Nat: You are the director of the "Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit" at Warwick Uni. What kind of research is it that you engage
in there? If academe is really losing its grip on the process of conveying
knowledge - as you put it in your paper "The Virtual Complexity of Culture"
in FutureNatural - then how does your Graduate Research Unit differ?
How does one practically go around inserting a "connectionist/bottom-up"
approach in an institution?
Sadie: An interesting twist to your question is that I actually left
a year ago. Not really for negative reasons, or for the difficulties your
question implies, but these difficulties certainly are there. There can
be a high personal price to pay for trying to initiate the kinds of institutional
changes that are necessary to make any real rigorous inter-disciplinary
work happen. Often, in universities, which are so structured in terms of
subjects and departments and so on, you can have lots and lots of multi-disciplinary
centres, but the notion of a new subject area in itself is very difficult
to cultivate. And as you rightly point out in your question, it is indeed
difficult to do that particular kind of work in an institution. I have
spent 7 years enjoying and trying to do this work in an institution, as
long as it as to some extent succeeding. But about a year ago, I decided
that I would concentrate on my own writing. But the "Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit" is still at Warwick, and the whole rational of it was that
it would be a bottom-up form of organisation. That has always been the
strength of it. I hope that the graduate students, who were about a dozen
at that time, will continue to run it. All the students were working on
their own project, and they all had some interest in new technologies,
but necessarily new technology as bits of machinery, but more in the cultural
and philosophical inclinations of it. To give an example: one student was
working on queer theory, but using models from complex dynamics, and trying
to get a new conception of culture and how you could explain the distribution
of a term like "queer". His work – which is still continuing – is tending
more towards a viral model, and he’s looking at the kind of post-AIDS queer
phenomena. Not just taking "virus" in its obvious sense, but using that
as the occasion to examine viral contagion in a broader context. So it
is THAT kind of interaction between culture and technology, rather than
the standard influence of the one on the other. All of the students, whatever
they were working on in very different areas, were all very materialist-philosophical
in mind. They would mainly be reading Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault
and so on. In effect we were looking for new paradigms how to rethink culture,
rather than the traditional academic humanist sort of way to view culture.
It seems to me that technology can not only be used to talk about human
culture, but actually ANY sort of culture: from culture in a petri-dish
in a biological context, right through to the notion of global culture.
So that’s the kind of – certainly not anti-humanist – but more NOT-humanist
ideas we were working with. Now practically, in teaching it’s of course
really difficult to insert a bottom-up approach, because the whole notion
of teaching and education is through and through top-down. Even in contexts
like the Research Unit, we’re still incredibly primitive in how we actually
communicate information. I must admit that my own preference is writing.
That obviously has its own problems, but at least it removes the sort of
idea that you are somewhere on a stage with your knowledge, dispensing
it to the people in the classroom people who don’t know. I do think that
it is an urgent necessity to get beyond that stage, especially when you’re
dealing with intelligent adults. I haven’t really followed the education
theme that seriously, but I have written a couple of pieces about education,
and I think that the crisis in education goes all the way down to school
education. It will be really interesting to see what happens to generations
of young school-going children, who are already familiar with computers
and the internet, and can thus access their own information. I think that
the interesting challenge teachers of many kinds are now faced with, is
what their role is. And if anything, I think it is a much more facilitating
role. My own approach on teaching has always been an emphasis on basic
skills and enthusiasm. I think that if you can give people the resources
to do their own work, the better it is…they have to find their own content.
Nat: You are a self-proclaimed cyberfeminist. What does that
mean to you?
Sadie: 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 old traditional notion that technology is male,
and any attempt to get beyond that got tagged with the "cyberfeminist"
label. But I see it as something much more interesting than only that:
one of its potential uses is - not considering it as some kind of movement
or anything - but as 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 "If 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, NOT 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 organisation. 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. I 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 I was interested in.
Nat: It’s a very misleading term, because the prefix "cyber" sort
of invokes the internet, while you are referring to all different kinds
of technologies and their various impacts. Sometimes I ask myself whether
this type of feminism does not fall prey to (white academic) cultural imperialism.
What’s in it for women who do not have the economic/educational possibilities?
Is their agenda being addressed at all? What about those women in factories
soldering chips for example?
Sadie: Well, I think that this side of it is actually very interesting.
There’s this whole historical genealogy of women interacting with technology,
but this is also geographically. Now obviously those women in factories
are at the bottom of the pile, there’s no doubt about that. But, one the
one hand, an interesting observation to think of is that you and I, and
all those women are all using or making computers in some capacity, albeit
either at the top or the bottom of that ladder. That in itself is an interesting
link, given that we are supposed to talk about a male dominated culture.
Nat: That’s a very optimistic view you’re taking there. If this is
some sort of female bonding, then men are still using these technologies
on the backs of these women.
Sadie: O yeah, absolutely. Exploitation is exploitation. But the difference
is that the women in those factories are - albeit hopefully at a faster
rate – going through the same changes women went through in the West during
the Industrial Revolution, or in the wake of the 2nd WW. We took a couple
of 100 years to get through from feudalism to having this conversation.
I think that in a number of countries in South East Asia the transition
from being stuck in the home, to actually running the factory is a relatively
short step. It may take a generation, but it’s not going to take the 200
or 300 years it took us. It’s hardly a good situation, but by the same
token I do think that it has a dynamic to it…it’s not fixed like that.
The roles that those women are playing, and even the geographical location
of these factories is a passing phenomenon; it’s not stuck there for all
time…there is a dynamic there….that would be the positive side. So yeah,
they’re stuck in the chip factory, but they’re not as stuck as they were
in the home. And another thing, which is similar to women in the West,
a small amount of economic independence relative to none at all goes a
long way.
Nat: In an interview with RosieX you state that the whole chaos/techno
culture is a feminised culture, and that our culture as a whole is becoming
more feminine. The social constructivist in me raises an eyebrow here.
In short, what do you mean by this?
Sadie: Well, again, I DO want to get away from a simple social constructionist
position, because I don’t think it just comes down to simple social construction.
I mean, if it did then why don’t we just change it?! So, we know that’s
wrong.
Likewise, we know that crude biological determinism is wrong too, because
you can change things. So, we have to find a middle path between those
two, where things are both socially constructed, but where they also tend
to accrete and accumulate certain kind of characteristics both socially
and genetically/biologically. So that over centuries you do end up with
a set of characteristics that which DO tend to be called female/male or
masculine/ feminine, but which are by no means fixed. I think that in the
days that we thought of biology as just "stuff" that was just sitting there,
and completely out of the picture, then these would be very unhelpful things
to say. But now that our ideas about biology are being so quickly revised,
and we realise that a particular shape of a population – even if it has
been that way for centuries – is not necessarily fixed, and that along
with cultural and social changes, do come physical and bodily changes too.
In addition to that, there’s a far more rigorous awareness now of the interaction
of humans with their environments, in all sort of contexts. So the human
body, or for that matter "to be a woman" is no longer this biologically
fixed thing. This comes back to the notion of culture at all levels: cultures
in your body, cultures in the city…and they all have to change. I do think
we are witnessing a period wherein these changes ARE actually happening.
Nat: But why a change towards "the feminine"?
Sadie: Well, rightly or wrongly (we both would probably like to say
wrongly), there are certain ways of doing things or certain attributes,
or qualities which have been considered "female" or "feminine" in the past…whether
we like it or not. It does seem to me that the demands of contemporary
culture, such as adaptability, multi-tasking, flexibility and so on, are
all qualities that for no good reason – obviously for the worst of reasons
– women have had to exercise to simply survive. To begin with, it was just
an interesting observation that a culture that seems so bent on standardisation,
centralisation, hierarchies etc - the computer almost being the epitome
of all of that – should be developing into a culture which seems to demand
quite the opposite. Suddenly, the skills which have been promoted so much
in the past – that is, a very straightforward and logical way of thinking,
i.e. the classic male thinking – begins to become quite disfunctional.
You only have to look at employment and demographic patterns to see that
there’s such a big shift towards women’s employment away from male employment…of
course with all the problems of low wages, part-time work etc etc. Nevertheless,
it is really a big cultural shift. It seems to me that this is very directly
because these new technologies demand new ways of working, and it just
so happens that portions of the population which seem best equipped for
that are women. If nothing else, there’s a real interesting irony of history
here: the attempt to promote the specialised top-down way of doing things
has turned the tables to produce quite the contrary.
Nat: I am really interested to link up what you just said
to Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life. This movement away from
expert systems, which depend on propositional/top-down knowledge, to systems
with more of a bottom-up approach, actually creates a space where you can
insert all kinds of different epistemologies, such as skills-knowledge,
bodily knowledge and female epistemologies. You know, the sort of
knowledge that has always been devalued.
Sadie: Yes, "intuition" is a good example of that. Intuition is almost
becoming a technical term in the newer distributed systems of Artificial
Intelligence, where you can actually observe the connections being made
in a connectionist system. The only way of talking about them is actually
as flashes of intuition. And it’s incredible that the most denigrated kind
of thinking [intuition] – because associated with the feminine – is almost
overtaking rigorous logic. If you really want a machine to think, you allow
it to be intuitive. What is so interesting about this all, is that it wasn’t
feminism that came along and demolished all that…it demolished itself.
That’s the beauty of it all. I also think that you can make very similar
parallel historical observation about the classic image of patriarchal
social organisation, that in trying to effect itself it has undone itself.
The more you DO aim at that kind of centralised control, the more you endanger
it flipping into its opposite. And we’re living in a time now, where both
tendencies are equally prominent: one the one hand there’s the Microsoft
centralisation tendency, and on the other hand there’s increasing – almost
anarchic - street-level grassroots techno-activity. Each is feeding of
the other, really. I think the most valuable thing one can do, is undermine
the whole paradigm of a top-down approach.
Nat:I’d like your comment on this quote from VNS
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 socio-pathic emergent system. Lock up your children, gaffer tape the
cunt’s mouth and shove a rat up her arse."
Sadie: 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 VNS Matrix had a way of articulating that, and become some kind
of beacon for a lot of women who just couldn’t go on because they became
associated with the "victim role". The 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 organisation, 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.