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question:
<If> Cyberfeminism was a question of technic?
<and> that means a questioin of procedure. <but> <and> <or> <in this respect> <in contrast> <if> <as> etc.
<As> 'technics' bears at least two meanings in the field of cyberfeminsim, there may first come to mind the technical conditions that produced the 'cyber'- prefixes to feminism: the digital medium in its specific forms of cyberspace and the conditions of electronic network-communication. In science as in popular culture 'information' functions as an effective 'hybrid', transgressing the borders of the hithero concrete or conceptual in a new way. <As> 'information' has universal descriptive power from its theoretical mathematical origins, such 'information' has been translated in the machine-base, radically altering the forms and functions of our knowledge, perception, bodies etc. What about the second notion of 'technics'? <If> this means furthermore something performed by 'subjects' revolutionary, psychoanalytic, mechanical etc, this second 'technics' figures as the mode of a feminist praxis: the structuring of cyberfeminist acts.
<But> how do these 'technics' interact, <if> one is considered to be the condition of the other? Such interaction follows necessarily a paradoxical line: <for> cyberfeminism has to articulate a new epistemological as well as a political field, including the'subjects' of these processes as elements of a radical praxis <or> an automatic calculation.
But what to do, <if> cyberfeminism audaciously will have forgotten the classical, revolutionary (<and> terrorist) demand - of the (self)creation of a 'new human'? This disciplinary phantasm is no longer available, nor is probably the notion of what would be 'one' subject, if a subject consists of elements indistinguishable from a machine's performance... <If> cyberfeminism is not only a media-effective term for a few vague ideas? <But> as well an 'operation' in the precise meaning, taking up the system's function of a network as political and theoretical form? <As> the private is political (under certain conditions), the topological is proposed to be subject at this laboratory. Like <if>, the basic element of programming languages for case differentiation and ramification - cyberfeminism can indicate this operation. The feed-back loop: "if x then a else b" sets an unpredictable future for the machine's actions: a network can be run through in various possibilities.
<Else> <if> cyberfeminism was a technic of simulation? After all, the combination of some loose mental sequences are encountered as characteristic of each true invention. For example 'the' film projector or 'the' digital computer were invented at different locations within the same historical period as it has been the case for the notion of 'cyberfeminism'. Not that the success story of a technical affirmation of what is not (or: not all) could have been predicted: simulations as are 'woman' <or> 'signal processing' worked out in different cyberfeminist tactics. Or did anyone in 1945 already read the following words in Vannevar Bush's famous article 'As we may think' in their present, cyberfeminist meaning: "... they (the advanced arithmetical machines) will select their own data and manipulate it (...). Such machines will have enormous appetites. One of them will take instructions and data from a roomful of girls armed with simple keyboard punches, and will deliver sheets of computed results every few minutes."?
<In this respect>: Cyborg Feminism? (Donna Haraway) <nevertheless> feminism in cyberfeminism? (Faith Wilding) <or> the clitoris as direct line to the matrix? (VNS Matrix) <In this respect> female extensions? (Cornelia Sollfrank) <in contrast> Cyberfeminism - with a difference? (Rosi Braidotti) <otherwise> Spiderfeminism? (Helene von Oldenburg) <and> weaving automatic feminism like Jaquard's loom? (Sadie Plant) etc. After all: <If> you don't make your bets on your simple keyboard punches, <then> rien ne va plus <and> goes on as always.
<Else> <if> cyberfeminism was construced by collective technics of dissent? <If> it is taken seriously one time that there is not 'one' cyberfeminism, but a debating culture of different approaches, reflecting themselves not as exclusive and for the time being unique? Such cyberfeminist procedures demand a reciprocal perception as well as a sufficiant standing, perhaps enormous appetites for debates, without the assurance the one position can be defined. Instead of this: ambivalences, misunderstandings, raisings to a higher power (in the mathematical sense), experiments. "<If> the principle of dissent has been a transitory meeting point for some ideas and desires ... <then> forget it <or> work it out." (Old Boys Network)
For <if> a bet is placed on the fact that what will become reality is made by women with machines, both can win. And <then> history can be deciphered in the mode of an incomplete future - and what perhaps will continue to be called women will continue to simulate in the zone beween the physical and the non-physical. Or how would you call this strange new skin of the virtual that coates seamlessly displays and surrounding objects like a slightly shifting double? At least it is somewhere worth working in: the utopian space which opens between the meaning and the letter, between different readings and practices, between desires and facts, between different versions of what is and what is not. This can mean: to work in a transition zone between informational noise and modes of simulation.
<In this respect> <otherwise> <while> < therefore> <but> <when> <if>
produce
(Claudia Reiche)
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