioning of thinking—art included—that occur away from the legislative Non-philosophy pitches itself against this particular apparatus exponent ofexponent this second of this articulation, second articulation, hence the hencetitle theof histitle of his faktum.6 Thisfaktum. decisional6 This decisional structure structure involves ainvolves further amove: further move: and more standard frameworks of Philosophy and Art History. To of capture. Not as an anti-philosophy (as, for example, in recent bookrecent “on” bookLaruelle, “on” Laruelle, All Thoughts All areThoughts Equal ).are Equal). philosophy’sphilosophy’s “auto-positioning” “auto-positioning” as ultimate as arbiterultimate over arbiter the over the move away from these frameworks is to call for a practice that Jacques Lacan’s characterization of psychoanalysis), nor as two terms.two Philosophy terms. Philosophy offers a certainoffers aperspective certain perspective and higher and higher involves forcing encounters and compatibilities and, ultimately, simply an “outside” to philosophy (at least as this is posited I want to Itake want each to takeof these each twoof thesearticulations two articulations in turn, butin turn,before but before synthesis—asynthesis—a “unity of “unityexperience”—over of experience”—over both conditioning both conditioning for experimentation with a terrain beyond typical ideas of self by philosophy). Indeed, non-philosophy does not turn away from that a furtherthat abrief further word brief about word non-philosophy about non-philosophy and the real. and the4 real.4 factors andfactors what isand conditioned. what is conditioned.7 Philosophy’s7 Philosophy’s cut, we might cut, we might and world. In terms of using fiction as a method more specifically philosophical materials exactly, but rather reuses or, we For Laruelle,For Laruelle, as I have asalready I have intimated, already intimated, philosophy philosophy involves ainvolves a say, producessay, aproduces particular a particular subject and subject world, and and world, then offersand then a offers a I am especially interested in how the performance of fictions might say, retools them. As Ray Brassier, among many others, particularparticular take on—or take an account,on—or an explanation,account, explanation, or interpretation or interpretation perspectiveperspective (now seemingly (now seemingly the only permissiblethe only permissible or coherent or one)coherent one) can operate to show us the edges of our own reality, and in the has pointed out (following Laruelle’s own suggestion), the of—the real.of—the Non-philosophy, real. Non-philosophy, on the other on thehand, other is ahand, form isof a form of from whichfrom to thinkwhich themto think both. them both. diagram as itself a form of speculative fictioning. My essay ends “non” here is more like that used in the term “non-Euclidean thought thatthought proceeds that fromproceeds the real,from theor, real,at a pinch,or, at alongsidea pinch, alongside by drawing some of these different threads together, and laying geometry”: it signals an expansion of an already existing it: ratherit: than rather positing than apositing real, it a assumesreal, it its assumes always its already always already We might alsoWe might call alsothis callcomplex this set complex of operations set of operations philosophy’s philosophy’s out six propositions or applications of non-philosophy to—or paradigm; a recontextualization of existing material (in this “givenness”“givenness” as a presupposition as a presupposition or axiom. orFor axiom. non-philosophy For non-philosophy this this ideologicalideological character: character: the real causes—or,the real causes—or, at least, atin least,the in the indeed as—art practice. case conceptual) and the placing of these alongside newer real is itselfreal isradically itself radically foreclosed foreclosed to thought, to atthought, least asat thisleast as this last instance,last instance, determines—philosophy, determines—philosophy, but the latter but the is latterthen is then “discoveries.”3 is typicallyis typically understood understood (it cannot (it be cannot“explained” be “explained” or interpreted or interpreted abstractedabstracted out and seen out asand itself seen ascause itself of thecause real of (hence,the real its (hence, its in this sense),in this and sense), as such and we as might such saywe mightthat thesay thirdthat thekey third key productionproduction of the world). of the The world). connections The connections to two of toLaruelle’s two of Laruelle’s 1. Definitions and Diagrams From these few sentences we can already extract two key articulationarticulation of non-philosophy of non-philosophy is that it is implies that it a impliesform of a form of key precursors,key precursors, Karl Marx Karland especiallyMarx and especially Louis Althusser, Louis Althusser, are are characteristics (or distinct articulations, perhaps) of non- gnosis or gnosiseven “spiritual” or even “spiritual” knowledge. knowledge.5 In fact,5 alongsideIn fact, alongside its its explicit,explicit, but we might but alsowe might note alsothat notethis thatperspective this perspective bears some bears some In his work on non-philosophy (comprising over twenty-five philosophy: formidableformidable complexity complexity there is athere sense is in a whichsense non-philosophyin which non-philosophy resemblanceresemblance to Lacan’s to theorization Lacan’s theorization of the retro-formation of the retro-formation of the of the books to date and periodized into five distinct phases of can be immediatelycan be immediately grasped in grasped an almost in anbanal almost or atbanal least or naïve—at least naïve— subject (whichsubject must (which come mustto reverse come to the reverse “illusion” the “illusion” of the ego of and the ego and development) Laruelle claims to have identified and demarcated 1. It involves an attitude and orientation toward philosophy that sense. I willsense. be Ireturning will be returning to this and to addingthis and some adding qualifications some qualifications assume itsassume own causality), its own causality), as well as as Gilles well asDeleuze Gilles and Deleuze Félix and Félix a certain autocratic (and arrogant) functioning of philosophy: also implies a kind of practice (or, at any rate, a particular below. below. Guattari’sGuattari’s own materialist own materialist account of account the subject of the as subject residuum as residuum that it tends to position itself as the highest form of thought “use” of philosophical materials). Laruelle also calls this a in Anti-Oedipusin Anti-Oedipus (a subject (a that subject misrecognizes that misrecognizes itself as itselfprior toas prior to (enthroned above all other disciplines), while at the same performance, as well as, crucially, a science: non-philosophy the process—thethe process—the syntheses syntheses of the unconscious—that of the unconscious—that produced it).produced8 it).8

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– FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART –PRACTICE –

Indeed, inIndeed, a relatively in a relatively recent summary recent of summary non-philosophy of non-philosophy Laruelle Laruelle outside perspective).outside perspective). Non-philosophy, Non-philosophy, for Laruelle, for Laruelle,must attempt must attempt himself suggestshimself thatsuggests non-philosophers that non-philosophers are very close are very to both close the to both the its task fromits taskwithin from philosophy’s within philosophy’s own interpretive own interpretive circles (we circles (we political politicalmilitant andmilitant the analyst. and the9 analyst.9 might note,might again, note, the again, connections the connections with deconstruction with deconstruction as a as a process alwaysprocess already always occurring already occurring“within” Western“within” metaphysics). Western metaphysics). The decisionalThe decisional mechanism mechanismis not restricted is not restricted to philosophy to philosophy as a as a disciplinediscipline (or discourse), (or discourse), but impacts but on impacts our thinking on our morethinking more To backtrackTo backtrackfor a moment: for aas moment: mentioned as mentionedabove, for above, Laruelle, for Laruelle, generally generally(we are all (we philosophical are all philosophical subjects insubjects this sense). in this We sense). We non-philosophynon-philosophy is not another is not take another on the take real on (or, the realindeed, (or, indeed, might notemight here notethe resonances here the resonances with Jacques with Derrida’s Jacques Derrida’s“diagnosis” “diagnosis” a sufficienta sufficient explanation explanation of it), but of proceeds it), but fromproceeds the real. from the real. of a logocentrismof a logocentrism that is determinate that is determinate in philosophy in philosophy (at least (atin least in For LaruelleFor itLaruelle names a it more names radical a more immanence—arising radical immanence—arising from a from a the Westernthe tradition), Western tradition), but also in but other also forms in other of apparently forms of apparently non non suspensionsuspension of decision—that of decision—that is specifically is specifically other to the other world to the world philosophicalphilosophical thought (the thought lack (theof hyphen lack ofhere hyphen denotes here the denotes non the non produced byproduced philosophy by philosophy (whatever (whateverthe claims the of claimsthe latter of the about latter about LaruellianLaruellian sense of these sense terms). of these Commentators terms). Commentators have variously have variously its own immanenceits own immanencemight be). might11 Again, be). non-philosophy11 Again, non-philosophy is a thinking is a thinking suggested suggestedthat non-philosophy that non-philosophy (this time (this in Laruelle’s time in Laruelle’s sense) sense) from a realfrom that a realis itself that isindifferent itself indifferent to that thinking to that (therethinking (there is a less convincingis a less convincing deconstruction deconstruction (as in Andrew (as inMcGettigan’s Andrew McGettigan’s is no reverseis no causality reverse causality(or “reciprocal (or “reciprocal determination”) determination”) in this in this critical overviewcritical ofoverview Laruelle) of Laruelle)as well as, as indeed, well as, a indeed,more radical a more radical sense). Onsense). the one On hand, the onethen, hand, this then, real thisis very real simple: is very it simple: is it is operation operationthat itself that repositions itself repositions deconstruction deconstruction as simply as simply just “this,”just immediately “this,” immediately graspable, graspable, almost pre-cognitive almost pre-cognitive (and, (and, another formanother of philosophy form of philosophy (as in Brassier’s (as in Brassier’s own overview). own overview).10 10 for Brassier,for Brassier,uninteresting—and uninteresting—and empty—in thisempty—in respect). this respect).And yet, And yet, Whatever theWhatever understanding, the understanding, it seems clear it seems that clear Derrida that is Derrida the is the as Robin Mackayas Robin points Mackay out points in his out own in introduction his own introduction to Laruelle, to Laruelle, “near enemy”“near of enemy”Laruelle, of Laruelle,but also (at but least also (atto this least reader) to this that reader) that it is in factit is not in self-evident fact not self-evident at all (at at least all (atto the least typical to the typical non-philosophy,non-philosophy, although clearlyalthough indebted clearly toindebted Derrida, to involvesDerrida, involves “subject” “subject”that is in that and ofis thein and “world”). of the 12“world”). Indeed, 12how Indeed, could howit could it something somethingmore affirmative more affirmative (at least (atpotentially) least potentially) than the than the be self-evidentbe self-evident to a subject to awho subject has been who produced has been byproduced the very by the very melancholymelancholy science of science deconstruction. of deconstruction. philosophicalphilosophical operation operation(the decisional (the decisional structure) structure) in question? in question?

Non-philosophyNon-philosophy is, then, is,an attempt then, an to attempt practice to philosophypractice philosophy (at (at In its ownIn operations, its own operations, non-philosophy non-philosophy (at least (atin this least in this least of aleast kind) of without a kind) the without aforementioned the aforementioned auto-positioning. auto-positioning. particularparticular articulation) articulation) does use concepts, does use concepts,but only after but only after Crucially,Crucially, it does not it involve does not a involvestraightforward a straightforward disavowal disavowalof the of the these havethese been haveuntethered been untethered from their from properly their philosophicalproperly philosophical philosophicalphilosophical gesture (again, gesture it (again, is not nonit is philosophy not non philosophy in this in this function, function,their auto-positioning. their auto-positioning. Laruelle alsoLaruelle calls also this calls auto- this auto- more straightforwardmore straightforward sense); nor sense); does it nor involve does it recourse involve torecourse an to an positioningpositioning the “Principle the “Principle of Sufficient of Sufficient Philosophy”: Philosophy”: simply put, simply put, “outside” “outside”that might that then might be simply then befolded simply back folded in by back philosophy in by philosophy philosophy’sphilosophy’s claim to truth—or claim to astruth—or Anthony as Paul Anthony Smith Paul puts Smith it, puts it, (as I suggested(as I suggestedabove, all above, philosophy all philosophy claims to claimssupersede to supersedeprevious previous “philosophy’s“philosophy’s faith in itself faith inbefore itself the before Real.” the13 This Real.” “explains”13 This “explains” interpretations,interpretations, to really toget really to the get real to “from” the real a more “from” radical a more radical some of thesome complexity of the complexity of non-philosophy, of non-philosophy, in that it in can that read it can read

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– FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – Fig. 1. TheFig. ventriloquism 1. The ventriloquism of non-philosophy of non-philosophy like philosophylike philosophy (it cannot (it but cannot be very but close be very to the close philosophy to the philosophy it writes iton) writes and also on) must and alsouse neologisms must use neologisms and other andunfamiliar other unfamiliar terms—not terms—notonly a new only vocabulary a new vocabulary but, at times, but, atalso times, a new also syntax— a new syntax— in order toin articulate order to articulate its non-philosophical its non-philosophical operations operations away from away from already existingalready philosophicalexisting philosophical language. language.

We could perhapsWe could also perhaps diagram also these diagram relations these relationsbetween philosophy between philosophy and non-philosophy,and non-philosophy, in relation in torelation the real, to theas a real, set of as circuits, a set of circuits, as in in Fig.as in 1: in Fig. 1:

The arrowsThe in arrowsthe diagram in the suggest diagram the suggest direction the directionof determination of determination (as in the(as real in determining the real determining both non-philosophy both non-philosophy and philosophy) and philosophy) but also demarkbut also a direction demark a directionof operation of operation(as in philosophy (as in philosophy interpretinginterpreting the real, theand real,non-philosophy and non-philosophy “ventriloquizing,” “ventriloquizing,” or or speaking throughspeaking philosophy). through philosophy). To jump ahead To jump slightly, ahead slightly,we might also we might also call this callventriloquism this ventriloquism of philosophy of philosophy by non-philosophy by non-philosophy a kind of a kind of fictioningfictioning, insofar ,as insofar the “explanatory” as the “explanatory” power of philosophy power of philosophy (its (its various claimsvarious about claims the aboutreal) theis transformed real) is transformed into something into somethingelse: else: models withmodels no necessary with no necessarypretensions pretensions to truth (I to have truth attempted (I have attempted to suggestto this suggest in the this above in thediagram above with diagram the broken with the line broken inner line inner circuit). circuit).Certainly, Certainly, in his more in recent his more writings recent (aswritings we shall (as see) we shall see) Laruelle suggestsLaruelle thatsuggests non-philosophy that non-philosophy is concerned is concernedwith just withsuch just such a mutationa ofmutation philosophy, of philosophy, which he calls which “philo-fictions.” he calls “philo-fictions.”

We might alsoWe might note alsoagain note the againconnections the connections to Marx and to Althusser Marx and Althusser here: philosophyhere: philosophy as a particular as a particular ideology (withideology its (withtruth itsclaims) truth claims) 1. The real;1. The real; and, thus,and, non-philosophy thus, non-philosophy as a form ofas ideologya form of critique.ideology critique.The The 2. Philosophy;2. Philosophy; apparent “real”apparent world “real” of philosophy—from world of philosophy—from the perspective the perspective of of 3. Non-Philosophy;3. Non-Philosophy; non-philosophy—isnon-philosophy—is itself revealed itself asrevealed a fiction, as a determinedfiction, determined (in (in 4. Fictioning4. Fictioning the last instance)the last instance)by a more radicalby a more immanence radical immanencethat has not that been has not been determineddetermined by philosophy by philosophy at all (indeed, at all this(indeed, real thisis, precisely, real is, precisely,

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– FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – Fig. 2 TheFig. flattening 2 The flattening of non-philosophy of non-philosophy (or “change(or “change in vision”) in vision”) undetermined).undetermined). Crucially, Crucially, however (and however following (and followingMackay once Mackay once more), onemore), cannot one draw cannot a simple draw linea simple of demarcation line of demarcation here between here between ideology/philosophyideology/philosophy and a science and athat science “demystifies” that “demystifies” them. This them. This would act wouldsimply act to simplyproduce to a producefurther abinary further that binary philosophy that philosophy could thencould reach then across reach and across ultimately and ultimately subsume; itsubsume; would beit towould be to produce yetproduce another yet philosophical another philosophical circuit, acircuit, further astructure further structure of decision.of decision.Hence the Henceimportance the importance of what Laruelle of what willLaruelle call will call “superposition,”“superposition,” an act of anplacing act of the placing two alongside the two alongsideone another, one another, as it wereas (I it will were return (I will very return briefly very to briefly this in to section this in 2). section 2).

To see allTo this see fromall thisa slightly from a differentslightly differentperspective—more perspective—more topologically,topologically, or even “non-topologically”—we or even “non-topologically”—we might suggest might that suggest that non-philosophynon-philosophy involves ainvolves kind of a“flattening” kind of “flattening” of philosophy’s of philosophy’s auto-positioningauto-positioning and a concomitant and a concomitant undoing of undoing its Principle of its Principleof of SufficientSufficient Philosophy Philosophy (again, its (again, pretension its pretension of being ableof being to able to account foraccount all of for the all real). of the We real).might thenWe might draw thena second draw diagram,a second diagram, as in Fig.as 2: in Fig. 2:

This diagramThis foregrounds diagram foregrounds the particular the particular “change in “change vision” in (to vision” (to use a Laruellianuse a Laruellian phrase) that phrase) non-philosophy that non-philosophy entails, aentails, kind of a kind of “dropping “droppingdown” of philosophicaldown” of philosophical perspective perspective and, with and,that, with what that, what we might callwe might a rejigging call a rejiggingof foreground of foreground and background and background relations. relations. Here, it isHere, as if it the is asconceptual if the conceptual material hasmaterial been laidhas beenout onlaid out on a tabletop.a tabletop.This is not This exactly is not a exactlymove from a movethree from dimensions three dimensions to to two, but rathertwo, but a flatnessrather a inflatness which therein which are thereno supplementary are no supplementary 14 14 dimensionsdimensions (to use Deleuzian (to use Deleuzianterminology). terminology). The “view Thefrom “view above” from above” 1. Philosophy1. Philosophy (view from (view above); from above); is replacedis byreplaced something by somethingmore immanent more and,immanent as such, and, partialas such, (in partial (in 2. Non-philosophy2. Non-philosophy (as dropping (as droppingdown); down); fact, Laruellefact, suggestsLaruelle thatsuggests non-philosophy that non-philosophy is less an is overview less an overview 3. Philo-fictions3. Philo-fictions (and other (and modes other of modesthought); of thought); than like thana line, like a aclinamen, line, a clinamen,that touches that on touches different on different“models” “models” 4. Non-philosophy4. Non-philosophy (as clinamen) (as clinamen) of thought).of thought).It is this It radical is this change radical in changeperspective in perspective that that enables a enablesdifferent a differenttreatment treatmentof philosophy. of philosophy.

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– FICTION AS METHOD – – FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART –PRACTICE – Fig. 2 The flattening of non-philosophy (or “change in vision”) undetermined). Crucially, however (and following Mackay once To jump aheadTo jump again ahead slightly again weslightly might notewe might an immediate note an immediateand and untethereduntethered from its Principlefrom its Principleof Sufficient of Sufficient Philosophy, Philosophy, becomes becomes more), one cannot draw a simple line of demarcation here between obvious connectionobvious connection with art practicewith art here,practice insofar here, as insofar non- as non- just one modejust ofone thinking mode of alongsidethinking alongsidea whole host a whole of others: host of others: ideology/philosophy and a science that “demystifies” them. This philosophyphilosophy becomes a becomespractice a thatpractice involves that ainvolves manipulation a manipulation artistic, artistic,but also thebut scientific,also the scientific, even, perhaps, even, theperhaps, animal the animal would act simply to produce a further binary that philosophy of materialof (andmaterial even (andthe constructioneven the construction of a different of a differentkind of kind of (again, this(again, is the this democratization is the democratization of thought, of whichthought, is mostwhich is most could then reach across and ultimately subsume; it would be to conceptualconceptual “device” that“device” allows that for allows this “shift”for this in “shift” view). inWe view). We thoroughlythoroughly tracked through tracked in through Ó Maoilearca’s in Ó Maoilearca’s work “on” workLaruelle). “on” Laruelle).17 17 produce yet another philosophical circuit, a further structure might howevermight also however note alsofour notebrief four reservations brief reservations before moving before on moving on Non-philosophyNon-philosophy gives us an gives interesting us an interesting way in which way to in (re)position which to (re)position of decision. Hence the importance of what Laruelle will call to the second—andto the second—and somewhat looser—articulationsomewhat looser—articulation of non-philosophy. of non-philosophy. philosophyphilosophy and its materials and its materials(as laid out(as above)—alaid out radicallyabove)—a radically “superposition,” an act of placing the two alongside one another, The first Thereservation first reservation concerns whetherconcerns Laruelle’s whether Laruelle’s diagnosis diagnosis different differentpoint of view,point asof itview, were—but as it itwere—but also offers it also up offersa up a as it were (I will return very briefly to this in section 2). of all philosophyof all philosophy is correct. is Arecorrect. there Areforms there of philosophyforms of philosophy corollary corollaryperspective perspective on how different on how differentforms of thoughtforms of invariably thought invariably that do notthat proceed do not by proceed decision by indecision the sense in theLaruelle sense usesLaruelle the uses the coexist and,coexist indeed, and, might indeed, interact. might interact.This is to This posit is ato radical posit a radical To see all this from a slightly different perspective—more term? This,term? ultimately, This, ultimately, is where Brassieris where marksBrassier the markslimits the of limits of horizontalityhorizontality (or, in F é(or,lix Guattari’s in Félix Guattari’s terms, “transversality”) terms, “transversality”) topologically, or even “non-topologically”—we might suggest that Laruelle’sLaruelle’s method.15 method.An attendant15 An attendant(and stronger) (and stronger)critique iscritique that is that that operatesthat betweenoperates heterogeneous between heterogeneous practices. practices. In this change In this change non-philosophy involves a kind of “flattening” of philosophy’s the operationthe operationof reducing of allreducing philosophy all philosophy to decision to (albeitdecision (albeit of vision ofphilosophy vision philosophy is brought is down brought to earth, down tooperating earth, operatingmore more auto-positioning and a concomitant undoing of its Principle of articulatedarticulated in numerous in ways)numerous denies ways) the denies specificity the specificity of different of different as fictionas than fiction as a thanclaim as to a truthclaim (itto truthis positioned (it is positioned as a model as a model Sufficient Philosophy (again, its pretension of being able to philosophiesphilosophies and indeed and can indeed produce can a producekind of asolipsism; kind of solipsism; this this among others).among Inothers). the same In gesture,the same othergesture, forms other of thoughtforms of (for thought (for account for all of the real). We might then draw a second diagram, is McGettigan’sis McGettigan’s take.16 A thirdtake. 16reservation A third reservation is whether is non- whether non- example art),example in theirart), turn,in their are turn,given aresome given philosophical some philosophical (or at (or at as in Fig. 2: philosophyphilosophy involves anythinginvolves otheranything than other a kind than of a“turf kind war”of “turf war” any rate non-philosophical)any rate non-philosophical) worth, insofar worth, as insofar they are as nothey longer are no longer among philosophersamong philosophers (after all, (after generally all, generallyspeaking, speaking,non-philosophy non-philosophy unfavorablyunfavorably compared withcompared a philosophy with a philosophy enthroned enthronedabove them. above them. This diagram foregrounds the particular “change in vision” (to is read byis philosophers). read by philosophers). A fourth andA fourth final andreservation final reservation concerns concerns use a Laruellian phrase) that non-philosophy entails, a kind of what, precisely,what, precisely, a concept adoes concept when doesuntethered when untethered from the from the This secondThis articulation second articulation of non-philosophy of non-philosophy (as naming (as different naming different “dropping down” of philosophical perspective and, with that, what Principle Principleof Sufficient of Sufficient Philosophy. Philosophy. This, for This,me, is for really me, isthe really the kinds of thinking)kinds of thinking)is less explored is less byexplored Laruelle by (althoughLaruelle (althoughI will I will we might call a rejigging of foreground and background relations. key questionkey (andquestion the most(and productive),the most productive), and it is andsomething it is somethingI will I will look belowlook at twobelow recent at two texts recent by himtexts on bythe him kind on ofthe thinking kind of thatthinking that Here, it is as if the conceptual material has been laid out on return to returnexplicitly to explicitly in section in 2 sectionbelow. 2 below. photography,photography, for example, for mightexample, perform). might perform).This might This well might be, aswell be, as a tabletop. This is not exactly a move from three dimensions to Brassier suggests,Brassier suggests,because non-philosophy, because non-philosophy, in one respect in one anyway, respect anyway, two, but rather a flatness in which there are no supplementary has very littlehas very to littlesay about to saythese about other these forms other of thought;forms of itthought; does it does 14 dimensions (to use Deleuzian terminology). The “view from above” 1. Philosophy (view from above); ii. Other ii.modes Other of modes thought of thought not involvenot yet involve another yet (philosophical) another (philosophical) take on the take different on the different is replaced by something more immanent and, as such, partial (in 2. Non-philosophy (as dropping down); terrains “outside”terrains “outside”philosophy philosophy that it can that then it appropriatecan then appropriate via via 18 18 fact, Laruelle suggests that non-philosophy is less an overview 3. Philo-fictions (and other modes of thought); In the secondIn the diagram second above diagram (Fig. above 2) we(Fig. might 2) notewe might the possibilitynote the possibility its own definitionsits own definitions of the latter. of the latter. than like a line, a clinamen, that touches on different “models” 4. Non-philosophy (as clinamen) that the “flattened”that the “flattened” philosophical philosophical materials—the materials—the philo-fictions— philo-fictions— of thought). It is this radical change in perspective that can be positionedcan be positioned alongside alongsideother forms other of nonforms philosophical of non philosophical It is worthIt remarking,is worth remarking, however, thathowever, these that other these forms other of forms of enables a different treatment of philosophy. thought (notethought the (notelack ofthe hyphen lack ofagain hyphen here). again Philosophy, here). Philosophy, when when thinking havethinking themselves have themselves been theorized been theorizedelsewhere elsewhere(there is (there is

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– FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART –PRACTICE – plenty of plentymaterial of outmaterial there outon art,there the on animal,art, the and animal, so on). and19 so on).19 as a practice)as a practice)might consist might in consist (in passing in (in we passing might alsowe might note also note The question,The question,it seems toit me,seems is towhether me, is these whether theorizations these theorizations that this thatimplies this that implies practice that alwayspractice already always involves already itsinvolves its have hithertohave alwayshitherto been always philosophical been philosophical in character in character(proceeding (proceeding own “theory”—itown “theory”—it does not necessarilydoes not necessarily need a further need alayer further of layer of from decision),from decision), and, if so, and, what if mightso, what a non-philosophical might a non-philosophical reflection—justreflection—just as it also as implies it also that implies theory that can theory itself can be itselfits be its theorizationtheorization (one not proceeding(one not proceeding from decision) from decision)of, say, artof, say, art own kind ofown (speculative) kind of (speculative) practice). practice).20 I will return20 I will to returnsome of to some of be like? Therebe like? is alsoThere the is supplementaryalso the supplementary question asquestion to whether as to whether these questionsthese questionsin section in 3. section 3. these otherthese non otherphilosophical non philosophical forms of thinkingforms of “need”thinking an “need” an account—fromaccount—from philosophy philosophy or non-philosophy—in or non-philosophy—in the first theplace. first place. To return Tomore return directly more todirectly Laruelle, to Laruelle,and pull backand pullslightly, back slightly, After all,After the workall, ofthe artists, work of scientists,artists, scientists, and so forth and isso forth is a more generala more question general concernsquestion whatconcerns other what practices other practicescould could already occurringalready occurringwithout the without help ofthe philosophy help of philosophy (although (althoughmy own my own follow fromfollow non-philosophy’s from non-philosophy’s particular particular shift in perspective.shift in perspective. essay doesessay not attenddoes not to attendthis directly, to this directly,there is alsothere the is morealso the more What differentWhat differentkinds of thoughtkinds of does thought it make does possible it make inpossible its in its radical thesisradical I gesturedthesis I togestured above thatto above animals, that foranimals, example, for example, very redefinitionvery redefinition of thinking? of thinking?To a certain To aextent certain this extent is this is already thinkalready in somethink respects). in some respects). precisely preciselya work of aexperimentation work of experimentation and, indeed, and, construction. indeed, construction. The possibilityThe possibility of what Mackay of what calls Mackay “non-standard calls “non-standard worlds” that worlds” that It seems toIt meseems that to this me thatis one this of isthe one most of interestingthe most interesting areas areas arise fromarise this fromshift this and shiftradical and change radical in changeperspective in perspective cannot cannot of inquiryof in inquiry relation in torelation non-philosophy to non-philosophy and art practice. and art practice. be predicted—orbe predicted—or even, perhaps, even, articulatedperhaps, articulated in typical in (read: typical (read: The diagnosisThe diagnosisof how philosophy of how philosophy or theory orcaptures theory objectscaptures and objects and philosophical)philosophical) language. 21language. In relation21 In torelation this we to might this notewe might note practices practices(or, in fact, (or, definesin fact, them defines as such them in as the such first in theplace) first place) Laruelle’sLaruelle’s interest ininterest poetics, in orpoetics, forms ofor writing—fictions—forms of writing—fictions— is important,is important, but more compellingbut more compelling is how non-philosophy is how non-philosophy might might that are notthat for are philosophers not for philosophers (it is pretty (it isclear pretty from clear even froma even a reconfigurereconfigure what counts what as countsa theory as ofa theoryart and of how art it and might how it might cursory lookcursory at Laruelle’s look at Laruelle’s corpus that corpus the readershipthat the readership of his of his contribute—howevercontribute—however obliquely—to obliquely—to an understanding an understanding of how art of itself how art itself major worksmajor needs works to beneeds well-versed to be well-versed in philosophy). in philosophy).22 Might this22 Might this works in practice,works in practice,on the ground on the as groundit were as (that it were is, (thatwhen itis, is when it is more poeticmore and poetic experimental and experimental register involveregister an involve untethering an untethering from from not explained,not explained, interpreted, interpreted, or simply ordefined simply by defined philosophy). by philosophy). Two Two decision? decision?Indeed, what Indeed, forms what of writing,forms of wewriting, might ask,we might are reallyask, are really questions,questions, then: what then: kind whatof framework kind of frameworkdoes non-philosophy does non-philosophy offer offer adequate to,adequate and appropriate to, and appropriate for, the properlyfor, the non-philosophicalproperly non-philosophical for thinkingfor aboutthinking art; about and, art;what and,kind whatof thinking kind of isthinking art? is art? subject? Thissubject? question This isquestion of especial is of relevanceespecial relevancewhen we consider when we consider that, typically,that, typically, syntax and syntax narrative and narrativeare generally are generallya kind of a kind of In fact, theIn fact,above thetwo abovequestions—of two questions—of theory and theory practice, and practice,we we handmaidenhandmaiden to philosophy; to philosophy; I will return I will to returnthis below. to this below. might say—aremight connected say—are connectedinsofar as insofar the change as the in changeperspective in perspective announced announcedby non-philosophy by non-philosophy (the “dropping (the “droppingdown”) produces down”) bothproduces both To start toTo bringstart toto anbring end tothis an briefend this reflection brief reflection on what I onhave what I have a reconfigurationa reconfiguration of what a oftheory what (ofa theory art, for(of example)art, for mightexample) might called thecalled second the articulation second articulation of non-philosophy of non-philosophy (the flattening) (the flattening) be and a differentbe and a differentunderstanding understanding of what thought of what (understood thought (understood we might suggestwe might a suggestcouple morea couple questions. more questions. The first Theconcerns first howconcerns how

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– FICTION AS METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE – – FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART PRACTICE– – plenty of material out there on art, the animal, and so on).19 as a practice) might consist in (in passing we might also note Laruelle’sLaruelle’s account of account different of differentmodels and models of an and“algebra of an of“algebra of kind of overviewkind of (or,overview indeed, (or, any indeed, clinamen any thatclinamen “touches” that “touches”other other The question, it seems to me, is whether these theorizations that this implies that practice always already involves its thought” differsthought” from, differs for from,example, for someoneexample, like someone Guattari like andGuattari his and his forms of thought).forms of thought).It would beIt awould radical be a“non” radical that “non” announces that announcesthe the have hitherto always been philosophical in character (proceeding own “theory”—it does not necessarily need a further layer of own theoryown of theorymetamodelization. of metamodelization. In fact, itIn seemsfact, toit meseems that to there me that there necessity necessityof always ofre-localizing always re-localizing any global any view. global This view. “non” This “non” from decision), and, if so, what might a non-philosophical reflection—just as it also implies that theory can itself be its might wellmight be a wellhighly be productivea highly productive encounter encounterto be forced to bebetween forced between does not namedoes anot terrain name aas terrain such (external as such (externalto philosophy), to philosophy), or or theorization (one not proceeding from decision) of, say, art own kind of (speculative) practice).20 I will return to some of non-philosophynon-philosophy and schizoanalysis, and schizoanalysis, not least notas theleast latter as the latter indeed anyindeed kind ofany steady kind ofstate steady or consistentstate or consistent practice, practice,but the but the be like? There is also the supplementary question as to whether these questions in section 3. could itselfcould be itselfunderstood be understood as a kind asof a“non-psychoanalysis.” kind of “non-psychoanalysis.”23 23 continuingcontinuing refusal of refusal any superior of any orsuperior global orposition—or global position—or what we what we these other non philosophical forms of thinking “need” an To return Toto returnan earlier to an criticism, earlier criticism, we might alsowe might ask whetheralso ask whether might alsomight call alsoa radical call aparochialism. radical parochialism. account—from philosophy or non-philosophy—in the first place. To return more directly to Laruelle, and pull back slightly, Laruelle’sLaruelle’s thinking impliesthinking a impliescertain ahomogenization, certain homogenization, but also but also After all, the work of artists, scientists, and so forth is a more general question concerns what other practices could (and almost(and despite almost itself) despite a itself)further aoverview, further overview,at least ofat aleast of a All this speculationAll this speculation aside (and aside it has (and to itbe hassaid to that be saidthinking that thinking already occurring without the help of philosophy (although my own follow from non-philosophy’s particular shift in perspective. kind, “on”kind, other “on” forms other of thought:forms of non-philosophythought: non-philosophy as just the as just the about non-philosophyabout non-philosophy breeds this breeds kind thisof speculation, kind of speculation, with with essay does not attend to this directly, there is also the more What different kinds of thought does it make possible in its latest novellatest philosophy, novel philosophy, as it were. as Althoughit were. non-philosophyAlthough non-philosophy its variousits loops various and loopsnestings), and nestings), there is alsothere clearly is also a clearlykey a key radical thesis I gestured to above that animals, for example, very redefinition of thinking? To a certain extent this is does not involvedoes not the involve same auto-positioningthe same auto-positioning as philosophy, as philosophy, it does it does issue here—anotherissue here—another reason that reason what thatI have what called I have the called second the second already think in some respects). precisely a work of experimentation and, indeed, construction. posit a kindposit of aview kind from of viewelsewhere, from elsewhere, or, perhaps, or, aperhaps, view on aa viewview on a view articulationarticulation of non-philosophy of non-philosophy is less explored is less byexplored Laruelle. by Laruelle. The possibility of what Mackay calls “non-standard worlds” that (as exemplified(as exemplified in my own indiagrams my own ofdiagrams its operations). of its operations). In fact, asIn fact, as Indeed, followingIndeed, followingon from some on fromof my some comments of my above,comments we above,might we might It seems to me that this is one of the most interesting areas arise from this shift and radical change in perspective cannot I suggestedI suggestedin section in i sectionabove, iti above,seems toit meseems that to the me latter—thethat the latter—the note that notethe practicethat the ofpractice non-philosophy of non-philosophy can never canbe simplynever bea simply a of inquiry in relation to non-philosophy and art practice. be predicted—or even, perhaps, articulated in typical (read: perspectiveperspective of any view of fromany viewabove—must from above—must also be dropped also be down dropped in a down in a question ofquestion mapping of out mapping a terrain out aoutside terrain philosophy, outside philosophy, as this as this The diagnosis of how philosophy or theory captures objects and philosophical) language.21 In relation to this we might note further flatteningfurther flattening (it is in (itthis is sense in this that sense non-philosophy that non-philosophy can can will then willsimply then be simplyco-opted be byco-opted philosophy by philosophy (as its material). (as its material). Is Is practices (or, in fact, defines them as such in the first place) Laruelle’s interest in poetics, or forms of writing—fictions— only ever onlybe one ever form be ofone thinking; form of thinking;one perspective one perspective among others). among others). this, ultimately,this, ultimately, the limit theof non-philosophylimit of non-philosophy as a particular as a particular is important, but more compelling is how non-philosophy might that are not for philosophers (it is pretty clear from even a practice? practice?Like deconstruction Like deconstruction before it before(at least it (atfrom least one from one reconfigure what counts as a theory of art and how it might cursory look at Laruelle’s corpus that the readership of his To give thisTo giveanother this inflection, another inflection, we might alsowe might note alsothat notethese that these perspective),perspective), non-philosophy—as non-philosophy—as a take on athe take structure on the structureand and contribute—however obliquely—to an understanding of how art itself major works needs to be well-versed in philosophy).22 Might this different differentperspectives perspectives or models orare models also “lived”are also out “lived” in the out in the workings ofworkings philosophy—is of philosophy—is delimited delimitedby the very by thinkingthe very itthinking it works in practice, on the ground as it were (that is, when it is more poetic and experimental register involve an untethering from world. Theyworld. are, Theywe might are, say,we might performed say, performed(hence, again, (hence, the again, the pitches itselfpitches “against.” itself “against.” Non-philosophy Non-philosophy can operate can as operate a kind asof a kind of not explained, interpreted, or simply defined by philosophy). Two decision? Indeed, what forms of writing, we might ask, are really connectionconnection between non-philosophy between non-philosophy and schizoanalysis). and schizoanalysis). Which is Which is trap for thoughttrap for even thought as it even diagnoses as it diagnosesphilosophy philosophy as itself asa trap.itself a trap. questions, then: what kind of framework does non-philosophy offer adequate to, and appropriate for, the properly non-philosophical to say thatto thesay realmthat theof non-philosophicalrealm of non-philosophical work is not work only is thenot only the for thinking about art; and, what kind of thinking is art? subject? This question is of especial relevance when we consider tabletop—andtabletop—and the abstract the (non)abstract philosophical (non) philosophical plane—but plane—butalso life also life that, typically, syntax and narrative are generally a kind of and practiceand morepractice generally. more generally. (In this respect(In this it respect is especially it is especially 2. Interlude:2. Interlude: Philo- to Philo- Photo-Fiction to Photo-Fiction In fact, the above two questions—of theory and practice, we handmaiden to philosophy; I will return to this below. the connectionthe connection of Guattari’s of Guattari’s abstract modelingabstract tomodeling concrete to concrete might say—are connected insofar as the change in perspective practice—forpractice—for example, atexample, La Borde—that at La Borde—that marks out marksschizoanalysis out schizoanalysis I want nowI towant briefly now to turn briefly to Laruelle’s turn to Laruelle’s writings onwritings what he on calls what he calls announced by non-philosophy (the “dropping down”) produces both To start to bring to an end this brief reflection on what I have as its ownas kind its ofown non kind philosophy.) of non philosophy.) Could we thenCould posit we then a more posit a more “photo-fiction,”“photo-fiction,” which in manywhich ways in manyaddress—and ways address—and bring together— bring together— a reconfiguration of what a theory (of art, for example) might called the second articulation of non-philosophy (the flattening) radical nonradical philosophy? non philosophy? This would This perhaps would name perhaps forms name of thinkingforms of thinking the two articulationsthe two articulations of non-philosophy of non-philosophy outlined above.outlined Indeed, above. Indeed, be and a different understanding of what thought (understood we might suggest a couple more questions. The first concerns how that do notthat “refer” do not to “refer” philosophy to philosophy and its materials, and its materials, or to any or to any for Laruellefor aLaruelle way of thinkinga way of thethinking relationship the relationship of philosophy of philosophy

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– FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART –PRACTICE – to non-philosophyto non-philosophy is through is photography through photography and its relationship and its relationship part of thepart real) of theinstead real) of instead (or besides) of (or itsbesides) representational its representational to what heto calls what non-photography. he calls non-photography. Here photography Here photography contains contains function. function.In each case In eachthe conceptual case the conceptual and photographic and photographic materials materials its own Principleits own Principleof Sufficient of Sufficient Photography, Photography, or, again, or, makes again, makes are positionedare positioned as fictions—or as fictions—or what Laruelle, what Laruelle,in this essay, in this calls essay, calls a particulara particular claim to truth. claim toIndeed, truth. photography Indeed, photography (at least (atat least at photo-fictionsphoto-fictions and philo-fictions. and philo-fictions. first glance)first is glance) an accurate is an andaccurate faithful and “picturefaithful of“picture the world”; of the world”; it is, we mightit is, say, we might a graphic say, aexample graphic of example those standard of those modesstandard modes In a more recentIn a more essay recent that essay develops that thisdevelops idea thisof photo-fiction, idea of photo-fiction, of thoughtof that thought Laruelle that writesLaruelle against. writes Outliningagainst. Outlininga possible a possible Laruelle tacklesLaruelle the tackles philosophical the philosophical discourse discourseof aesthetics of aesthetics non-photographicnon-photographic practice ispractice then also is thena way also of outlining a way of outlininga non- a non- more directly,more directly,tracking atracking move from a moveaesthetics from aesthetics (understood (understood as as philosophicalphilosophical practice. practice. a philosophicala philosophical account of account art’s self-sufficiency of art’s self-sufficiency or truth) or truth) to what heto calls, what hegenerally, calls, generally, art-fictions. art-fictions. These latter These are latter are In his essayIn his“What essay Is Seen “What in Is a Photo?”Seen in aLaruelle Photo?” pitchesLaruelle his pitches own his own associatedassociated with the practice with the ofpractice a “non-aesthetics,” of a “non-aesthetics,” an aesthetics an aesthetics take on thetake photograph on the photograph against any against “theory” any of“theory” photography of photography that that not tied tonot a Principletied to a Principleof Sufficient of Sufficient Philosophy Philosophy but instead but instead positions positionsthe former the as formera double as of a doublethe world. of the Indeed, world. the Indeed, task the task arising fromarising what fromhe suggests, what he suggests,again, is again,a more ais scientific a more a scientific is to thinkis the to thinkphotograph the photograph as non-representational as non-representational (however (however paradigm involvingparadigm involvingthe positing the ofpositing models. of25 Onmodels. the face25 On of the face of counterintuitivecounterintuitive that might that be). might24 For be).Laruelle24 For thisLaruelle requires this requires it, this laterit, this essay later is less essay about is less art aboutpractice—photography art practice—photography or or a certain astance certain or stanceposture or of posture the photographer—and of the photographer—and with this with this otherwise—andotherwise—and more about more philosophy about philosophy (as instantiated (as instantiated in the in the the instantiationthe instantiation of a very particularof a very particular kind of relation kind of torelation the to the discourse discourseof aesthetics) of aesthetics) and how one and might how onereposition might reposition it. Indeed, it. Indeed, real—whichreal—which then, in turn, then, entails in turn, the entails production the production of a different of a different there is stillthere a is minimal still aaesthetics minimal aesthetics at work in at Laruelle’s work in Laruelle’s own own kind of knowledgekind of knowledge(one that (onedoes thatnot arise does notfrom arise representation). from representation). account, ataccount, least of at sorts least (an of sortsaccount (an of account what art of “is”). what art That “is”). That To “see” theTo “see”photograph the photograph (and photographer) (and photographer) in this way in means this way means said, Laruelle’ssaid, Laruelle’s own claim ownis that claim these is that photo/philo-fictions these photo/philo-fictions both the suspensionboth the suspension of a certain of aprivileging certain privileging of perception of perception and and operate betweenoperate photography between photography and philosophy, and philosophy, with each withdiscipline each discipline the interruptionthe interruption of the paradigm of the ofparadigm “being-in-the-world.” of “being-in-the-world.” In In surrenderingsurrendering its own “auto-finalized its own “auto-finalized form” or “auto-teleology.” form” or “auto-teleology.”26 26 this problematizationthis problematization of phenomenology—and of phenomenology—and refusal of refusal yet more of yet more The two disciplinesThe two disciplines undergo a undergoreduction a reductionof sorts (“in of sorts the sense (“in the sense philosophicalphilosophical “interpretive “interpretive circles”—Laruelle circles”—Laruelle suggests thatsuggests that of phenomenologicalof phenomenological reduction” reduction”27)—or are 27themselves)—or are themselves flattened— flattened— science andscience scientific and scientific experiences experiences of the world of themight world operate might operate and are broughtand are together brought intogether what Laruelle in what callsLaruelle the callsmatrix, the matrix, as a guideas insofar a guide as insofar the latter as the proceed latter through proceed a throughpragmatic a pragmatic or generic,or “ingeneric, which “inphoto which and photofictions and (afictions philosophy (a philosophy or or and experimentaland experimental engagement engagement with the real with (or, the realat least, (or, atwith least, with conceptuality)conceptuality) are under-determined, are under-determined, which is to which say, is deprived to say, ofdeprived of a demarcateda demarcated “section” “section”of it). So, of just it). as So, non-philosophy just as non-philosophy their classicaltheir classicalfinality andfinality domination.” and domination.”28 28 involves ainvolves particular a particular take on philosophy, take on philosophy, a use of it a asuse material of it as material (untethered(untethered from its interpretive from its interpretive function), function), so non-photography so non-photography The generic—aThe generic—akind of image kind or of “space” image or of “space” thought of that thought is non- that is non- will involvewill a involveuse of the a use photograph of the photograph as material as (asmaterial very much (as very much hierarchicalhierarchical (or radically (or radicallyhorizontal, horizontal, to return to returna term Ito used a term I used

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– FICTION AS METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE – – FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART –PRACTICE – to non-philosophy is through photography and its relationship part of the real) instead of (or besides) its representational above)—is above)—isthen this thenother this strange other realm strange (of realmthe real) (of thethat real) is that is announces announcesa turn from a turnhermeneutics from hermeneutics to something to somethingmore heuristic). more heuristic). to what he calls non-photography. Here photography contains function. In each case the conceptual and photographic materials un- or under-determined.un- or under-determined. Laruelle willLaruelle also willcall alsothis callleveling this leveling its own Principle of Sufficient Photography, or, again, makes are positioned as fictions—or what Laruelle, in this essay, calls out an algebraout an of algebra philosophy/photography. of philosophy/photography. This horizontality This horizontality is is The key forThe Laruelle key for in Laruelle all this in is all photo-fiction’s this is photo-fiction’s break with break with a particular claim to truth. Indeed, photography (at least at photo-fictions and philo-fictions. important,important, as without as it—as without I mentioned it—as I mentionedabove—non-philosophy above—non-philosophy representationrepresentation and mimesis and and, mimesis with that,and, with the productionthat, the production of a of a first glance) is an accurate and faithful “picture of the world”; becomes justbecomes one more just superior one more philosophicalsuperior philosophical position (andposition thus (and thus certain kindcertain of freedom kind of (he freedom writes, (he for writes, example, for of example, the jouissance of the jouissance it is, we might say, a graphic example of those standard modes In a more recent essay that develops this idea of photo-fiction, is itself isopen itself to further open to “nesting” further “nesting”by the positing by the ofpositing other of other to be foundto at be the found end atof the“photo-centrism”). end of “photo-centrism”).29 In themselves29 In themselves these these of thought that Laruelle writes against. Outlining a possible Laruelle tackles the philosophical discourse of aesthetics outside perspectives).outside perspectives). Indeed, one Indeed, might onesuggest might that suggest Laruelle’s that Laruelle’s photo-fictionsphoto-fictions imply and, imply it seems and, to it me, seems help to produce me, help a newproduce kind aof new kind of non-photographic practice is then also a way of outlining a non- more directly, tracking a move from aesthetics (understood as own non-philosophyown non-philosophy is itself issimply itself another simply form another of thought form of thought subject (ifsubject we can (ifstill we callcan still it this), call orit whatthis), Laruelle or what calls Laruelle (in calls (in philosophical practice. a philosophical account of art’s self-sufficiency or truth) among others;among although, others; although,as I also mentionedas I also mentionedabove, Laruelle above, Laruelle a nod to Kant’sa nod notionto Kant’s of anotion non-empirical of a non-empirical transcendental transcendental subject) subject) to what he calls, generally, art-fictions. These latter are does suggestdoes that suggest non-philosophy that non-philosophy has a specificity has a specificity as a line—a as a line—a “Subject =“Subject X.”30 They = X.”also30 implyThey also a new imply terrain a new (or, terrain as I suggested(or, as I suggested In his essay “What Is Seen in a Photo?” Laruelle pitches his own associated with the practice of a “non-aesthetics,” an aesthetics clinamen—thatclinamen—that “touches” “touches”these other these fictions. other fictions. above, a newabove, realm) a new to berealm) “discovered”—or to be “discovered”—or constructed—“beyond” constructed—“beyond” take on the photograph against any “theory” of photography that not tied to a Principle of Sufficient Philosophy but instead the “world”the of “world” philosophy/photography. of philosophy/photography.31 Laruelle31 turns Laruelle to quantum turns to quantum positions the former as a double of the world. Indeed, the task arising from what he suggests, again, is a more a scientific In “Photo-Fiction,In “Photo-Fiction, A Theoretical A Theoretical Installation” Installation” Laruelle isLaruelle is mechanics mechanicshere (and indeedhere (and in muchindeed of inhis much recent of his writings), recent writings), is to think the photograph as non-representational (however paradigm involving the positing of models.25 On the face of concerned concernedwith building with abuilding new conceptual a new conceptual or theoretical or theoretical apparatus apparatus where he findswhere the he toolsfinds adequatethe tools and adequate appropriate and appropriate to this to this counterintuitive that might be).24 For Laruelle this requires it, this later essay is less about art practice—photography or that wouldthat be capable would be of capable producing of producingthese strange these photo-fictions strange photo-fictions experimentalexperimental reorganization reorganization or reconstruction or reconstruction of the world of (outsidethe world (outside a certain stance or posture of the photographer—and with this otherwise—and more about philosophy (as instantiated in the or models orof modelsthe real. of theThese real. are Theseforms areof thought forms of (broadly thought (broadly representation).representation). Such a “new” Such scientific a “new” scientific theory does theory not involve does not involve the instantiation of a very particular kind of relation to the discourse of aesthetics) and how one might reposition it. Indeed, construed)construed) that are less that explanatory are less explanatory or interpretive or interpretive of the world of the world yet more binaries,yet more binaries,but rather but a “superpositioning” rather a “superpositioning” in which a inthird which a third real—which then, in turn, entails the production of a different there is still a minimal aesthetics at work in Laruelle’s own as it is, andas it more is, speculative and more speculative in character. in character. Might we suggest, Might we suggest, state is producedstate is by produced the addition by the (or addition “superposing”) (or “superposing”) of two previous of two previous kind of knowledge (one that does not arise from representation). account, at least of sorts (an account of what art “is”). That then, thatthen, it is that this it experimental is this experimental nature of naturephoto-fictions of photo-fictions that that states. Superpositioningstates. Superpositioning is a way of is dealing a way of with dealing the paradox with the I paradox I To “see” the photograph (and photographer) in this way means said, Laruelle’s own claim is that these photo/philo-fictions characterizescharacterizes them as a formthem ofas arta form practice? of art practice? mentioned mentionedabove of non-philosophy above of non-philosophy as both theory as both of thoughttheory of and thought and both the suspension of a certain privileging of perception and operate between photography and philosophy, with each discipline just one modejust of one thinking mode of itself—indeed, thinking itself—indeed, it is precisely it is preciselyquantum quantum the interruption of the paradigm of “being-in-the-world.” In surrendering its own “auto-finalized form” or “auto-teleology.”26 As I intimatedAs I intimatedabove, this above, strange this kind strange of non-photographic kind of non-photographic science’s science’sbreak with break representational with representational “accounts” “accounts” of matter andof matter the and the this problematization of phenomenology—and refusal of yet more The two disciplines undergo a reduction of sorts (“in the sense apparatus apparatusis also necessarily is also necessarily a phenomenologically a phenomenologically reduced one: reduced one: universe thatuniverse makes that it so makes useful it forso useful non-philosophy. for non-philosophy. We might even We might even philosophical “interpretive circles”—Laruelle suggests that of phenomenological reduction”27)—or are themselves flattened— it “pictures”it “pictures” what happens what to happens experience to experience when not tied when to not a self/tied to a self/ say that non-philosophy,say that non-philosophy, in this sense, in this is quantumsense, is philosophy—and quantum philosophy—and science and scientific experiences of the world might operate and are brought together in what Laruelle calls the matrix, interpreter,interpreter, or when such or whenexperience such experience is not “processed” is not “processed” through through that the Subjectthat the = XSubject is the =quantum-subject. X is the quantum-subject. as a guide insofar as the latter proceed through a pragmatic or generic, “in which photo and fictions (a philosophy or representation.representation. We might also We might say the also fictions say the thatfictions are produced that are produced and experimental engagement with the real (or, at least, with conceptuality) are under-determined, which is to say, deprived of by it are somehowby it are weaker somehow (again, weaker they (again, are “undetermined”), they are “undetermined”), a demarcated “section” of it). So, just as non-philosophy their classical finality and domination.”28 untethereduntethered as they are as from they a are certain from apretension. certain pretension. This is a moreThis is a more 3. Non-Art3. Non-ArtPractice Practice involves a particular take on philosophy, a use of it as material modest formmodest of thought, form of perhaps,thought, butperhaps, it is alsobut it one is that also has one the that has the (untethered from its interpretive function), so non-photography The generic—a kind of image or “space” of thought that is non- potential potentialto expand tothe expand very idea—and the very workingidea—and out—of working what out—of thought what thought I want nowI to want develop now to some develop of the some above of thein six above different, in six different, more more will involve a use of the photograph as material (as very much hierarchical (or radically horizontal, to return to a term I used is and mightis andbecome might (it become is in this(it is sense in this that sense Laruelle’s that Laruelle’s “non” “non” specific “applications”specific “applications” of non-philosophy of non-philosophy to art practice. to art 32practice. 32

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In particularIn particular I want to Itest want Laruelle’s to test Laruelle’s method when method it comes when toit comes to conceptualconceptual resources resources(given that (given the normalthat the (philosophical) normal (philosophical) rules rules thinking throughthinking a throughnon philosophical a non philosophical discipline discipline with its ownwith its own are suspended).are suspended).34 Philosophy34 Philosophy (or non-philosophy) (or non-philosophy) becomes a becomesmore a more logics andlogics history, and buthistory, also, butmore also, particularly, more particularly, in relation in torelation to synthetic—and,synthetic—and, again, speculative—practice again, speculative—practice in this sense in this (rather sense (rather an understandingan understanding of performance of performance as its own as kind its ofown “non-art” kind of “non-art”(or (or than an analyticthan an inquiry).analytic inquiry).More radically, More radically, this kind thisof practice kind of practice what Davidwhat Burrows David has Burrows called has “performance called “performance fiction”). fiction”).33 33 opens up theopens different up the differentspace of andspace for of thinking and for thatthinking I mentioned that I mentioned above. above. i. Diagrammaticsi. Diagrammatics ii. Art asii. model Art as model DiagrammaticsDiagrammatics might be amight name befor a thename practice for the ofpractice of recontextualization,recontextualization, reorganization, reorganization, and general and manipulation general manipulation Non-philosophyNon-philosophy might also might name alsothe multiplicityname the multiplicity of thinking—the of thinking—the of philosophicalof philosophical materials materialsthat have thatbeen haveuntethered been untethered from their from their other kindsother of thought—thatkinds of thought—that subsists alongsidesubsists alongsidethe philosophical the philosophical properly philosophicalproperly philosophical function orfunction discourse. or discourse. I have already I have already and the conceptualand the conceptual more broadly. more Indeed,broadly. there Indeed, is thethere important is the important laid out somelaid ofout the some aspects of the of aspects this kind of thisof practice kind of above,practice but above, but question, question,here, of thehere, role of ofthe affect role ofin affectart practice, in art practice,and whether and whether in relationin torelation art more to explicitlyart more explicitly we might notewe might the possibilitynote the possibility this more thispathic more register pathic mightregister also might be understood also be understood as a kind as a kind that conceptsthat beconcepts refigured be refigureddiagrammatically. diagrammatically. In a simple In sensea simple sense of non-conceptualof non-conceptual thinking—a thinking—a different differentkind of non kind philosophy, of non philosophy, they can bethey drawn, can bebut drawn, more generallybut more generallyto diagram to suggests diagram asuggests a perhaps. Again,perhaps. some Again, of this some terrain of this has terrain been laidhas beenout above,laid out but above, but different different“imaging” “imaging”or even performance or even performance of concepts. of concepts.In fact, In fact, in relationin torelation art practice to art itpractice seems toit meseems that to with me thatthis withsecond this second art practiceart haspractice always has involved always ainvolved take on aphilosophy take on philosophy (and theory (and theory aspect we aspectare moving we are into moving more intoproductive more productive territory. territory. Indeed, art Indeed, art more broadly)more thatbroadly) resonates that resonateswith this—a with “use” this—a of philosophical“use” of philosophical practice haspractice long beenhas longinvolved been ininvolved non-conceptual in non-conceptual explorations, explorations, materials materialsas material. as material. just as itjust has asalso it involvedhas also itsinvolved own particular its own particular take on conceptual take on conceptual material (withoutmaterial the(without help ofthe non-philosophy). help of non-philosophy). A question A question A key questionA key herequestion is what here these is what philosophical these philosophical materials materials“do” “do” rephrased rephrasedfrom one askedfrom oneabove asked might above also might be posed also here:be posed what here: does what does when untetheredwhen untethered in this way: in thiswhat way:is their what explanatoryis their explanatory power power non-philosophynon-philosophy in its democratizing in its democratizing aspect bring aspect to artbring practice? to art practice? (if that still(if that has stilla meaning has ahere)? meaning Or, here)? to put Or, this to anotherput this way, another way, Certainly Certainlyit brings itphilosophy brings philosophy (and aesthetics) (and aesthetics) down from downits from its can this becan anything this be differentanything differentfrom the usefrom of the philosophy use of philosophy as as throne, makesthrone, it moremakes of it a moremodel of among a model others; among and, others; in the and, same in the same illustration,illustration, or “caption”? or “caption”? (Laruelle (Laruellehimself uses himself the latteruses the latter gesture, art’sgesture, own art’smodels own are models given area certain given astatus certain beyond status being beyond being term when termwriting when of writing philo-fictions.) of philo-fictions.) What, we mightWhat, ask,we might does ask, does simple fictionsimple (at fiction least (atwhen least this whenis opposed this is to opposed truth). to But truth). But the treatmentthe treatmentof philosophy of philosophy in this way in allowthis wayus toallow think? us to think? what does whatthis doesmodeling this allowmodeling beyond allow such beyond democratization? such democratization? As I As I One answerOne is answerthat it is might, that itfor might, example, for suggestexample, surprising suggest surprising mentioned mentionedabove, very above, little very is littlesaid about is said this about area—the this otherarea—the other and productiveand productive connections connections and conjunctions and conjunctions between different between different forms of thoughtforms of besides thought philosophy—“within” besides philosophy—“within” non-philosophy non-philosophy

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– FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART – PRACTICE – itself. Again,itself. it seemsAgain, to it me seems that tothis me isthat partly this becauseis partly a because a “decision”“decision” (however that (however might thatmanifest)? might manifest)? Insofar as Insofarart involves as art involves certain deconstructivecertain deconstructive logic is at logic play: is any at formplay: of any thinking, form of asthinking, as representationrepresentation (a “picturing (a “picturing of the world”) of the then world”) the answer then theis answer is thinking, isthinking, always alreadyis always determined already determined by the cut bythat the produces cut that produces clearly yesclearly (and the yes above (and commentsthe above on comments photography on photography would have would have the world andthe theworld subject and the that subject thinks. that35 thinks.35 relevance here—althoughrelevance here—although work would workneed wouldto be needdone toto belay done out to lay out how this particularhow this particular structure operatesstructure in operates art practice in art more practice more But perhapsBut we perhapsmight rephrase we might this, rephrase and alsothis, put and it also in moreput it in more generally).generally). But in this But sense in thiswe might sense also we mightsay that also modern say that art modern art positive terms:positive non-philosophy terms: non-philosophy cannot but cannotuse the but stuff use ofthe the stuff of the has alreadyhas been already through been its through own “non” its “revolution”own “non” “revolution” with the move with the move world and thusworld must and usethus it must differently, use it differently, untethering untethering it from the it from the from figurationfrom figuration to abstraction to abstraction (Malevich and(Malevich Pollock and representing Pollock representing world (in theworld sense (in ofthe a senseworld ofdetermined a world determined by philosophy). by philosophy). In terms In terms the twin apotheosesthe twin apotheoses of this tendency of this in tendency Western inpainting). Western painting).37 37 of art one ofthinks art oneof Williamthinks ofBurroughs William andBurroughs his cut-ups, and his which cut-ups, which open up a differentopen up a space-time.different space-time. Indeed, narratives—the Indeed, narratives—the logical logical In fact, withIn fact,the further with the move further beyond move abstraction beyond abstraction to objecthood to objecthood sequencingsequencing of sentences of (causesentences and (causeeffect), and familiar effect), syntax, familiar syntax, we have practiceswe have that,practices in their that, relationship in their relationship to representation, to representation, and so forth—whichand so forth—which the cut-ups the slice cut-ups into sliceand rearrange into and arerearrange key are key “mirror” the“mirror” relation the between relation non-philosophy between non-philosophy and philosophy. and philosophy. determiningdetermining factors of factorsthe world. of theNon-philosophy world. Non-philosophy in this expanded in this expanded Certainly Minimalism,Certainly Minimalism, for example, for was example, involved was in involved something in something sense mightsense then mightalso bethen a formalso ofbe non-narrative,a form of non-narrative, or even a formor even a form else “beyond”else representation, “beyond” representation, in that it inwas that the itproduction was the production of non-fictionof non-fiction (in which the(in “non”which namesthe “non” a widening names aof widening context ofto context to of objects,of assemblages, objects, assemblages, and so forth and that so forthwere notthat “about” were not “about” include thoseinclude formal those experiments formal experiments that go beyond that simplego beyond narrative, simple narrative, the real, butthe partreal, of but it part(and ofin itwriters (and insuch writers as Donald such Juddas Donald Judd as well as asa usewell of as language a use of beyond language its beyondrepresentational its representational and Robert andSmithson Robert we Smithson have a clearwe have articulation a clear articulation of this of this function).function). Such art will Such need art towill be need“read,” to beor “read,”at least or maintain at least maintain logic—the radicallogic—the break radical their break practices their announce—aspractices announce—as well well a minimum consistencya minimum consistency of sense. Again,of sense. experiments Again, experiments in writing in writing as an indicationas an indication of the importance of the importance of fiction, of as fiction, a mode ofas a mode of non-narrativenon-narrative fictions (or, fictions at least, (or, inat playingleast, inwith playing narrative with narrative writing, inwriting, articulating in articulating it).38 We needit). only38 We addneed that only this add shiftthat this shift schema) wouldschema) be instructive would be instructive here.36 here.36 in perspectivein perspective also necessarily also necessarily changes the changes perspective the perspective on on previous art,previous such thatart, itsuch is thatthen itseen is asthen representation seen as representation but but also as itselfalso objectas itself (what object else (whatcould elseit be?). could We it might be?). also We might also iii. Non-artiii. (andNon-art art history)(and art history) note Marcelnote Duchamp’s Marcel ideaDuchamp’s of the idea “reciprocal of the “reciprocal readymade,” readymade,” which which involves usinginvolves (representational) using (representational) art as material art as for material everyday for everyday Another (andAnother perhaps (and more perhaps appropriate) more appropriate) thinking through thinking of through of objects.39 objects.Contemporary39 Contemporary practices thatpractices refer thatback referto—or backreuse— to—or reuse— non-philosophynon-philosophy in relation in to relation art would to beart an would examination be an examination of of art, untetheredart, untethered from its previous from its representational previous representational functioning, functioning, whether artwhether performs art its performs own auto-positioning its own auto-positioning and has its and own has its own would also wouldbe important also be hereimportant (what hereis sometimes (what is calledsometimes “second- called “second- kind of principlekind of thatprinciple doubles that the doubles Principle the ofPrinciple Sufficient of Sufficient order practice”),order practice”), but so would but those so would practices those that,practices for example,that, for example, Philosophy:Philosophy: does art also does involve art also a certaininvolve kinda certain of invariant kind of invariant repeat or restagerepeat orprevious restage performances. previous performances. It is also Itin isthis also in this

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– NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART –PRACTICE – ALMOSTALMOST EVERY EVERY sense that,sense today, that, abstract today, artabstract is itself art isfigural itself (it figural involves (it involves the referencingthe referencing of previous of abstractions).previous abstractions). There is a There similar is a similar MODERNMODERN MOVEMENT MOVEMENT structure structureto non-philosophy’s to non-philosophy’s use of philosophy use of philosophy in these kinds in these of kinds of practice, practice,but we might but also we might note alsothat notethere that is equally there is a equallysimilar a similar INVOLVEDINVOLVED THIS THIS limit, insofarlimit, as insofar such practices as such practicesinvolve a involvenesting aof nesting art within of art within art (ad infinitum).art (ad infinitum). I will return I will to returnthis. to this.

DISAVOWALDISAVOWAL OF OF We might alsoWe might gesture also here gesture to the here history to the of history the avant-garde of the avant-garde more more generally generallyand their andrefusal their of refusal previous of categoriesprevious categories of art. Almost of art. Almost A PREVIOUSA PREVIOUS every modernevery movement modern involvedmovement thisinvolved disavowal this disavowalof a previous of a previous definition—thedefinition—the performance performance of a forceful of a “No”forceful echoing “No” throughout echoing throughout time (and timemanifestos (and manifestos embody this embody recurring this recurringmotif, perhaps motif, most perhaps most DEFINITION—DEFINITION— explicitlyexplicitly foregrounded foregrounded in Dada, which in Dada, further which involved further ainvolved refusal a refusal of “good sense”).of “good Theresense”). was Therealso, waswith also, the avant-gardes, with the avant-gardes, a a THETHE PERFORMANCE PERFORMANCE concomitantconcomitant drive to bring drive art to bringinto life. art into Indeed, life. in Indeed, terms of in non- terms of non- art, a recurringart, a recurringfeature of feature the avant-garde of the avant-garde is the incorporation is the incorporation OF OFA FORCEFULA FORCEFUL of non-artisticof non-artistic material inmaterial order to in disrupt order to representation. disrupt representation. From the readymadeFrom the readymadeto Arte Povera to Arte to Poverathe happening, to the happening, art has also art has also been—at leastbeen—at in its least initial in its impulse—non-art. initial impulse—non-art. Here it is Here surely it is surely “NO”“NO” ECHOING ECHOING Duchamp whoDuchamp best exemplifies who best exemplifies the refusal the of refusal representation, of representation, just just as it is Allanas it Kaprow is Allan who Kaprow gestures who togestures the very to limits the very of limitsthe frame of the frame THROUGHOUTTHROUGHOUT TIME TIME (and who does(and most who doesto collapse most to orcollapse “blur” orthe “blur” art/life the boundary).art/life boundary). All this amountsAll this to amounts saying tothat saying from thatone perspective from one perspective art history art history gives us angives account us an of account how art of has how always art has been always thought been in thought relation in relation to somethingto somethingoutside itself. outside itself.

There is aThere lot more is a to lot be more said to about be said this about relationship this relationship between between art and non-art,art and especiallynon-art, especially in relation in torelation Laruelle’s to Laruelle’s own ideas own ideas about how aboutan anti-philosophy how an anti-philosophy (as opposed (as to opposed non-philosophy) to non-philosophy) invariablyinvariably sets up an sets “outside” up an “outside”that then thatgets thenincorporated gets incorporated in in a renewed a“definition” renewed “definition” (hence my (henceinterest my ininterest the reciprocal in the reciprocal

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– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE – – FICTION –AS FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART PRACTICE– – ALMOST EVERY sense that, today, abstract art is itself figural (it involves readymade,readymade, which does which not lookdoes “outside”not look “outside”art (it is art not (it an isanti- not an anti- as it were,as ait structuring were, a structuring invariant, invariant, whatever awhatever given practice a given practice the referencing of previous abstractions). There is a similar art) but usesart) artbut asuses its art material). as its material). There is alsoThere the is issuealso theof issue of might claim.might Such claim. is the Such strategy is the ofstrategy Suhail ofMalik, Suhail who Malik, calls who calls MODERN MOVEMENT structure to non-philosophy’s use of philosophy in these kinds of art practiceart traversingpractice traversing this edge, this often edge, moving often toward moving non-art toward non-art for an “exit”for anfrom “exit” a Contemporary from a Contemporary Art that isArt the that handmaiden is the handmaiden of of practice, but we might also note that there is equally a similar status, onlystatus, to hold only back to holdat the back last at moment,the last as moment, it were, as init were, in contemporarycontemporary neoliberalism. neoliberalism.41 Here the41 veryHere “openness”the very “openness” of the of the INVOLVED THIS limit, insofar as such practices involve a nesting of art within order to maintainorder to anmaintain artistic an statusartistic (again, status it (again, seems toit meseems that to me that work of artwork is ofseen art as is profoundly seen as profoundly ideological. ideological. In relation In torelation this to this art (ad infinitum). I will return to this. a certain adeconstructive certain deconstructive logic is atlogic play is with at playthese with practices these practices recent critiquerecent ofcritique contemporary of contemporary art, we might art, alsowe might note alsothat notethere that there that oscillatethat oscillatebetween art between and non-art). art and non-art).A question A herequestion might here might has long beenhas longa “tradition” been a “tradition” of radical of (or radical “social”) (or “social”)art history art history DISAVOWAL OF We might also gesture here to the history of the avant-garde more be, then, be,what then, does whatan understanding does an understanding of non-art of (in non-art Laruelle’s (in Laruelle’s as a form asof aideology form of critiqueideology thatcritique is intent that ison intentdemystifying on demystifying the the generally and their refusal of previous categories of art. Almost sense) bringsense) to thebring table to thegiven table this given particular this particular history of history modern of modern aesthetic aestheticand ideological and ideological functioning functioning of art, and of especiallyart, and especially of of A PREVIOUS every modern movement involved this disavowal of a previous art? One answerart? One might answer be thatmight it be allows that ita radicalallows arethinking radical rethinking of of “Art History,”“Art History,”by giving bya properlygiving a historicalproperly historical account of account art of art definition—the performance of a forceful “No” echoing throughout the whole thequestion whole ofquestion the avant-garde of the avant-garde and of the and art/non-art of the art/non-art objects—mightobjects—might we even call we eventhis calla kind this of anon-Art kind of History non-Art (the History (the time (and manifestos embody this recurring motif, perhaps most dialectic.dialectic. To recall: To Laruelle’s recall: Laruelle’s non-philosophy non-philosophy does not positdoes notan posit an capitals denotingcapitals adenoting certain adisciplinary certain disciplinary self-sufficiency)? self-sufficiency)? DEFINITION— explicitly foregrounded in Dada, which further involved a refusal outside; indeed,outside; it indeed, is not itan isavant-garde not an avant-garde position inposition this sense. in this sense. of “good sense”). There was also, with the avant-gardes, a Perhaps ifPerhaps we follow if weLaruelle, follow Laruelle,then, we arethen, not we so are much not exploring so much exploring But, to returnBut, toto returnMalik, tothis Malik, is also this a iscomplex also amatter complex insofar matter insofar THE PERFORMANCE concomitant drive to bring art into life. Indeed, in terms of non- a territorya territorybeyond accepted beyond definitions,accepted definitions, but reconfiguring but reconfiguring the the as we mightas saywe mightthat contemporarysay that contemporary art (note: art no (note:capitals) no capitals) art, a recurring feature of the avant-garde is the incorporation very terrainvery of terrain art and of life art (inand termslife (inof superpositioning).terms of superpositioning). Once Once is a practiceis a thatpractice has itselfthat has been itself untethered been untethered from a certain from a certain OF A FORCEFUL of non-artistic material in order to disrupt representation. again it wouldagain seemit would that seemnon-philosophy that non-philosophy (and non-art) (and hasnon-art) this has this programmaticprogrammatic account (namely, account modernism).(namely, modernism). Contemporary Contemporary art is art is From the readymade to Arte Povera to the happening, art has also double face:double on theface: one on hand the itone allows hand ita certainallows apractice certain outsidepractice outside already characterizedalready characterized by a radical by ademocratization: radical democratization: this, for this, for been—at least in its initial impulse—non-art. Here it is surely the laws andthe logicslaws and of logicsthe discipline of the discipline it seeks toit undermineseeks to undermine(it (it example, wouldexample, be Jean-Françoiswould be Jean-François Lyotard’s Lyotard’stake (on “arttake in(on the “art in the “NO” ECHOING Duchamp who best exemplifies the refusal of representation, just is, as Laruelleis, as callsLaruelle it, calls“heretical”), it, “heretical”), but on the but other on theit cannotother it cannot age of postmodernity”),age of postmodernity”), or indeed orRosalind indeed Krauss’sRosalind (onKrauss’s our (on our as it is Allan Kaprow who gestures to the very limits of the frame but be caughtbut beby caughtthese veryby these forms very (insofar forms as(insofar it must as work it mustwithin work within “post-medium“post-medium condition”). condition”).42 From this42 Fromperspective this perspective it would beit would be THROUGHOUT TIME (and who does most to collapse or “blur” the art/life boundary). and with them).and with40 them).40 Malik who Malikis reinstating who is reinstating a certain aprogram—we certain program—we might even might say even say All this amounts to saying that from one perspective art history decision—aboutdecision—about what art shouldwhat art do. should Of course, do. Of it course, is always it is always gives us an account of how art has always been thought in relation possible topossible position to theposition other’s the point other’s of viewpoint as of the view ideological as the ideological to something outside itself. iv. Ideologyiv. Ideology critique critique one (witnessone the(witness Adorno/Lukács the Adorno/Lukács debates around debates autonomy around versusautonomy versus realism43),realism but it43 ),does but seem it doesto me seem that to positioning me that positioning art as art as There is a lot more to be said about this relationship between To return Toto returnsome of to my some earlier of my comments earlier aboutcomments Althusser about Althusserand and ideology critique—orideology critique—or as simply ascritical—and simply critical—and at the same at timethe same time art and non-art, especially in relation to Laruelle’s own ideas ideology, ideology,another take another on the take conjunction on the conjunction of non-philosophy of non-philosophy dismissingdismissing practices practicesthat are notthat committed are not committedto this critique, to this critique, about how an anti-philosophy (as opposed to non-philosophy) and art mightand artbe thatmight non-philosophy be that non-philosophy can help tocan diagnose help to anddiagnose and cannot butcannot limit butour limitunderstanding our understanding of art and of indeed art and of indeedits of its invariably sets up an “outside” that then gets incorporated in critique “Contemporarycritique “Contemporary Art” as a Art”whole. as Ita whole.might helpIt might to identify help to identify terrain ofterrain operation of operation(rather than, (rather for than,example, for openingexample, it opening up to it up to a renewed “definition” (hence my interest in the reciprocal a particulara particular logic at work—forlogic at example,work—for indeterminacy—thatexample, indeterminacy—that is, is, further adventures).further adventures).

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Nevertheless,Nevertheless, a key question a key arisingquestion from arising this fromparticular this particular For me thisFor experience me this experience resonates resonateswith the radicalwith the immanence radical immanenceof of perspectiveperspective is whether is there whether is indeedthere isa non-artindeed apractice non-art thatpractice that non-philosophy.non-philosophy. Indeed, as Indeed, I also asmentioned I also mentionedabove, there above, is there is utilizes artutilizes as its art material, as its material,but untethers but untethersit from its it dominantfrom its dominant something somethingsurprising—and surprising—and yet at the yet same at timethe sameobvious—about time obvious—about logics (whateverlogics (whateverthese might these be); might and, be);if so, and, whether if so, this whether is this is Laruelle’sLaruelle’s idea of a ideaform of athought form of that thought is from that the is realfrom the real something somethingdifferent differentto what art to alreadywhat art does. already It seemsdoes. clear,It seems clear, rather thanrather yet anotherthan yet interpretation another interpretation of it. As ofI hope it. AsI have I hope I have here, thathere, it is that the itdefinition is the definition of art that of determinesart that determines its “non” its “non” made clear,made art clear, practice art ispractice often involvedis often ininvolved this other in this kind other kind (and, as such,(and, ifas thesuch, dominant if the logicsdominant are logics indeed are indeterminacy, indeed indeterminacy, of presentation.of presentation. The conference, The conference, however, madehowever, the differencemade the difference or perhapsor representation, perhaps representation, then this thenwill thisdefine will non-art define as non-art non- as non- between thebetween two perspectives—or the two perspectives—or gestures—suddenly gestures—suddenly very apparent. very apparent. representationrepresentation and determinate). and determinate). A further Aquestion further isquestion whether is whether art—or non-art—canart—or non-art—can itself escape itself these escape interminable these interminable circuits ofcircuits of Indeed, performanceIndeed, performance in general in has general this qualityhas this of quality producing of producing definitiondefinition and redefinition. and redefinition. Can it offer Can ait different offer a differentkind of kind of differencedifference through a throughcut. It ais cut. non-representation It is non-representation par excellence par excellence knowledge knowledge“outside” “outside”art as it artis typically as it is typicallyunderstood? understood?44 44 insofar asinsofar in its asvery in livenessits very itliveness offers itan offers“experience” an “experience” of life of life “outside” “outside”representation. representation.46 However,46 thereHowever, is alsothere the is questionalso the question here as tohere whether as to at whether least someat least kind someof minimal kind of framing minimal is framing is v. Performancev. Performance fictions fictions required torequired make it to art, make or it else art, it or becomes else it “just becomes life” “just (this, life” (this, again, is again,the edge is thatthe edgeKaprow that traverses). Kaprow traverses). In fact, itIn seemsfact, toit seems to Leading onLeading from the on above,from the and above, changing and perspectivechanging perspective a little, a little, me that a melife that might a life well might need wellsome needframing—a some framing—aperformance, performance, as it as it there is alsothere the is compellingalso the compelling gnostic “account” gnostic “account”that non- that non- were—in orderwere—in for orderit be fortaken it outbe takenof the out frame of thewithin frame which within it iswhich it is philosophyphilosophy gives of thegives real of thatthe realI mentioned that I mentionedat the beginning at the beginningof of usually experienced/perceivedusually experienced/perceived (what Laruelle (what callsLaruelle the callsworld). the world). this essay.this At essay.the end At of the the end conference of the conference on “Fiction on as“Fiction Method” as Method” Counter-intuitively,Counter-intuitively, art practice, art practice,as performance, as performance, can be more can be more (the progenitor(the progenitor of this book), of this Tim book), Etchells Tim performedEtchells performeda “re-mix” a “re-mix” real than reallife thanbecause life it because is framed it is(at framed least (atminimally). least minimally). of the previousof the speaker,previous M.speaker, John Harrison, M. John Harrison,and his compelling and his compelling reading ofreading one of ofhis one own of short his ownstories. short45 stories. Both presentations—45 Both presentations— The modelsThe and models fictions and referredfictions toreferred earlier to in earlier this essay in this essay one a pieceone of a fiction,piece of thefiction, other thea performance—were other a performance—were somewhat somewhat demonstratedemonstrate ways of sidestepping ways of sidestepping more typical, more oftentypical, unseeable, often unseeable, different differentto the previous to the papers.previous Indeed, papers. if Indeed, the latter if the had latter had frames of framesreference. of reference. They offer They one offerset of one approaches set of approaches to enabling to enabling generally generallybeen about been fiction about as fiction method as(albeit method involving (albeit involvingcreative creative ourselves ourselvesto think ofto artthink practice of art aspractice the production as the production of fictions of fictions as well asas critical well as approachescritical approaches and interventions), and interventions), here, in bothhere, in both that allow—almostthat allow—almost as a side aseffect—for a side effect—for a glimpse aof glimpse the real of the real of these lastof these contributions last contributions to the conference, to the conference, we were presented we were presented (or, to refer(or, againto refer to theagain conference, to the conference, it is the itvery is differencethe very difference with fictionwith as fiction method asitself. method With itself. both Withit was both as itif wasthe aswhole if the whole between thebetween two fictional the two fictionalworlds—our worlds—our typical world typical and worldthe world and the world conferenceconference assemblage assemblage had somehow had tipped—and somehow tipped—and phase-shifted—from phase-shifted—from an art practicean art canpractice present—that can present—that allows for allows a small for part a small of the part of the being “about”being the “about” real tothe being real “of”to being (or alongside)“of” (or alongside) it. it. real to leakreal through). to leak through).Again, unless Again, a fictionunless ais fiction produced, is produced,the the

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– FICTION AS– FICTION METHOD AS – METHOD – – NON-PHILOSOPHY– NON-PHILOSOPHY AND ART PRACTICE AND ART –PRACTICE – danger is dangerthat a ispractice that a merelypractice presents merely apresents piece of a thepiece world of theas world as his “A Newhis Presentation “A New Presentation of Non-Philosophy,” of Non-Philosophy,” not least notwhen least he when he it surroundsit surroundsus on an everydayus on an basis,everyday without basis, any without difference any difference (as (as suggests thatsuggests non-philosophy that non-philosophy might be themight only be “chancethe only for “chance an for an is the caseis withthe caseart practiceswith art practicesthat simply that archive simply what archive exists what exists effective effectiveutopia.”49 utopia.”49 without transformingwithout transforming it). It is, it). then, It is,through then, the through performance the performance of a fictionof athat fiction art canthat foreground art can foreground the always the already always fictional already fictional This effectiveThis effectiveutopia would utopia mean would living mean life living away lifefrom awaythose from those status of statusa world of it a isworld different it is differentfrom. from. forms thatforms have thatcaught have and caught restrict and it:restrict it is it:to refuseit is to refuse philosophy,philosophy, especially especially in its key in operation its key operationof producing of producingthe the fiction offiction a (separate) of a (separate) self—or, rather,self—or, its rather, positing its ofpositing the of the vi. The fictionvi. The fictionof a self of a self latter as latternot a fictionas not abut fiction as a truthbut as (the a truth self (theas product self as product of a certainof adecision certain thatdecision is then that occluded, is then occluded,hidden from hidden that from that PerformancePerformance art aside, art it aside,seems toit meseems that to non-philosophy me that non-philosophy is is subject). subject).Non-philosophy Non-philosophy might then might be about then untetheringbe about untethering the the also at itsalso most at interestingits most interesting and compelling and compelling when it is when thought it is thought self from selfits auto-positioning,from its auto-positioning, its own enthronement its own enthronement (and as (and as in relationin torelation a life tothat a lifeis lived that differently,is lived differently, or in relation or in relation such it hassuch something it has somethingvery specific very tospecific offer recentto offer accounts recent andaccounts and to Michel toFoucault’s Michel Foucault’s suggestion suggestion (though for (though different for differentreasons) reasons) critiques critiquesof the “Anthropocene”). of the “Anthropocene”). that “everyone’sthat “everyone’s life become life a workbecome of aart.” work47 of This art.” is 47to This “apply” is to “apply” non-philosophynon-philosophy to expanded to practicesexpanded practicesbeyond the beyond gallery, the butgallery, also but also In fact, itIn seemsfact, thatit seems what thatfollows what from follows this frominsight this is insight not is not to think aboutto think aesthetic about aestheticpractices, practices, in more general in more terms, general in terms, in the “dissolving”the “dissolving” of the self, of thebut, self, we might but, say,we might a holding say, aof holding it of it relation torelation what Guattari to what calledGuattari the called production the production of subjectivity of subjectivity in a lighter,in a morelighter, contingent more contingent manner—as, manner—as, precisely, precisely, a fiction a fiction (and to the(and expanded to the ethico-aestheticexpanded ethico-aesthetic paradigm thatparadigm is implied that is by implied by (and, insofar(and, as insofar the self as isthe the self anchor is the point anchor for pointnumerous for othernumerous other this). this). fictions—thefictions—the different differentworlds through worlds which through a self which moves—then a self moves—then these too theseare seen too asare fictions). seen as fictions). Crucially, Crucially, this might this also might also Indeed, asIndeed, I have asgestured I have towardgestured above, toward we above,might wantwe might to ask want to ask mean the possibilitymean the possibility of producing of producingother fictions other offictions the self of the self whether thewhether very structurethe very structureof typical of subjectivity—and typical subjectivity—and of a of a (or other (orfictions other offictions non-self), of non-self), and with thatand withthe explorationthat the exploration “self”—is “self”—isnot itself not the itself product the of product a certain of aphilosophical certain philosophical of other waysof other of being ways inof thebeing world. in the50 Althoughworld.50 thereAlthough is notthere the is not the decision (broadlydecision construed),(broadly construed), one that isone lived that onis alived day-to-day on a day-to-day space herespace to go here into to Laruelle’s go into Laruelle’s own writings own onwritings this other on this kind other kind basis.48 Abasis. non-philosophical48 A non-philosophical take on subjectivity take on subjectivity will involve will a involve a of subject,of wesubject, might notewe might his conceptnote his of concept the “generic of the human,”“generic human,” diagnosis diagnosisof such a ofpositioning such a positioning (again, typical (again, subjectivity), typical subjectivity), or “stranger,”or “stranger,” which he describeswhich he describesas a “radical as a ordinariness”“radical ordinariness” but, for me,but, more for interestingme, more interesting is that it is might that pointit might to thepoint to the that is neverthelessthat is nevertheless at odds with at oddsthe worldwith the(and world which (and we alwayswhich we always possibilitypossibility of being inof thebeing world in thewithout world a withoutfixed sense a fixed of asense of a already are,already over are,and aboveover andany above“assumed” any “assumed”subjectivity). subjectivity).51 51 typical selftypical (with self all (withthe attendant all the attendantissues this issues unfixity this canunfixity can bring). Laruellebring). seemsLaruelle to beseems suggesting to be suggesting something somethingsimilar in similar in A compellingA compelling final question—which final question—which I have gestured I have towardsgestured towards

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– FICTION AS METHOD – Bibliography –––. “Immanence: A Life.” In Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. Translated by Anne Boyman, throughout my essay—is what this terrain “outside” the self might 25–33. New York: Zone Books, Adorno, Theodor, Walter Benjamin, 2011. be like and if, indeed, it can be explored. Mackay writes well on Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and this discovery of the generic “beneath” the subject produced by Georg Lukàcs. Aesthetics and –––, and Félix Guattari. Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and philosophy and how we might begin to experience and experiment Politics. Translated by Ronald Taylor. London: NLB, 1977. Schizophrenia. Translated by with it (for it is not a given, but, to echo Deleuze and Guattari, Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and needs to be constructed, piece by piece).52 It is perhaps with Beech, Amanda. “Art and Its Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone ‘Science’.” In Speculative Aesthetics. this grand vision of the work of non-philosophy that we begin to Press, 1984. Edited by Robin Mackay, Luke see the more profound connections with, and radical implications Pendrell, and James Trafford. –––. What Is Philosophy? for, what might be call a non-art practice. This, then, is Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. London: Verso, the experimental exploration—but also the construction and Brassier, Ray. “Axiomatic Heresy: 1994. performance—of new worlds and new kinds of non-subjects adequate The Non-Philosophy of François Foucault, Michel. “On the and appropriate to them. Or, more simply: fiction as method. Laruelle.” Radical Philosophy, no. 121 (September/October 2003): Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview 24–35. of Work in Progress.” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Essential –––. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. and Extinction. Basingstoke: Edited by Paul Rabinow. Translated Palgrave, 2007. by Robert Hurley, 253–80. London: Penguin, 2000. –––. “The View from Nowhere.” Identities: Journal of Politics, Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Gender and Culture 8, no. 2 In Art in Theory, 1900–1990. (Summer 2011): 7–23. Edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 809–13. Oxford: Basil Burrows, David. “Performance Blackwell, 1992. Fictions.” In Performance Fictions. Edited by David Burrows, 47–70. Krauss, Rosalind. A Voyage on the Birmingham: Article Press, 2010. North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Burrows, David, and Simon Thames and Hudson, 1999. O’Sullivan. Mythopoesis–Myth- Science–Mythotechnesis: Laruelle, François. “Fragments of Fictioning in Contemporary Art. an Anti-Guattari.” Linguistic Capital. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Translated by Charles Wolfe. Press, forthcoming. Accessed January 7, 2017. https:// linguisticcapital.files.wordpress. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and com/2013/03/laruelle_fragments- Repetition. Translated by Paul of-an-anti-guattari.pdf. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

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