Nat: What I loved about your performance
(in the Beursschouwburg, Brussels) was that you structured it as a sermon.
So you ritualise technology and technologise religion - an issue you also
take up in your book when you talk about Margaret Atwoods novel The
Handmaid’s Tale. Can you tell me more about the relation between technology
and ritual?
Anne: We can start with the performance here. There are actually two
impulses to the performance: one is to try to puncture not only the rituals
and religiosity that exist around technology, but also the ritual and religiosity
that exist around post-modern theory, much of which is written by men claiming
to be proclaiming the nature of woman. Post-modernism takes itself so seriously,
but you just cannot take the pronouncements they offer on women seriously
because it’s just simply an impossible epistemological position for women.
Nat: Also in your book you claim that feminism should "crash the
post-modern party" (31). You express caution with post-modern theory, since
it tends to leave out the socio-cultural context and indulges in text and
discourse. Nevertheless, a lot of the recent cultural criticism involving
technology (and I mean the feminist works here as well) exhibits an obsession
with, for example, Deleuze and Guattari; all you hear is rhizomes and that
sort of stuff. 1000 Plateaux was published over 20 years ago...why
are we using these models? Are they relevant at all for the new developments
in media and culture?
Anne: Deleuze and Guattari are a perfect example of people who end
up being discourse machines. They put in circulation a set of ideas and
terms: for example to think the animate instead of the inanimate; to think
flows instead of objects...Now these are really powerful terms and concepts.
But what happens is that they get turned into this industry to produce
more discourse, that then gets applied to the post-modern scene in a way
that seems seamless. I mean, people will take up Deleuze and Guattari as
if they are the beginning and the end of everything we need to know about
our contemporary moment. I’m just a little suspicious of the seamlessness,
you know. There don’t seem to be any contradictions, there’s always an
answer...just like there always seems to be an answer in Foucault. You
can always read the current moment through these theoretical lenses, and
everything would be taken care of. I think that you have to start looking
at the material conditions. I know that there are some feminists who are
doing really good work on Deleuze and Guattari, and who are trying to theorise
gender that has a materiality to it, so that’s a really good project. However,
I don’t think that’s the project Deleuze and Guattari did, but it’s something
other people are going to have to pick up on. When you think about "flows"
and the global circuit of capital, then I still think that it’s a theory
and worldview produced out of a location of dominance, rather than a theory
and worldview that can articulate what it might be to be somewhere else
in the circuit of capital. It’s a discourse that is strangely de-materialised
for as much as it invokes the body (the body without organs)...now of course
that may not be their [ Deleuze and Guattari]
fault, that may be the fault of theory. This is not to say that we shouldn’t
do theory...of course we should. But I guess there’s always the danger
that you get so seduced by theory - whether it is post-modernist theory
or feminist theory - that you just get pulled into these discursive constructs
and language games, and forget to try to wrestle with what the material
life is like.
Nat: You teach at Georgia Tech a cultural studies program which covers
science and technology. Recently there has been a plethora of books in
the field of cultural studies which deals with science and technology.
How do you see this recent development, and how do you think cultural studies
try to bridge the so-called "soft" sciences with the "hard" sciences?
Anne: I am actually teaching a course right now in "Science, Technology
and Gender", which is informed by feminist theory, techno-science studies
and cultural studies. So I am really wrestling with a whole set of related
issues. The interesting thing about cultural studies’ engagement with science
and technology, is that it seems like it just happened. It seems like we
just started paying attention to science and technology, and oftentimes
people would trace that back to Donna Haraway’s "Cyborg Manifesto". Although
the "Cyborg Manifesto" was a very pivotal piece, and functioned like a
manifesto by getting a whole bunch of people engaged in the debates and
so on, it actually isn’t the place where cultural studies started to engage
science and technology. In fact, there’s a long history of cultural studies
- informed by the Frankfurt School and Marxist theories - that had an engagement
with science and technology. For example, Marx’ work about the fate of
labour in an increasingly industrial world was certainly a theory about
the nature of the human being in an age of technology. What I try to argue
about this all, is that these are not just popular questions or fascinations,
but that cultural studies has long had a fascination with it; it has long
been worried about it, and has long tried to figure out how one lives with
a science that seems to have a will of its own, and a technology which
seems so determining. I think because science and technology seem to be
so divorce of any kind of determining structure, and that by corollary
they seem to be the motor of things, there’s this is increased urgency
to deal with these matters. And I DO think we have to deal with these things,
but we need the historical perspective: we need to know "how do we get
here" in order to know how to do things differently. We need to understand
how science both enables us to do things, so we have to understand the
dynamics of the hard sciences, because they have had a profound impact
on the quality of life, especially for the "developed" countries and our
understanding of "natural" phenomena. Further we also need to understand
how technologies get employed to serve certain agendas, and start to figure
out how they may be deployed to serve other agendas. And then we’ve got
to start and figure out what an other agenda IS, which is a whole other
project... So there seem to be lots of ways to come into the issue of science,
technology and culture: one is to look at the historical way that cultural
studies have engaged these issues; one is to think about how we can live
with science and technology. Another is an issue which we deal with at
Georgia Tech: how do you educate people who are going to be scientific
and technological leaders differently, so that maybe they will DO things
differently? How do you help them mutate, so that they’re not the same
technological bureaucrats that preceded them?
Nat: What role do you see women play in this account?
Anne: One thing that I try to argue, as in the last chapter of my book
"Feminism for the Incurably Informed", is that women have always had a
relationship to technology. They have always been technological innovators;
they have not been written into the histories of technology - in fact they
have been definitionally written out of those histories. That is, if a
woman is doing it, then by definition it is not a technology; for example,
things like food preparation, menstruation products, childcare, the construction
of domestic space and so on. All of those are technologies that create
the world, that create our ability to live in the world, and those have
been "traditionally" women’s domains. So to claim that women have been
technophobic just doesn’t make sense to me, especially when you look at
class relations. Working class women, labourers, and servants were the
machines that performed the daily labour of making a life for the people
for whom they worked - whether they were slaves or servants or paid help.
Now, there is probably a technophobia, because women get taught not to
want a certain kind of technology; they are taught to think that certain
technologies are off limits, such as computer technologies, media technologies
etc. So there’s a gender division of technologies: simple and domestic
technologies we can have, other technologies have been male-identified.
So we get taught not to trespass on other people’s technologies, but that
doesn’t occur because of our technophobia...we don’t trespass because we’ve
been taught NOT to, or because we haven’t been taught HOW to! We haven’t
been taught how to tinker, or how to solder, or how to program, or how
to take something apart and put it back together again. You know, Autumn
Stanley has got a great book called Women of Invention, and it’s
an exhaustive history of all the women who have contributed to the major
technological domains, from the classic philosophers to women who are now
practising scientists and technologists. She makes the case in this 600-page
book that there is no technology that hasn’t had a woman involved in its
development. So it’s not hard-wired in us that we can’t do it; it’s just
the way in which the social structures channel us one way, and men an other
way.
Nat: In a recent interview you said that you want to get more production
experience in new media. How important do you think "involvement" is for
cultural criticism? Moreover, how much of technical skill do you need to
be a cultural critic of technology?
Anne: I really think you need to know what the labour is like to build
these projects. If I were thinking about this in terms of being a cultural
critic - for me that means that you have a commitment to understanding
the material substrate of technology: how these things get made; who makes
them; what is the labour involved and so on. Now that does not mean that
you need to sit for 50 hours a week soldering chips, but I think you need
to know what it is to solder a chip...so that you can imagine what it must
be like to do that day in day out for 50 or 60 hours a week. You need to
know what it feels like to get your hands burnt by the solder. Likewise
with multi-media. I don’t think you necessarily need to be a multi-media
artist to do criticism of multi-media projects. But I think you have to
understand what it means to sit at a screen for 12 or 15 hours a day and
program something in an application interface that takes up 30 seconds
of screen time. It’s easy to criticise the end product without understanding
the material labour that goes into producing it; the criticism can never
be that simple, though. So silicon chips are perhaps the tool of the devil,
but they are also the embodiment of the labour of women who labour for
50 and 60 hours a week building these chips. They are not just the tools
of the elite, but they are also the material means by which a whole group
of people are oppressed at a physical level. Now multi-media is very labour
intensive, and it is often not a single person’s project. So for that reason
I actually think that there is hope for cultural critics to get more involved
in it, without being the ones who are actually programming pixels and so
on. You have to be willing to invest yourself, even if you’re not going
to be the expert in it or make it your career. You should know the basics
because that’s empowering critically (you understand the labour involved)
and it’s empowering creatively (you get a sense what you can do with this).
That’s my hope for multi-media and these new technologies: they will enable
women and men who have a critical perspective to give form to the latter,
and to get it to circulate in a way that ‘zines are rather limited, and
academic papers as well. But hey, why not put up a web page, do a collage
or a performance? These are mechanisms of circulation that the new media
enable, and I think that everybody needs to be involved in that. It’s that
moment when you have an emergent media, that has not totally been won over
yet by one agenda.
Nat: In your book you point out that the Harawayian concept
of the cyborg foregrounds the opposition between machine and human; that
is, "it defines the meaning of both the term ‘human’ and ‘artificial’"
(33). How do you see that technologies indeed "perform" humanity and artificiality?
Is this performance gendered in any way? And why are some technological
performances naturalised by our culture?
Anne: I would say that one example of a naturalised technological
performance is that the computer performs masculinity, in the way that
it enacts rationality. It enacts rationality because that’s the mechanism
that drives the computer. People are trying to contest and break that;
so artificial intelligence and artificial life programs are trying to make
the computer NOT perform rationality, but perform spontaneity, irrationality,
and so on. I think that computers are both props and stages. They are props
for the performance of gender: men use them to augment the fact that they
are men. But it’s also a stage for gender in terms of the space it make
available to us: it’s one more place where we perform ourselves. Given
the fact that our notion of ourselves is often a gendered construct, it
is another space for performing gender. Now this is imbued in cyberspatial
places like MUDs, MOOs, and chatrooms, but it’s also in the applications
that get built...that’s another place for performing a gendered sensibility.
We built a multi-media project that we took to the UN
Women’s Conference in Beijing, and that was totally designed as a piece
of feminist multi-media. We designed it with an explicit commitment to
feminist aesthetics, feminist narrative theory, and feminist documentary.
Thus the multi-media application was another stage for us to stage our
identity...an identity perhaps not so much tied to our bodies, but certainly
tied to our social ontology. So I think that computers in particular are
technologies that "prop" us up, as well as offer a stage. And the liberatory
potential of this lies in the fact that with a stage you’re always thinking
that there’s a possibility for doing something different, whereas with
a prop there’s the implication that it’s always going to reinforce something
that is already in motion or something that is already given. And I think
that the hope of the cyborgs is that in our engagements with technology
something new could happen...it’s a space of indeterminacy. This is, actually,
the more radical insight about Haraway: the cyborg is neither organic nor
machinic, it’s both...and we don’t know what that means. We can’t exhaust
that definitionally, because sometimes it’s organic and sometimes it’s
machinic, and sometimes it violates the principle of both, and I think
THAT is the promise of monsters.
Nat: I’d like to ask you about your opinion on the "post-human" body.
Is the euphoria of so-called "post-humanists" (like for example the extropians)
naive? Is there such a thing as a posthuman body at all? Where do you situate
it?
Anne: I first of all think that the post-human body is a useful abstraction.
When I think about another inflection of the cyborg, I think of it now
through the last series of Star Trek with the "borgs". Another variation
of cyborg identity is an identity that is totally de-individuated: we are
members of a hive, and we are not only de-humanised, but of some mechanically
implanted consciousness that is instinctual and programmatic. When I think
about post-human identity in the sense of the "borg"(being activated by
the master program), then it is of course not liberatory. Yet, there’s
a positive aspect in being a member of a collective hive, which is based
on the critique of individuality: you understand that your humanity and
your nature of humanness is very much dependent on the humanness of those
around you (the kinships you have, the relationships you have, the fact
that you are living in an historical moment). In other words, your situation
is NOT an individual situation, but is connected, and what you do has an
impact on people on the other side of the world. So there is this other
notion of the "cyborgianess" of post-human identity that does not focus
on the "post" part, but that de-individuates the notion that human beings
are isolated atoms. I think that particularly this aspect of post-human
identity is very important. But again, it’s always an abstraction, and
part of the challenge is to make this abstraction real. That is, make people
- who fiercely believe in their individuality - understand that they are
not individuals: when we consume, when we contract and exchange labour,
when we engage in political acts, we ARE affecting other people. So to
get people to stop thinking that human being equals individual, is a positive
aspect of post-humanism...to focus on the fact that our individuality is
highly constructed by certain programs - as with the "borgs" - is a less
liberatory inflection of post-humanism. The challenge is to hope for a
notion of individuality, which resists being totally programmed, determined
and moulded. But at the same time not to get caught up in this utopian
understanding that we are all self-creating individuals, free to do whatever
we want.