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OH, SUCK ME OFF
Donna Haraway's 'A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century' 2 spawned and inspired a generation of female replicants. These mutating and proliferating women, unlike the techno-atavists "obstinately clinging to a bad faith founded in outmoded dualisms: mind/body, organism/machine, self/other, master/slave, high/low",~ have predominately infiltrated cyberspace networks reconstructing a Symbolic of what it means to be female, a human subject and to have control over, and interaction with, one's framework of technology. Cyborg replication is often uncoupled and distanced from organic reproduction and unmediated corporeal and libidinal investments. Personal narratives and dreams are re-invented and reinscribed in a different, interactive, Symbolically coded structure. Cyborg sexuality and identity can be such a nice prophylactic against heterosexism and phallogocentric constructs of Woman as Other, Virgin or Mother: "My mistress enters my sensory orbit."4
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - gamegirls simultaneously organism and machine - who populate cyberspace ambiguously and polymorphously, like Intelligent Mist. The cyborg is feminist ontology and epistemology and it gives us politics:
"The computer is the prized toy of our essentially male culture. To use technologies which are really intended for a clean slick commercial boy's world, to make personal, bodily, feminine work, and to re-insert this work into mainstream culture, into art discourse and into society, is a political act." 5
The exuberant proliferation of cyborgs in contemporary literature, as well as the phantasmatic interest in cyborgs that can be witnessed in the most different cultural spheres, gives evidence of a cultural shift of the boundaries between the natural and the technological that already has a deep impact on the human use of body and mind. Fantasies of cyborgs seem to suggest that there is a dimension of postmodern subjectivity which can only be accounted for with categories able to grasp the intrusion of technology into or even the technologizing of body, mind, memory, desire, emotion and experience. The female cyborg as a postmodern mythological figure may symbolise a transition to a new notion of the subject that is in a more general way linked to what Gabriele Schwab in 'Cyborgs and Cybernetic Intertexts' has heuristically called the "holonomy of the subject." 6 The body, organised like a text, is not linear but holonomic, its intertextual relations are holistic. Any new "text" (information) is stored and assimilated into a new "whole." Changes in the code lead to irreversible mutations because there are o boundaries left between texts and intertexts. Subjectivity presents as a form of intertextuality.
S/he, the cyborg, is a creature in a post-gendered, post-dualistic, post-Oedipal, and perhaps truly postmodern, world. VNS images a "muscular hybrid", which is infinitely more complex than imaging Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds cellotaped together. S/he is rather a product of a generalised technologizing of the world and particularly of the ways in which artists incorporate contemporary notions of cybernetics or field and system theories. The intertextual cyborg is an experimental subject under the effects of cybernetics and technology - the coupling between bodies of texts, technology and theory.
The body, from this perspective, is more than an organic body. It becomes a text, a screen onto which cultural fantasies, desires, fears, anxieties, hopes, and utopias are projected. Cybernetic organisms inspire such projections because they are the products of a technological, or artificial, manipulation of the body. The fascination with such technological manipulations stems from the fact that the manipulated bodies are, on the unconscious level, also perceived as phantasms of the fragmented body grotesque & uncanny. Their grotesque realism invites us to invest them with all sorts of unconscious images. This is why the cyborg may, in the most diverse cultural spheres, become the object of complex semiotic performances and the locus of postmodern phantasms of body and mind. There is also a way in which television culture establishes an interconnectedness with others that constantly blurs the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, which may be enough to produce a culture of cyborgs.
These creatures (and their creators) are resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity: "She decodes my perversities in nanoseconds" (VNS video). Maryella Hatfield's Range of Experience Productions Inc. ironically explores a future world where VR (Virtual Reality) has replaced dreams and the experience of emotions and life nuances has been lost. Hatfield has invented the Dream Base selector - a machine which enables you to re-live (repressed) experiences. The content of Dement's work Typhoid Mary is, according to the artist, highly personal and corporeal. It has to do with her own experience, memories, aggression, flesh, desire, madness, bloodlust and fantasy. Her work follows "the logic of dream and hallucination to create a subterranean, subcutaneous narrative of personal symbols." But she remains, always, in control.
Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define different political possibilities and limits from those constructed by the mundane fictions of Man and Woman - "I'm psyching for some hard down-time with a free radical." They are oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden i.e. through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished (w)hole, a city and cosmos. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. As illegitimate offspring they are exceedingl unfaithful to their origins. Their Fathers are, after all, inessential "millennia later I am accommodated in an oral cavity which amplifies the workings of her secret cybernetic body ... she transforms me into pure code pure speed ..."
Kim Bounds' Autarky explores the rejection of patriarchal social systems, symbolically re-instating goddess philosophy and attempting to incite more women to integrate digital technology into their lives. Networld by Faye Maxwell is a surrealistic voyage through deep dataspace somewhere between the inside of a computer and human imagination. This is a space where electricity, bytes, bits an numbers are transformed into a sensual and organic dance. Sintu is dancing freely by herself when she is seduce by the strength of a beautiful patterned male body. The dancer finally become joined.
VNS Matrix's All New Gen, leading band of renegade DNA Sluts, Patina de Panties, Dentata and the princess of Slime, grants the wish for (s)heroic quests, exuberant eroticism and serious politics. She is omnipresent intelligence, an anarcho-cyber terrorist with multiple guises whose main-aim i to virally infect and corrupt the informatics of domination and terminate the moral code.
In this game you become a component of the matrix, joining ANG in her quest to sabotage the databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe ...
Monsters still defined the limits of normalcy in the human imagination. Before they successfully interfaced their bodies with cybernetic matrices, human beings had to appreciate that any desire for stable identity was useless and retarded certain monstrous instincts necessary for healthy interface. Luckily, monsters represented a very large, indelible territory of habits, taboos and denials in their psyches. Monsters still exist and their semiologies continue to proliferate. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallocentrism. The name of the game is infiltration and re-mapping the possible futures outside the (chromo) phallic patriarchial code.
All battles take place in the Contested Zone, a terrain of propaganda, sub version and transgression. Your guide through the Contested Zone are renegade DNA Sluts, abdicators from the oppressive superhero regime, who have joined ANG in her fight for data liberation...
Transformations are effected by virus vectors carrying (hopefully) a new developmental code - Virus of the New World Disorder. Humans were preoccupied with perfectibility. They often said, in the mirroring way they had of saying almost everything, "I want to make myself perfectly clear" and I want to make my self perfectly clear." Since the difference between these statements was evident only when the written form was carefully read or self was correctly enunciated orally, human beings were prone to totalizing arguments, theories of unity and hierarchical dualisms. GAMEGIRL OBJECTIVE: To defeat Big Daddy Mainframe, a transplanetary military industrial imperial data environment.
The path of infiltration is treacherous and you will encounter many obstacles. The most wicked is Circuit Boy - a dangerous technobimbo...
with a gratuitous 3D detachable dick which, when unscrewed transforms into a cellular phone. The phone is a direct line to the Cortex Crones, brain matter of the matrix and guardians of the digi cryst. However, el clitoris es llnea directa a la matriz.
Technological determinism is only one ideological space opened by the reconceptualisation of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world. 'Textualization' of everything in post-structural, post modern, post-real theory has been damned for its disregard for lived relations of domination that ground the 'play' of arbitrary reading. Post-modern (feminist) strategies, such as cyborg myths, undermine the certainty of what counts as real, probably fatally. The transcendent authorisation of interpretation is lost and with it the ontology grounding 'Western' epistemology. The alternative is not necessarily cynicism or faithlessness like the accounts of technological determinism destroying 'man' by the 'machine' or 'political action' by the 'text.' Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artifacts have politics, so why shouldn't we? On your dangerous and necessary journey to screw up BDM, Circuit Boy and the Cybermen:
You will be fuelled by G-Slime. Please monitor your levels. Bonding with the DNA Sluts will replenish your supplies.
I can vouch for this strategy, especially if you remove more than your shoes in the Bonding Booth]. "She willingly slid into the other she had always felt herself to have been. She could use her body to connect with the networks of her choice."
Be prepared to question your gendered biological construction.
Humans classified themselves by gender, which severely impeded the development of social relations such as those involving reproduction, science and technology. One by-product of gender identifications was labelled the Oedipal complex, a kind of psychological virus. Recall this early but already lethal example from my databank: "Ladies and Gentlemen ... Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of femininity ... Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply you are yourselves the problem." The Oedipal complex was promoted as an irreversible development and caused many disfigured identifications. Consider the transfer of guilt to an entire social class of women in this example or in concepts such as purity and mother. Such perversions almost certainly account for the brief appearance of Oedipal chimera during early cyborg development. Fortunately, Oedipal chimera extinguished themselves on cue by mirroring their identity in dualism. From this, human beings learned to distinguish illegitimate fusions that are ethically unproductive from those that are critically speculative. They are fast becoming post-Oedipal, like me. The potential of cybernatic worlds rests with the feminist cyborg. Salutations, pussy.
Be aware there is no moral code in the Zone.
Once they articulate the representational problems raised by cyborg
technology, they will have achieved the status of partial explanations. Then
monsters will represent the potential community in the human imagination and
they will say, "I want to make my selves partially appear."
Enjoy. "We move through this post-real world at the speed of thought"' (VNS video). "It didn't look like a Pep Cola ad. It was actually someone personalising of a space." 7
A language of the past
Current runs through bodies
and then it doesn't.
On again.
Off again.
Always two things switching.
One thing instantly replaces another.
It was the language
of the Future.
-Laurie Anderson, 'The Language of the Future'
2 Donna Haraway, 'A Cyborg Manifesro' in Simians Cyborgs and Women- The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991.
3 Jane Goodall, 'Nightmares in the net and Bugs in the System' in Broadsheet Vol. 23 No. 1 (Autumn 1994).
4 VNS Matrix, All New Gen, video.
5 Linda Dement, Typhoid Mary, Information about the work.
6 Gabriele Schwab, 'Cyborgs and Cybernetic Intertexts: On Postmodern Phantasms of Body and Mind' Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, (eds.) Patrick O'Donnell and Robert Con Davis Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989.
7 Moira Corby in 'My Memory Your Past an interview with Moira Corby in MESH No.2 (Summer 1993).
© JYANNI STEFFENSEN, MESH #3 Autumn 1994. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts