[Interview] Sadie Plant, Cyberfeminist, Writer
Q: You are a self-proclaimed cyberfeminist. What does that mean to you?
A: I have only used it as a descriptive term, and unfortunately I have acquired it as label. I always wish that I hadn't proclaimed myself a cyberfeminist!! What you get is publishers publicity’s gloss, which is in itself an interesting syndrome to see the packaging in operation. i think that a lot of people have read the work that is called cyberfeminist, and these people aren’t necessarily feminist at all. They are looking at complex dynamics and so on, they are not getting the cyberfeminist spin on it. You know, my book "Zeros and Ones " certainly intervenes in a lot of feminist debates, but I don’t see it as a feminist book, and I think that a lot of the more intelligent readings of it don’t either. So there’s an interesting discrepancy between what’s on the cover of the book and all the publicity surrounding it, and what’s actually in the book...which is a bit of a shame. But having said all that, there is something interesting about this term Cyberfeminism , which is why I mentioned it in the very first place. I have no idea what it would mean to be a cyberfeminist, but there was a moment a few years ago where people started talking about this word cyberfeminism. Amongst the things that first intrigued me about it was that it seemed to pop up almost at the same time in lots of different places, most notably Australia.i guess that people were sort of seeing the limit of the crude oldtraditional notion that technology is male, and any attempt to get beyond that got tagged with the cyberfeminist label. But l see it as something much more interesting than only that: one ofits potential uses is-not considering it as some kind of movementor anything but as a possible way of looking back on the history of feminism and of <women’s lib>, and try to tell a much more materialist and non-linear story about how that has happened.There has been a tendency to either see feminism as a political movement making certain changes happen, therefore claiming responsibility in a positive sense...or at the same time there’s the feeling that it failed to achieve certain things, and is therefore blaming itself. But I think that a political movement is never entirely responsible. That is, IT is not making anything happen...the human element is not the only element of issue; it’s very much tied up with really complex technical, economical and cultural changes.
The danger of moving in that direction is that you could easily slip in some sort of crude economic sermonism, which is an equally bad mistake. But I have tried to find a point where you can get between those two positions. You basically deal with questions as lf any positive social changes are simply a matter of political decisions and political activity, then presumably one could have had feminism at any point in the last 2500 years...but WHY NOW? Why was it in the 20th Century that it really happened?” Obviously then it becomes inextricable from various material changes.
The technological ones are particularly interesting, HUT because they are very determining or making anything happen, but because they have a close relation to the infrastructure of how things work in a culture, and they provide very stark examples of different kinds of organization. So,«for example, the shift from the telephone system to the internet really does parallel very similar cultural and social shifts.
In a sense i have been trying to get to a notion of a non-linear history of feminism. l have never quite put it in those terms, but there’s certainly that side of cyberfeminism as well. From that point of view, you can look back historically, and see that the Industrial Revolution was like the first kind of significant shift in social relations on a genderfront, and then obviously the World Wars were also a major point.
THAT was initially more the kind of cyberfeminism l was interested
Q:
I‘d like your comment on this quote from " VHS Matrix" <Bitch Mutant Manifesto> The net’s the partheno- genetic bitch -mutant feral child of big daddy mainframe. She’s out of control, Kevin, she‘s the sociopathic emergent system. Lock up your children, gaffer tape the cunt‘s mouth and shove a rat up her arse.”
A: Gosh!! What can I say about this ? OK, when I first saw vns Matrix” work, I was so impressed with it because it seemed to be as far away from a kind of <victim feminism> as you could get. At that time that attitude was so refreshing! You know, that sense of some insidious, emergent, uncontrollable tendency...which is of course by no means a fiction of the VNS Matrix collective imagination...it‘s a broadly felt cultural fear. I think that VHS Matrix had a way of articulating that, and became some kind of beacon for a lot of women who just couldn’t go on because they became associated with the victim role beauty of vns Matrix is that you could obviously read their claims as just metaphorical statements,but it’s not just artistic fantasy. I mean, the partheno-genetic quality of it as an emergent organization, the whole mutation and feral tendencies... If it would only be a metaphorical statement, then it still would be powerful, but what‘s so impressive about it, is that it is talking about actual developments as well.
So, for all those reasons I‘m a fan.