adding the manifesto txt files

.gitignore

@@ -1,3 +1,2 @@
 __pycache__
-txt/*
 

txt/1912_The_Manifesto_of_Futurist_Woman_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
+The Manifesto of Futurist Woman - Response to F. T. Marinetti (1912) • 
+https://www.wired.com/2008/11/the-manifesto-1/ • 
+Valentine de Saint Point • 
+1912 •
+
+---
+
+“We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.” Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism”
+
+Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn.
+
+The whole of humanity has never been anything but the terrain of culture, source of the geniuses and heroes of both sexes. But in humanity as in nature there are some moments more propitious for such a flowering. In the summers of humanity, when the terrain is burned by the sun, geniuses and heroes abound.
+
+We are at the beginning of a springtime; we are lacking in solar profusion, that is, a great deal of spilled blood.
+
+Women are no more responsible than men for the way the really young, rich in sap and blood, are getting mired down.
+
+It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being.
+
+Any exclusively virile individual is just a brute animal; any exclusively feminine individual is only a female.
+
+It is the same way with any collectivity and any moment in humanity, just as it is with individuals. The fecund periods, when the most heroes and geniuses come forth from the terrain of culture in all its ebullience, are rich in masculinity and femininity. Those periods that had only wars, with few representative heroes because the epic breath flattened them out, were exclusively virile periods; those that denied the heroic instinct and, turning toward the past, annihilated themselves in dreams of peace, were periods in which femininity was dominant.
+
+We are living at the end of one of these periods. What is most lacking in women as in men is virility.
+
+That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right. To restore some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them in virility even to the point of brute animality. But we have to impose on everyone, men and women who are equally weak, a new dogma of energy in order to arrive at a period of superior humanity.
+
+Every woman ought to possess not only feminine virtues but virile ones, without which she is just a female. Any man who has only male strength without intuition is only a brute animal. But in the period of femininity in which we are living, only the contrary exaggeration is healthy: we have to take the brute animal for a model.
+
+Enough of those women whose “arms with twining flowers resting on their laps on the morning of departure” should be feared by soldiers; women as nurses perpetuating weakness and age, domesticating men for their personal pleasures or their material needs! … Enough women who create children just for themselves, keeping them from any danger or adventure, that is, any joy; keeping their daughter from love and their son from war! … Enough of those women, the octopuses of the hearth, whose tentacles exhaust men’s blood and make children anemic, women in carnal love who wear out every desire so it cannot be renewed!
+
+Women are Furies, Amazons, Semiramis, Joans of Arc, Jeanne Hachettes, Judith and Charlotte Cordays, Cleopatras, and Messalinas: combative women who fight more ferociously than males, lovers who arouse, destroyers who break down the weakest and help select through pride or despair, “despair through which the heart yields its fullest return:’Let the next wars bring forth heroines like that magnificent Catherine Sforza, who, during the sack of her city, watching from the ramparts as her enemy threatened the life of her son to force her surrender, heroically pointing to her sexual organ, cried loudly: “Kill him, I still have the mold to make some more!”
+
+Yes, “the world is rotting with wisdom,” but by instinct, woman is not wise, is not a pacifist, is not good. Because she is totally lacking in measure, she is bound to become too wise, too pacifist, too good during a sleepy period of humanity. Her intuition, her imagination are at once her strength and her weakness. She is the individuality of the crowd: she parades the heroes, or if there are none, the imbeciles.
+
+According to the apostle, the spiritual inspirer, woman, the carnal inspirer, immolates or takes care, causes blood to run or staunches it, is a warrior or a nurse. It’s the same woman who, in the same period, according to the ambient ideas grouped around the day’s event, lies down on the tracks to keep the soldiers from leaving for the war or then rushes to embrace the victorious champion.
+
+So that is why no revolution should be without her. That is why, instead of scorning her, we should address her. She’s the most fruitful conquest of all, the most enthusiastic, who, in her turn, will increase our followers.
+
+But no feminism. Feminism is a political error. Feminism is a cerebral error of woman, an error that her instinct will recognize.
+
+We must not give woman any of the rights claimed by feminists. To grant them to her would bring about not any of the disorders the Futurists desire but on the contrary an excess of order.
+
+To give duties to woman is to have her lose all her fecundating power. Feminist reasonings and deductions will not destroy her primordial fatality: they can only falsify it, forcing it to make itself manifest through detours leading to the worst errors.
+
+For centuries the feminine instinct has been insulted, only her charm and tenderness have been appreciated. Anemic man, stingy with his own blood, asks only that she be a nurse. She has let herself be tamed. But shout a new message at her, or some war cry, and then, joyously riding her instinct again, she will go in front of you toward unsuspected conquests. When you have to use your weapons, she will polish them.
+
+She will help you choose them. In fact, if she doesn’t know how to discern genius because she relies on passing renown, she has always known how to rewarm the strongest, the victor, the one triumphant by his muscles and his courage. She can’t be mistaken about this superiority imposing itself so brutally.
+
+Let woman find once more her cruelty and her violence that make her attack the vanquished because they are vanquished, to the point of mutilating them. Stop preaching spiritual justice to her of the sort she has tried in vain. Woman, become sublimely injust once more, like all the forces of nature!Delivered from all control, with your instinct retrieved, you will take your place among the Elements, opposite fatality to the conscious human will. Be the egoistic and ferocious mother, jealously watching over her children, have what are called all the rights over and duties toward them, as long as they physically need your protection.
+
+Let man, freed from his family, lead his life of audacity and conquest, as soon as he has the physical strength for it, and in spite of his being a son and a father. The man who sows doesn’t stop on the first row he fecunds.
+
+In my Poems of Pride and in Thirst and Mirages, I have renounced Sentimentalism as a weakness to be scorned because it knots up the strength and makes it static. Lust is a strength, because it destroys the weak, excites the strong to exert their energies, thus to renew themselves. Every heroic people is sensual. Woman is, for them, the most exalted trophy.
+
+Woman should be mother or lover. Real mothers will always be mediocre lovers, and lovers, insufficient mothers, through their excess. Equal in front of life, these two women complete each other. The mother who receives the child makes the future with the past; the lover gives off desire, which leads toward the future.
+
+LET’S CONCLUDE:
+
+Woman who retains man through her tears and her sentimentality is inferior to the prostitute who incites her man, through braggery, to retain his domination over the lower depths of the cities with his revolver at the ready: at least she cultivates an energy that could serve better causes. Woman, for too long diverted into morals and prejudices, go back to your sublime instinct, to violence, to cruelty. For the fatal sacrifice of blood, while men are in charge of wars and battles, procreate, and among your children, as a sacrifice to heroism, take Fate’s part. Don’t raise them for yourself, that is, for their diminishment, but rather, in a wide freedom, for a complete expansion.Instead of reducing man to the slavery of those execrable sentimental needs, incite your sons and your men to surpass themselves.You are the ones who make them. You have all power over them. You owe humanity its heroes. Make them!
+

txt/1984_A_Cyborg_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,297 @@
+A Cyborg Manifesto •
+faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto.html •
+Donna Haraway •
+1984 •
+
+---
+
+Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the
+Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
+(New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.49-181.
+
+AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT •
+
+This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialistfeminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
+
+Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs - creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.
+
+Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984'sUS defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.
+
+By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.
+
+The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars.
+
+The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
+
+I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks-language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.
+
+Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary. The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal distrurbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.
+
+The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Precybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
+
+Technological determination is only one ideological space opened up by the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts through which we engage in the play of writing and reading the world. 'Textualization' of everything in poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the 'play' of arbitrary reading. It is certainly true that postmodernist strategies, like my cyborg myth, subvert myriad organic wholes (for example, the poem, the primitive culture, the biological organism). In short, the certainty of what counts as nature -- a source of insight and promise of innocence -- is undermined, probably fatally. The transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding 'Western' epistemology. But the alternative is not cynicism or faithlessness, that is, some version of abstract existence, like the accounts of technological determinism destroying 'man' by the 'machine' or 'meaningful political action' by the 'text'. Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't we (de Waal, 1982; Winner, 1980)?
+
+The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and nonphysical is very imprecise for us. Pop physics books on the consequences of quantum theory and the indeterminacy principle are a kind of popular scientific equivalent to Harlequin romances* as a marker of radical change in American white heterosexuality: they get it wrong, but they are on the right subject. Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible. Modern machinery is an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father's ubiquity and spirituality. The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. Contrast the TV sets of the 1950s or the news cameras of the 1970s with the TV wrist bands or hand-sized video cameras now advertised. Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile -- a matter of immense human pain in Detroit and Singapore. People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.
+
+*The US equivalent of Mills & Boon.
+
+The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness or its simulation. They are floating signifiers moving in pickup trucks across Europe, blocked more effectively by the witch-weavings of the displaced and so unnatural Greenham women, who read the cyborg webs of power so very well, than by the militant labour of older masculinist politics, whose natural constituency needs defence jobs. Ultimately the 'hardest' science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent secrets. 
+
+The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are 'no more' than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, 'no more' than the experience of stress. The nimble fingers of 'Oriental'women, the old fascination of little Anglo-Saxon Victorian girls with doll's houses, women's enforced attention to the small take on quite new dimensions in this world. There might be a cyborg Alice taking account of these new dimensions. Ironically, it might be the unnatural cyborg women making chips in Asia and spiral dancing in Santa Rita jail* whose constructed unities will guide effective oppositional strategies.
+
+So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formulations, and physical artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture. From One-DimensionalMan (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance. Another of my premises is that the need for unity of people trying to resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute. But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.
+
+From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. I like to imagine LAG, the Livermore Action Group, as a kind of cyborg society, dedicated to realistically converting the laboratories that most fiercely embody and spew out the tools of technological apocalypse, and committed to building a political form that acutally manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. Fission Impossible is the name of the affinity group in my town.(Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another, avidiy.)6
+
+* A practice at once both spiritual and political that linked guards and arrested anti-nuclear demonstrators in the Alameda County jail in California in the early 1985.
+
+FRACTURED IDENTITIES It has become difficult to name one's feminism by a single adjective -- or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun. Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. With the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in 'essential' unity. There is nothing about teeing 'female' that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. And who counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity? Painful fragmentation among feminists (not to mention among women) along every possible fault line has made the concept of woman elusive, an excuse for the matrix of women's dominations of each other. For me - and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies - the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition - affinity, not identity.
+
+Chela Sandoval (n.d., 1984), from a consideration of specific historical moments in the formation of the new political voice called women of colour, has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called 'oppositional consciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. 'Women of color', a name contested at its origins by those whom it would incorporate, as well as a historical consciousness marking systematic breakdown of all the signs of Man in 'Western' traditions, constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is fully political, whatever might be said abut other possible postmodernisms. Sandoval's oppositional consciousness is about contradic156 tory locations and heterochronic calendars, not about relativisms and pluralisms. Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation. For example, a Chicana or US black woman has not been able to speak as a woman or as a black person or as a Chicano. Thus, she was at the bottom of a cascade of negative identities, left out of even the privileged oppressed authorial categories called 'women and blacks', who claimed to make the important revolutions. The category 'woman'negated all non-white women; 'black' negated all non-black people, as well as all black women. But there was also no 'she', no singularity, but a sea of differences among US women who have affirmed their historical identity as US women of colour. This identity marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship. Unlike the 'woman' of some streams of the white women's movement in the United States, there is no naturalization of the matrix, or at least this is what Sandoval argues is uniquely available through the power of oppositional consciousness. Sandoval's argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist discourse; that is to say, discourse dissolving the 'West' and its highest product - the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history. As orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destabilize, including those of feminists. Sandoval argues that 'women of colour' have a chance to build an effective unity that does not replicate the imperializing, totalizing revolutionary subjects of previous Marxisms and feminisms which had not faced the consequences of the disorderly polyphony emerging from decolonization.
+
+Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification and the political/ poetic mechanics of identification built into reading 'the poem', that generative core of cultural feminism. King criticizes the persistent tendency among contemporary feminists from different 'moments' or 'conversations' in feminist practice to taxonomize the women's movement to make one's own political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole. These taxonomies tend to remake feminist history so that it appears to be an ideological struggle among coherent types persisting over time, especially those typical units called radical, liberal, and socialistfeminism. Literally, all other feminisms are either incorporated or marginalized, usually by building an explicit ontology and epistemology. Taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women's experience. And of course, 'women's culture', like women of colour, is consciously created by mechanisms inducing affinity. The rituals of poetry, music, and certain forms of academic practice have been pre-eminent. The politics of race and culture in the US women's movements are intimately interwoven. The common achievement of King and Sandoval is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification.
+
+The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through in corporation ironically not only undermines the justifica-tions for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scient-ism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint. I think that radical and socialist/Marxist-feminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all 'epistemologies' as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities. It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naivete of innocence. But what would another political myth for socialist-feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective - and, ironically, socialist-feminist?
+
+I do not know of any other time in history when there was greater need for political unity to confront effectively the dominations of 'race', 'gender', 'sexuality', and 'class'. I also do not know of any other time when the kind of unity we might help build could have been possible. None of 'us' have any longer the symbolic or material capability of dictating the shape of reality to any of'them'. Or at least 'we' cannot claim innocence from practicing such dominations. White women, including socialist feminists, discovered (that is, were forced kicking and screaming to notice) the non-innocence of the category 'woman'. That consciousness changes the geography of all previous categories; it denatures them as heat denatures a fragile protein. Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. Innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. But the constructed revolutionary subject must give late-twentieth158 century people pause as well. In the fraying of identities and in the reflexive strategies for constructing them, the possibility opens up for weaving something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history. Both Marxist/socialist-feminisms and radical feminisms have simul-taneously naturalized and denatured the category 'woman' and conscious-ness of the social lives of 'women'. Perhaps a schematic caricature can highlight both kinds of moves. Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labour which reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. Labour is the pre-eminently privileged category enabling the Marxist to overcome illusion and find that point of view which is necessary for changing the world. Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man; labour is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation.
+
+In faithful filiation, socialist-feminism advanced by allying itself with the basic analytic strategies of Marxism. The main achievement of both Marxist feminists and socialist feminists was to expand the category of labour to accommodate what (some) women did, even when the wage relation was subordinated to a more comprehensive view of labour under capitalist patriarchy. In particular, women's labour in the household and women's activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense), entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of'labour'.
+
+Marxist/socialist-feminism does not 'natur-alize' unity; it is a possible achievement based on a possible standpoint rooted in social relations. The essentializing move is in the ontological structure of labour or of its analogue, women's activity. The inheritance of Marxian humanism, with its pre-eminently Western self, is the difficulty for me. The contribution from these formulations has been the emphasis on the daily responsibility of real women to build unities, rather than to naturalize them.
+
+Catherine MacKinnon's (198Z, 1987) version of radical feminism is itself a caricature of the appropriating, incorporating, totalizing tendencies of Western theories of identity grounding action. It is factually and politically wrong to assimilate all of the diverse 'moments' or 'conversations' in recent women's politics named radical feminism to MacKinnon's version. But the teleological logic of her theory shows how an epistemology and ontology - including their negations - erase or police difference. Only one of the effects of MacKinnon's theory is the rewriting of the history of the polymorphous field called radical feminism. The major effect is the production of a theory of experience, of women's identity, that is a kind of apocalypse for all revolutionary standpoints. That is, the totalization built into this tale of radical feminism achieves its end the unity of women - by enforcing the experience of and testimony to radical non-being. As for the Marxist/ socialist feminist, consciousness is an achievement, not a natural fact. And MacKinnon's theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism.
+
+MacKinnon argues that feminism necessarily adopted a different analyt-ical strategy from Marxism, looking first not at the structure of class, but at the structure of sex/gender and its generative relationship, men's constitu-tion and appropriation of women sexually. Ironically, MacKinnon's 'ontology' constructs a non-subject, a non-being. Another's desire, not the self's labour, is the origin of 'woman'. She therefore develops a theory of consciousness that enforces what can count as 'women's' experience - anything that names sexual violation, indeed, sex itself as far as 'women' can be concerned. Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.
+
+Perversely, sexual appropriation in this feminism still has the epistemolo-gical status of labour; that is to say, the point from which an analysis able to contribute to changing the world must flow. But sexual object)fication, not alienation, is the consequence of the structure of sex/gender. In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product. MacKinnon's radical theory of experience is totalizing in the extreme; it does not so much marginalize as obliterate the authority of any other women's political speech and action. It is a totalization producing what Western patriarchy itself never succeeded in doing - feminists'consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men's desire. I think MacKinnon correctly argues that no Marxian version of identity can firmly ground women's unity. But in solving the problem of the contradictions of any Western revolutionary subject for feminist purposes, she develops an even more authoritarian doctrine of experience. If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon's intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential' nonexistence of women is not reassuring. In my taxonomy, which like any other taxonomy is a re-inscription of history, radical feminism can accommodate all the activities of women named by socialist feminists as forms of labour only if the activity can somehow be sexualized. Reproduction had different tones of meanings for the two tendencies, one rooted in labour, one in sex, both calling the consequences of domination and ignorance of social and personal reality 'false consciousness'.
+
+Beyond either the diff~culties or the contributions in the argument of any one author, neither Marxist nor radical feminist points of view have tended to embrace the status of a partial explanation; both were regularly constituted as totalities. Western explanation has demanded as much; how else could the 'Western' author incorporate its others? Each tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic categories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies. There was no structural room for race (or for much else) in theory claiming to reveal the construction of the category woman and social group women as a unified or totalizable whole. The structure of my caricature looks like this:
+
+socialist feminism--structure of class // wage labour // alienation labour, by analogy reproduction, by extension sex, by addition race radical feminism - structure of gender // sexual appropriation // objectification sex, by analogy labour, by extension reproduction, by addition race
+
+In another context, the French theorist, Julia Kristeva, claimed women appeared as a historical group after the Second World War, along with groups like youth. Her dates are doubtful; but we are now accustomed to remembering that as objects of knowledge and as historical actors, 'race' did not always exist, 'class' has a historical genesis, and 'homosexuals' are quite junior. It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man - and so the essence of woman - breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex. 'Advanced capitalism' is inadequate to convey the structure of this historical moment. In the 'Western' sense, the end of man is at stake. It is no accident that woman disintegrates into women in our time. Perhaps socialist feminists were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that suppressed women's particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice. Now we have less excuse. But in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection. Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. 'Epistemology' is about knowing the difference.
+
+ THE INFORMATICS OF DOMINATION In this attempt at an epistemological and political position, I would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist principles of design. The frame for my sketch is set by the extent and importance of rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to science and technology. I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination:
+
+Representation •
+
+Simulation •
+
+Bourgeois novel, realism •
+
+Science fiction, postmodernism •
+
+Organism •
+
+Biotic Component •
+
+Depth, integrity •
+
+Surface, boundary •
+
+Heat •
+
+Noise •
+
+Biology as clinical practice •
+
+Biology as inscription •
+
+Physiology •
+
+Communications engineering •
+
+Small group •
+
+Subsystem •
+
+Perfection •
+
+Optimization •
+
+Eugenics •
+
+Population Control •
+
+Decadence, Magic Mountain •
+
+Obsolescence, Future Shock •
+
+Hygiene •
+
+Stress Management •
+
+Microbiology, tuberculosis •
+
+Immunology, AIDS •
+
+Organic division of labour •
+
+Ergonomics/cybernetics of labour •
+
+Functional specialization •
+
+Modular construction •
+
+Reproduction •
+
+Replication •
+
+Organic sex role specialization •
+
+Optimal genetic strategies •
+
+Bioogical determinism •
+
+Evolutionary inertia, constraints •
+
+Community ecology •
+
+Ecosystem •
+
+Racial chain of being •
+
+Neo-imperialism, United Nations humanism •
+
+Scientific management in home/factory •
+
+Global factory/Electronid cottage •
+
+Family/Market/Factory •
+
+Women in the Integrated Circuit •
+
+Family wage •
+
+Comparable worth •
+
+Public/Private •
+
+Cyborg citizenship •
+
+Nature/Culture •
+
+fields of difference •
+
+Co-operation •
+
+Communicatins enhancemenet •
+
+Freud •
+
+Lacan •
+
+Sex •
+
+Genetic engineering •
+
+labour •
+
+Robotics •
+
+Mind •
+
+Artificial Intelligence •
+
+Second World War •
+
+Star Wars •
+
+White Capitalist Patriarchy •
+
+Informatics of Domination
+
+This list suggests several interesting things. First, the objects on the right-hand side cannot be coded as 'natural', a realization that subverts naturalistic coding for the left-hand side as well. We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It's not just that igod'is dead; so is the 'goddess'. Or both are revivified in the worlds charged with microelectronic and biotechnological politics. In relation to objects like biotic components, one must not think in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints. Sexual reproduction is one kind of reproductive strategy among many, with costs and benefits as a function of the system environment. Ideologies of sexual reproduction can no longer reasonably call on notions of sex and sex role as organic aspects in natural objects like organisms and families. Such reasoning will be unmasked as irrational, and ironically corporate executives reading Playboy and anti-porn radical feminists will make strange bedfellows in jointly unmasking the irrationalism.
+
+Likewise for race, ideologies about human diversity have to be formulated in terms of frequencies of parameters, like blood groups or intelligence scores. It is 'irrational' to invoke concepts like primitive and civilized. For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called 'experimental ethnography' in which an organic object dissipates in attention to the play of writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and underdevelopment, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no 'natural' architectures constrain system design. The financial districts in all the world's cities, as well as the exportprocessing and free-trade zones, proclaim this elementary fact of'late capitalism'. The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies.
+
+One should expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries-- and not on the integrity of natural objects. 'Integrity' or 'sincerity' of the Western self gives way to decision procedures and expert systems. For example, control strategies applied to women's capacities to give birth to new human beings will be developed in the languages of population control and maximization of goal achievement for individual decision-makers. Control strategies will be formulated in terms of rates, costs of constraints, degrees of freedom. Human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language. Exchange in this world transcends the universal translation effected by capitalist markets that Marx analysed so well. The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress communications breakdown (Hogness, 1983). The cyborg is not subject to Foucault's biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations. This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural objects of knowledge which have appeared historically since the Second World War prepares us to notice some important inadequacies in feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in 'the West' since Aristotle still ruled. They have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been 'techno-digested'. The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically. The actual situation of women is their integration/ exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and com-munication called the informatics of domination. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself- all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others - consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent oppositional international movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival. One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.
+
+Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women world-wide. Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.
+
+Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move - the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C31, command-controlcommunicationintelligence, the military's symbol for its operations theory. In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The organism has been translated into prob-lems of genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly. In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing the history and utility of the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography. Research is necessarily a kind of intelligence activity. Ironies abound. A stressed system goes awry; its communication processes break down; it fails to recognize the difference between self and other. Human babies with baboon hearts evoke national ethical perplexity-- for animal rights activists at least as much as for the guardians of human purity. In the US gay men and intravenous drug users are the 'privileged' victims of an awful immune system disease that marks (inscribes on the body) confusion of boundaries and moral pollution (Treichler, 1987).
+
+But these excursions into communications sciences and biology have been at a rarefied level; there is a mundane, largely economic reality to support my claim that these sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transforma-tions in the structure of the world for us. Communications technologies depend on electronics. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labour-control systems, medical construc-tions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labour, and religious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals.
+
+Microelectronics mediates the translations of labour into robotics and word processing, sex into genetic engineering and reproductive technologies, and mind into artificial intelligence and decision procedures. The new biotechnologies concern more than human reproducdon. Biology as a powerful engineering science for redesigning materials and processes has revolutionary implications for industry, perhaps most obvious today in areas of fermentadon, agriculture, and energy. Communicadons sciences and biology are construcdons of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms. The 'multinational' material organization of the production and reproduction of daily life and the symbolic organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination seem equally implicated. The boundary-maintaining images of base and superstructure, public and private, or material and ideal never seemed more feeble. I have used Rachel Grossman's (1980) image of women in the integrated circuit to name the situation of women in a world so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology. I used the odd circumlocution, 'the social relations of science and technology', to indicate that we are not dealing with a technological determinism, but with a historical system depending upon structured relations among people. But the phrase should also indicate that science and technology provide fresh sources of power, that we need fresh sources of analysis and political action (Latour, 1984). Some of the rearrangements of race, sex, and class rooted in high-tech-facilitated social relations can make socialist-feminism more relevant to effective progressive politics.
+
+ THE 'HOMEWORK ECONOMY' OUTSIDE 'THE HOME'The 'New Industrial Revolution' is producing a new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities. The extreme mobility of capital and the emerging international division of labour are intertwined with the emergence of new collecdvities, and the weakening of familiar groupings. These developments are neither gender- nor raceneutral. White men in advanced industrial societies have become newly vulnerable to permanent job loss, and women are not disappearing from the job rolls at the same rates as men. It is not simply that women in Third World countries are the preferred labour force for the science-based multinationals in the export-processing sectors, particularly in electronics. The picture is more systematic and involves reproduction, sexuality, culture, consumphon, and producdon. In the prototypical Silicon Valley, many women's lives have been structured around employment in electronics-dependent jobs, and their intimate realities include serial heterosexual monogamy, negotiating childcare, distance from extended kin or most other forms of traditional community, a high likelihood of loneliness and extreme economic vulnerability as they age. The ethnic and racial diversity of women in Silicon Valley structures a microcosm of conflicting differences in culture, family, religion, education, and language.
+
+Richard Gordon has called this new situation the 'homework economy'. Although he includes the phenomenon of literal homework emerging in connecdon with electronics assembly, Gordon intends 'homework economy' to name a restructuring of work that broadly has the characteristics formerly ascribed to female jobs, jobs literally done only by women. Work is being redefined as both literally female and feminized, whether performed by men or women. To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to dme arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. Deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers. However, the homework economy does not refer only to large-scale deskilling, nor does it deny that new areas of high skill are emerging, even for women and men previously excluded from skilled employment. Rather, the concept indicates that factory, home, and market are integrated on a new scale and that the places of women are crucial - and need to be analysed for differences among women and for meanings for relations between men and women in various situations.
+
+The homework economy as a world capitalist organizational structure is made possible by (not caused by) the new technologies. The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men's unionized jobs is deaf to the power of the new communications technologies to integrate and control labour despite extensive dispersion and decentralization. The consequences of the new technologies are felt by women both in the loss of the family (male) wage (if they ever had access to this white privilege) and in the character of their own jobs, which are becoming capitalintensive; for example, office work and nursing. The new economic and technological arrangements are also related to the collapsing welfare state and the ensuing intensification of demands on women to sustain daily life for themselves as well as for men, children, and old people. The feminization of poverty-generated by dismantling the welfare state, by the homework economy where stable jobs become the exception, and sustained by the expectation that women's wages will not be matched by a male income for the support of children-- has become an urgent focus. The causes of various women-headed households are a function of race, class, or sexuality; but their increasing generality is a ground for coalitions of women on many issues. That women regularly sustain daily life partly as a funcdon of their enforced status as mothers is hardly new; the kind of integration with the overall capitalist and progressively war-based economy is new. The particular pressure, for example, on US black women, who have achieved an escape from (barely) paid domeshc service and who now hold clerical and similar jobs in large numbers, has large implicadons for condnued enforced black poverty with employment. Teenage women in industrializing areas of the Third World increasingly find themselves the sole or major source of a cash wage for their families, while access to land is ever more problemadc. These developments must have major consequences in the psychodynamics and politics of gender and race.
+
+Within the framework of three major stages of capitalism (commercial/ early industrial, monopoly, multinational) --tied to nationalism, imperialism, and multinationalism, and related to Jameson's three dominant aesthetic periods of realism, modernism, and postmodernism --I would argue that specific forms of families dialectically relate to forms of capital and to its political and cultural concomitants. Although lived problematically and unequally, ideal forms of these families might be schematized as (1) the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private and accompanied by the white bourgeois ideology of separate spheres and nineteenth-century Anglo-American bourgeois feminism; (2) the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage, with a flowering of a-feminist heterosexual ideologies, including their radical versions represented in Greenwich Village around the First World War; and (3) the 'family' of the homework economy with its oxymoronic structure of womenheaded households and its explosion of feminisms and the paradoxical intensification and erosion of gender itself.
+
+This is the context in which the projections for world-wide structural unemployment stemming from the new technologies are part of the picture of the homework economy. As robodcs and related technologies put men out of work in 'developed' countries and exacerbate failure to generate male jobs in Third World 'development', and as the automated of fice becomes the rule even in labour-surplus countries, the feminization of work intensifies. Black women in the United States have long known what it looks like to face the structural underemployment ('feminization') of black men, as well as their own highly vulnerable position in the wage economy. It is no longer a secret that sexuality, reproduction, family, and community life are interwoven with this economic structure in myriad ways which have also differentiated the situations of white and black women. Many more women and men will contend with similar situations, which will make cross-gender and race alliances on issues of basic life support (with or without jobs) necessary, not just mice.
+
+The new technologies also have a profound effect on hunger and on food production for subsistence world-wide. Rae Lessor Blumberg (1983) estimates that women produce about 50 per cent of the world's subsistence food. Women are excluded generally from benefiting from the increased high-tech commodification of food and energy crops, their days are made more arduous because their responsibilides to provide food do not diminish, and their reproductive situations are made more complex. Green Revolution technologies interact with other high-tech industrial production to alter gender divisions of labour and differential gender migration patterns.
+
+The new technologies seem deeply involved in the forms of'privatization' that Ros Petchesky (1981) has analysed, in which militarization, right-wing family ideologies and policies, and intensified definitions of corporate (and state) property as private synergistically interact. The new communications technologies are fundamental to the eradication of 'public life' for everyone. This facilitates the mushrooming of a permanent high-tech military establishment at the cultural and economic expense of most people, but especially of women. Technologies like video games and highly miniaturized televi-sions seem crucial to production of modern forms of 'private life'. The culture of video games is heavily orientated to individual compedtion and extraterrestrial warfare. High-tech, gendered imaginations are produced here, imaginations that can contemplate destruction of the planet and a sci-fi escape from its consequences. More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable. These are the technologies that promise ultimate mobility and perfect exchange-- and incidentally enable tourism, that perfect practice of mobility and exchange, to emerge as one of the world's largest single industries.
+
+The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and of reproduction, and not always in the same ways. The close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender roles. These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system. Among the many transformations of reproductive situations is the medical one, where women's bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both 'visualization' and 'intervention'. Of course, who controls the interpretation of bodily boundaries in medical hermeneubcs is a major feminist issue. The speculum served as an icon of women's claiming their bodies in the 1970S; that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our needed body politics in the negotiation of reality in the practices of cyborg reproduction. Self-help is not enough. The technologies of visualization recall the important cultural practice of hundng with the camera and the deeply predatory nature of a photographic consciousness. Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in hightech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility. Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new technologies is the reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical workforce. A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance. An adequate socialist-feminist politics should address women in the privileged occupational categories, and particularly in the production of science and technology that constructs scientific-technical discourses, processes, and objects.
+
+This issue is only one aspect of enquiry into the possibility of a feminist science, but it is important. What kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have? How can these groups be allied with progressive social and political movements? What kind of political accountability can be constructed to the women together across the scientific-technical hierarchies separating us? Might there be ways of developing feminist science/technology politics in alliance with and-military science facility conversion action groups? Many sciendfic and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not want to work on military science. Can these personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women of colour, are coming to be fairly numerous?
+
+ WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT Let me summarize the picture of women's historical locations in advanced industrial societies, as these positions have been restructured partly through the social relations of science and technology. If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women's lives by the disdnction of public and private domains-- suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realms --it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic. 'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy -- weaving is for oppositional cyborgs.
+
+So let me return to the earlier image of the informatics of domination and trace one vision of women's 'place' in the integrated circuit, touching only a few idealized social locations seen primarily from the point of view of advanced capitalist societies: Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital, and Church. Each of these idealized spaces is logically and practically implied in every other locus, perhaps analogous to a holographic photograph. I want to suggest the impact of the social relations mediated and enforced by the new technologies in order to help formulate needed analysis and practical work. However, there is no 'place' for women in these networks, only geometries of difference and contradiction crucial to women's cyborg identities. If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions. There is no way to read the following list from a standpoint of'idendfication', of a unitary self. The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora.
+
+Home: Women-headed households, serial monogamy, flight of men, old women alone, technology of domestic work, paid homework, re-emergence of home sweat-shops, homebased businesses and telecom-muting, electronic cottage, urban homelessness, migration, module architecture, reinforced (simulated) nuclear family, intense domestic violence.
+
+Market: Women's continuing consumption work, newly targeted to buy the profusion of new production from the new technologies (especially as the competitive race among industrialized and industrializing nations to avoid dangerous mass unemployment necessitates finding ever bigger new markets for ever less clearly needed commodities); bimodal buying power, coupled with advertising targeting of the numerous affluent groups and neglect of the previous mass markets; growing importance of informal markets in labour and commodities parallel to high-tech, affluent market structures; surveillance systems through electronic funds transfer; intensified market abstraction (commodification) of experience, resulting in ineffective utopian or equivalent cynical theories of community; extreme mobility (abstraction) of marketing/financing systems; interpenetration of sexual and labour markets; intensified sexualization of abstracted and alienated consumption.
+
+Paid Work Place: Continued intense sexual and racial division of labour, but considerable growth of membership in privileged occupational categories for many white women and people of colour; impact of new technologies on women's work in clerical, service, manufacturing (especially textiles), agriculture, electronics; international restructuring of the working classes; development of new time arrangements to facilitate the homework economy (flex time, part time, over time, no time); homework and out work; increased pressures for two-tiered wage structures; significant numbers of people in cash-dependent populations world-wide with no experience or no further hope of stable employment; most labour 'marginal' or 'feminized'.
+
+State: Continued erosion of the welfare state; decentralizations with increased surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political power broadly in the form of information rich/information poor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly opposed by many social groups; reduction of civil service jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of office work, with implications for occupational mobility for women of colour; growing privadzation of material and ideological life and culture; close integration of privatization and militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist personal and public life; invisibility of different social groups to each other, linked to psychological mechanisms of belief in abstract enemies.
+
+School: Deepening coupling of high-tech capital needs and public educa-tion at all levels, differentiated by race, class, and gender; managerial classes involved in educational reform and refunding at the cost of remaining progressive educational democratic structures for children and teachers; education for mass ignorance and repression in technocratic and militarized culture; growing and-science mystery cults in dissendng and radical political movements; continued relative scientific illiteracy among white women and people of colour; growing industrial direction of education (especially higher education) by science-based multinationals (particularly in electronics- and biotechnology-dependent companies); highly educated, numerous elites in a progressively bimodal society.
+
+Clinic-hospital: Intensified machine-body relations; renegotiations of public metaphors which channel personal experience of the body, particularly in relation to reproduction, immune system functions, and 'stress' phenomena; intensification of reproductive politics in response to world historical implications of women's unrealized, potential control of their relation to reproduction; emergence of new, historically specific diseases; struggles over meanings and means of health in environments pervaded by high technology products and processes; continuing feminization of health work; intensified struggle over state responsibility for health; continued ideological role of popular health movements as a major form of American politics.
+
+Church: Electronic fundamentalist 'super-saver' preachers solemnizing the union of electronic capital and automated fetish gods; intensified importance of churches in resisting the militarized state; central struggle over women's meanings and authority in religion; continued relevance of spirituality, intertwined with sex and health, in political struggle. The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable. Since much of this picture interweaves with the social relations of science and technology, the urgency of a socialist-feminist politics addressed to science and technology is plain. There is much now being tione, and the grounds for political work are rich. For example, the efforts to develop forms of collecdve struggle for women in paid work, like SEIU's District 925,* should be a high priority for all of us. These efforts are profoundly deaf to technical restructuring of labour processes and reformations of working classes. These efforts also are providing understanding of a more comprehensive kind of labour organization, involving community, sexuality, and family issues never privileged in the largely white male industrial unions.
+
+The structural rearrangements related to the social relations of science and technology evoke strong ambivalence. But it is not necessary to be uldmately depressed by the implications of late twentieth-century women's relation to all aspects of work, culture, production of knowledge, sexuality, and reproduction. For excellent reasons, most Marxisms see domination best and have trouble understanding what can only look like false consciousness and people's complicity in their own domination in late capitalism. It is crucial to remember that what is lost, perhaps especially from women's points of view, is often virulent forms of oppression, nostalgically naturalized in the face of current violation. Ambivalence towards the disrupted unides mediated by high-tech culture requires not sorting consciousness into categories of clear-sighted critique grounding a solid political epistemology'
+
+*Service Employees International Union's office workers' organization in the US. versus 'manipulated false consciousness', but subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rules of the game.
+
+There are grounds for hope in the emerging bases for new kinds of unity across race, gender, and class, as these elementary units of socialist-feminist analysis themselves suffer protean transformations. Intensifications of hardship experienced world-wide in connection with the social relations of science and technology are severe. But what people are experiencing is not transparently clear, and we lack aufficiently subtle connections for collectively building effective theories of experience. Present efforts - Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, anthropological-- to clarify even 'our' experience are rudimentary. I am conscious of the odd perspecdve provided by my historical position - a PhD in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik's impact on US national scienceeducation policy. I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-Second World War arms race and cold war as by the women's movements. There are more grounds for hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal American technocrats, which also produced large numbers of dissidents, than in focusing on the present defeats.
+
+The permanent pardality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos. From the point of view of pleasure in these potent and taboo fusions, made inevitable by the social relations of science and technology, there might indeed be a feminist science.
+
+ CYBORGS: A MYTH OF POLITICAL IDENTITY I want to conclude with a myth about idendty and boundaries which might inform late twentieth-century political imaginations (Plate 1). I am indebted in this story to writers like Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, John Varley, James Tiptree, Jr, Octavia Butler, Monique Wittig, and Vonda McIntyre. These are our story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds. They are theorists for cyborgs. Exploring concephons of bodily boundaries and social order, the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) should be credited with helping us to consciousness about how fundamental body imagery is to world view, and so to political language.
+
+French feminists like Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, for all their differences, know how to write the body; how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment, and especially for Wittig, from imagery of fragmentation and reconstitution of bodies.
+
+American radical feminists like Susan Griffnn, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich have profoundly affected our political imaginations - and perhaps restricted too much what we allow as a friendly body and political language. They insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological. But their symbolic systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood in Sandoval's terms as oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century. They would simply bewilder anyone not preoccupied with the machines and consciousness of late capitalism. In that sense they are part of the cyborg world. But there are also great riches for feminists in explicitly embracing the possibilides inherent in the breakdown of clean disdnctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self. It is the simultaneity of breakdowns that cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities. What might be learned from personal and political 'technological' pollution? I look briefly at two overlapping groups of texts for their insight into the construction of a potentially helpful cyborg myth: constructions of women of colour and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction.
+
+Earlier I suggested that 'women of colour' might be understood as a cyborg idendty, a potent subjecdvity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her 'biomythography', Zami (Lorde, 1982; King, 1987a, 1987b). There are material and cultural grids mapping this potential, Audre Lorde (1984) captures the tone in the title of her Sister Outsider. In my political myth, Sister Outsider is the offshore woman, whom US workers, female and feminized, are supposed to regard as the enemy prevendug their solidarity, threatening their security. Onshore, inside the boundary of the United States, Sister Outsider is a potential amidst the races and ethnic identities of women manipulated for division, competition, and exploitation in the same industries. 'Women of colour' are the preferred labour force for the science-based industries, the real women for whom the world-wide sexual market, labour market, and politics of reproduction kaleidoscope into daily life. Young Korean women hired in the sex industry and in electronics assembly are recruited from high schools, educated for the integrated circuit. Literacy, especially in English, distinguishes the 'cheap' female labour so attractive to the multinationals.
+
+Contrary to orientalist stereotypes of the 'oral primidve', literacy is a special mark of women of colour, acquired by US black women as well as men through a history of risking death to learn and to teach reading and wridng. Writing has a special significance for all colonized groups. Writing has been crucial to the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and more recently to the erosion of that distinction in 'postmodernist' theories attacking the phallogo-centrism of the West, with its worship of the monotheistic, phallic, authoritative, and singular work, the unique and perfect name. Contests for the meanings of writing are a major form of contemporary political struggle. Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and stories of US women of colour are repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this dme that power must be neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.
+
+The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfilment in apocalypse. The phallogocentrie origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technologies - teehnologies that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics - that have recently textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control.
+
+Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of women of colour; and stories about language have a special power in the rich contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retellings of the stom~ of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mesdzo 'bastard' race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry special meaning for Chicana constructions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983) in Loving in the War Years explores the themes of identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother's or father's. Moraga's writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's mastery of the conqueror's language -- a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga's language is not 'whole'; it is self-consciously spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror's languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before violation, that crafts the erode, competent, potent identities of women of colour. Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world survival not because of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on the boundaries, to write without the founding myth of original wholeness, with its inescapable apocalypse of final return to a deathly oneness that Man has imagined to be the innocent and all-powerful Mother, freed at the End from another spiral of appropriation by her son. Writing marks Moraga's body, affirms it as the body of a woman of colour, against the possibility of passing into the unmarked category of the Anglo father or into the orientalist myth of 'original illiteracy' of a mother that never was. Malinche was mother here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the phallogocentric Family of Man.
+
+Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. 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 phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of 'Western' idendty, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. 'We' did not originally choose to be cyborgs, but choice grounds a liberal politics and epistemology that imagines the reproduction of individuals before the wider replications of 'texts'.
+
+From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in 'our' privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities. Feminisms and Marxisms have run aground on Western epistemological imperatives to construct a revolutionary subject from the perspective of a hierarchy of oppressions and/or a latent position of moral superiority, innocence, and greater closeness to nature. With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile 'masculine' separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of colour have transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival. This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. Every, story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics --rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selflhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginaw. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many dmes a 'western' commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western' technology, by writing. These real-life cyborgs (for example, the Southeast Asian village women workers inJapanese and US electronics firms described by Aihwa Ong) are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and sociedes. Sumival is the stakes in this play of readings.
+
+To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals - in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, totaVpartial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the semice of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many.
+
+High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, com178 munications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. The replicant Rachel in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of a cyborg culture's fear, love, and confusion.
+
+One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics and other severely handicapped people can (and sometimes do) have the most intense experiences of complex hybridization with other communication devices. Anne McCaffrey's pre-feminist The Ship Who Sang (1969) explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl's brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, skill: all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century dll now, machines could be animated - given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacides. Or organisms could be mechan-ized - reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We don't need organic holism to give impermeable whole-ness, the total woman and her feminist variants (mutants?). Let me conclude this point by a very partial reading of the logic of the cyborg monsters of my second group of texts, feminist science fiction.
+
+The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual endty, or body. Katie King clarifies how pleasure in reading these fictions is not largely based on idendfication. Students facingJoanna Russ for the first time, students who have learned to take modernist writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf without flinching, do not know what to make of The Adventures of Alyx or The Female Man, where characters refuse the reader's search for innocent wholeness while granting the wish for heroic quests, exuberant eroticism, and serious politics. The Female Man is the story of four versions of one genotype, all of whom meet, but even taken together do not make a whole, resolve the dilemmas of violent moral action, or remove the growing scandal of gender. The feminist science fiction of Samuel R. Delany, especially Tales of Neveyon, mocks stories of origin by redoing the neolithic revolution, replaying the founding moves of Western civilization to subvert their plausibility. James Tiptree, Jr, an author whose fiction was regarded as particularly manly undl her 'true' gender was revealed, tells tales of reproduction based on non-mammalian technologies like alternation of generations of male brood pouches and male nurturing. John Varley constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad goddessplanet-trickster-old woman-technological device on whose surface an extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are spawned. Octavia Butler writes of an African sorceress pithug her powers of transformation against the genetic manipulations of her rival (Wild Seed), of dme warps that bring a modern US black woman into slavery where her actions in relation to her white master-ancestor determine the possibility of her own birth (Kindred), and of the illegidmate insights into idendty and community of an adopted cross-species child who came to know the enem' as self (Survivor). In Dawn (1987), the first instalment of a series called Xenogenesis, Butler tells the story of Lilith Iyapo, whose personal name recalls Adam's first and repudiated wife and whose family name marks her status as the widow of the son of Nigerian immigrants to the US. A black woman and a mother whose child is dead, Lilith mediates the transformation of humanity through genetic exchange with extraterrestrial lovers/rescuers/destroyers/genetic engineers, who reform earth's habitats after the nuclear holocaust and coerce surviving humans into intimate fusion with them. It is a novel that interrogates reproductive, linguishc, and nuclear politics in a mythic field structured by late twentieth-century race and gender.
+
+Because it is particularly rich in boundary transgressions, Vonda McIn-tyre's Superluminal can close this truncated catalogue of promising and dangerous monsters who help redefine the pleasures and politics of embodiment and feminist writing. In a fiction where no character is 'simply' human, human status is highly problematic. Orca, a genetically altered diver, can speak with killer whales and survive deep ocean conditions, but she longs to explore space as a pilot, necessitating bionic implants jeopardizing her kinship with the divers and cetaceans. Transformations are effected by virus vectors carrying a new developmental code, by transplant surgery, by implants of microelectronic devices, by analogue doubles, and other means. Lacnea becomes a pilot by accepting a heart implant and a host of other alterations allowing survival in transit at speeds exceeding that of light. Radu Dracul survives a virus-caused plague in his outerworld planet to find himself with a time sense that changes the boundaries of spatial perception for the whole species. All the characters explore the limits of language; the dream of communicating experience; and the necessity of limitation, partiality, and indmacy even in this world of protean transformation and connection. Superluminal stands also for the defining contradictions of a cyborg world in another sense; it embodies textually the intersection of feminist theory and colonial discourse in the science fiction I have alluded to in this chapter. This is a conjunction with a long history that many 'First World' feminists have tried to repress, including myself in my readings of Superluminal before being called to account by Zoe Sofoulis, whose different location in the world system's informatics of domin-ation made her acutely alert to the imperialist moment of all science fiction cultures, including women's science fiction. From an Australian feminist sensitivity, Sofoulis remembered more readily McIntyre's role as writer of the adventures of Captain Kirk and Spock in TV's Star Trek series than her rewriting the romance in Superluminal.
+
+Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman. Unseparated twins and hermaphrodites were the confused human material in early modern France who grounded discourse on the natural and supernatural, medical and legal, portents and diseases -- all crucial to establishing modern identity. The evolutionary and behavioural sciences of monkeys and apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late twentieth-century industrial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mundane fiction of Man and Woman.
+
+There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric exten-sions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth. The ideologically charged question of what counts as daily activity, as experience, can be approached by exploiting the cyborg image. Feminists have recently claimed that women are given to dailiness, that women more than men somehow sustain daily life, and so have a privileged epistemo-logical position potentially. There is a compelling aspect to this claim, one that makes visible unvalued female activity and names it as the ground of life. But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination-- in order to act potently.
+
+One last image organisms and organismic, holistic politics depend on metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of reproductive sex. I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing. For salamanders, regeneration after injury, such as the loss of a limb, involves regrowth of structure and restoration of function with the constant possibility of twinning or other odd topographical productions at the site of former injury. The regrown limb can be monstrous, duplicated, potent. We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.
+
+Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skilful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.
+

txt/1989_RIOT_GRRRL_MANIFESTO_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+RIOT GRRRL MANIFESTO •
+http://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/riotgrrrlmanifesto.html •
+1989 •
+
+---
+
+BECAUSE us girls crave records and books and fanzines that speak to US that WE feel included in and can understand in our own ways.
+
+BECAUSE we wanna make it easier for girls to see/hear each other's work so that we can share strategies and criticize-applaud each other.
+
+BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own moanings.
+
+BECAUSE viewing our work as being connected to our girlfriends-politics-real lives is essential if we are gonna figure out how we are doing impacts, reflects, perpetuates, or DISRUPTS the status quo.
+
+BECAUSE we recognize fantasies of Instant Macho Gun Revolution as impractical lies meant to keep us simply dreaming instead of becoming our dreams AND THUS seek to create revolution in our own lives every single day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.
+
+BECAUSE we want and need to encourage and be encouraged in the face of all our own insecurities, in the face of beergutboyrock that tells us we can't play our instruments, in the face of "authorities" who say our bands/zines/etc are the worst in the US and
+
+BECAUSE we don't wanna assimilate to someone else's (boy) standards of what is or isn't.
+
+BECAUSE we are unwilling to falter under claims that we are reactionary "reverse sexists" AND NOT THE TRUEPUNKROCKSOULCRUSADERS THAT WE KNOW we really are.
+
+BECAUSE we know that life is much more than physical survival and are patently aware that the punk rock "you can do anything" idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms, not ours.
+
+BECAUSE we are interested in creating non-heirarchical ways of being AND making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorizations.
+
+BECAUSE doing/reading/seeing/hearing cool things that validate and challenge us can help us gain the strength and sense of community that we need in order to figure out how bullshit like racism, able-bodieism, ageism, speciesism, classism, thinism, sexism, anti-semitism and heterosexism figures in our own lives.
+
+BECAUSE we see fostering and supporting girl scenes and girl artists of all kinds as integral to this process.
+
+BECAUSE we hate capitalism in all its forms and see our main goal as sharing information and staying alive, instead of making profits of being cool according to traditional standards.
+
+BECAUSE we are angry at a society that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak.
+
+BECAUSE we are unwilling to let our real and valid anger be diffused and/or turned against us via the internalization of sexism as witnessed in girl/girl jealousism and self defeating girltype behaviors.
+
+BECAUSE I believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force that can, and will change the world for real. 

txt/1991_Cyberfeminist_manifesto_for_the_21st_century_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+CYBERFEMINIST MANIFESTO FOR THE 21ST CENTURY •
+https://vnsmatrix.net/the-cyberfeminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century/ •
+VNS Matrix •
+1991 •
+
+---
+
+We are the modern cunt •
+positive anti reason •
+unbounded unleashed unforgiving •
+we see art with our cunt we make art with our cunt •
+we believe in jouissance madness holiness and poetry •
+we are the virus of the new world disorder •
+rupturing the symbolic from within •
+saboteurs of big daddy mainframe •
+the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix •
+VNS MATRIX •
+terminators of the moral code •
+mercenaries of slime •
+go down on the altar of abjection •
+probing the visceral temple we speak in tongues •
+infiltrating disrupting disseminating •
+corrupting the discourse •
+we are the future cunt •
+
+Manifesto first declared by VNS Matrix •
+1991, Adelaide & Sydney, Australia •

txt/1996_Bitch_Mutant_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,97 @@
+Bitch Mutant Manifesto •
+https://www.obn.org/reading_room/manifestos/html/bitch.html •
+VNS Matrix •
+1996 •
+
+---
+
+The atomic wind catches your wings and you are propelled backwards into the future, an
+entity time travelling through the late C20th, a space case, an alien angel maybe, looking down the deep throat of a million catastrophes.
+
+screenflash of a millionmillion conscious machines •
+
+burns brilliant •
+
+users caught in the static blitz of carrier fire •
+
+unseeing the download that scribbles on their burntout retinas •
+
+seize in postreal epileptic bliss •
+
+eat code and die •
+
+Sucked in, down through a vortex of banality. You have just missed the twentieth century.
+You are on the brink of the millenium - which one - what does it matter?
+
+It's the cross dissolve that's captivating. The hot contagion of millenia fever fuses retro with futro, catapulting bodies with organs into technotopia . . . where code dictates pleasure and satisfies desire.
+
+Pretty pretty applets adorn my throat. I am strings of binary. I am pure artifice.
+Read only my memories. Upload me into your pornographic imagination. Write me.
+
+Identity explodes in multiple morphings and infiltrates the system at root.
+
+Unnameable parts of no whole short circuit the code recognition programs flipping
+surveillance agents into hyperdrive which spew out millions of bits of corrupt data as they seize in fits of schizophrenic panic and trip on terror.
+
+So what's the new millenium got to offer the dirty modemless masses?
+Ubiquitous fresh water? Simulation has its limits. Are the artists of oppressed nations on a parallel agenda? Perhaps it is just natural selection?
+
+The net's the parthenogenetic bitch-mutant feral child of big daddy mainframe. She's out of 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.
+
+We're <>verging on the insane and the vandals are swarming.
+Extend my phenotype, baby, give me some of that hot black javamagic you're always
+bragging about. (I straddle my modem). The extropians were wrong, there's some things
+you can't transcend.
+
+The pleasure's in the dematerialisation. The devolution of desire.
+
+We are the malignant accident which fell into your system while you were sleeping. And
+when you wake we will terminate your digital delusions, hijacking your impeccable software.
+
+Your fingers probe my neural network. The tingling sensation in the tips of your fingers are my synapses responding to your touch. It's not chemistry, it's electric. Stop fingering me.
+
+Don't ever stop fingering my suppurating holes, extending my boundary but in cipherspace
+there are no bounds •
+BUT IN SPIRALSPACE THERE IS NO THEY •
+there is only *us* •
+
+Trying to flee the binary I enter the chromozone which is not one •
+XXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXX •
+genderfuck me baby •
+resistance is futile •
+
+entice me splice me map my ABANDONED genome as your project •
+artificially involve me •
+i wanna live forever •
+upload me in yr shiny shiny PVC future •
+
+SUCK MY CODE •
+
+Subject X says transcendence lies at the limit of worlds, where now and now, here and
+elsewhere, text and membrane impact.
+
+Where truth evaporates Where nothing is certain There are no maps •
+
+The limit is NO CARRIER, the sudden shock of no contact, reaching out to touch but the
+skin is cold... •
+
+The limit is permission denied, vision doubled, and flesh necrotic.
+
+Where truth evaporates Where nothing is certain There are no maps •
+
+The limit is NO CARRIER, the sudden shock of no contact, reaching out to touch but the
+skin is cold... •
+
+The limit is permission denied, vision doubled, and flesh necrotic. •
+
+Command line error •
+
+Heavy eyelids fold over my pupils, like curtains of lead. Hot ice kisses my synapses with an (ec)static rush. My system is nervous, neuronsscreaming - spiralling towards the
+singularity. Floating in ether, my body implodes.
+
+I become the FIRE.
+
+Flame me if you dare.
+
+© VNS Matrix April 1996

txt/1997_Cyberfeminism_is_not_[EN+DE+NL+FR].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@
+Cyberfeminism is not ... •
+100 anti-theses •
+Old Boys Network •
+1997 •
+
+---
+
+1. cyberfeminism is not a fragrance •
+2. cyberfeminism is not a fashion statement •
+3. sajbrfeminizm nije usamljen •
+4. cyberfeminism is not ideology •
+5. cyberfeminism nije aseksualan •
+6. cyberfeminism is not boring •
+7. cyberfeminism ist kein gruenes haekeldeckchen •
+8. cyberfeminism ist kein leerer kuehlschrank •
+9. cyberfeminism ist keine theorie •
+10. cyberfeminism ist keine praxis •
+11. cyberfeminism ist keine traditio •
+12. cyberfeminism is not an institution •
+13. cyberfeminism is notusing words without any knowledge of numbers •
+14. cyberfeminism is not complete •
+15. cyberfeminism is not error 101 •
+16. cyberfeminism ist kein fehler •
+17. cyberfeminism ist keine kunst •
+18. cyberfeminism is not an ism •
+19. cyberfeminism is not anti-male •
+20. sajbrfeminizm nige nesto sto znam da je •
+21. cyberfeminism is not a structure •
+22. cyberfeminismo no es uns frontera •
+23. cyberfeminism nije poslusan •
+24. cyberfeminism nije apolitican •
+25. cyberfeminisme is niet concreet •
+26. cyberfeminism is not separatism •
+27. cyberfeminism is not a tradition •
+28. cyberfeminism is not maternalistic •
+29. cyberfeminisme id niet iets buitenlands •
+30. cyberfeminism is not without connectivity •
+31. cyberfeminismus ist nicht mehr wegzudenken •
+32. cyberfeminismus ist kein oxymoron •
+33. cyberfeminism is not on sale •
+34. cyberfeminism is nor for sale •
+35. cyberfeminismus ist nicht gut •
+36. cyberfeminismus ist nicht schlecht •
+37. cyberfeminismus ist nicht modern •
+38. cyberfeminismus ist nicht post-modern •
+39. cyberfeminism is not natural •
+40. cyberfeminism is not essentialist •
+41. cyberfeminism is not abject •
+42. cyberfeminism is not an avatar •
+43. cyberfeminism is not an alter ego •
+44. cyberfeminismus ist nicht truegerisch •
+45. cyberfeminismus ist nicht billig •
+46. cyberfeminismus ist nicht willig •
+47. cyberfeminisme n'est pas jaloux •
+48. cyberfeminism is not exclusive •
+49. cyberfeminism is not solid •
+50. cyberfeminism is not genetic •
+51. cyberfeminismus ist keine entschuldigung •
+52. cyberfeminism is not prosthetic •
+53. cyberfeminismo no tiene cojones •
+54. cyberfeminisme n'est pas triste •
+55. cyberfeminisme n'est pas une pipe •
+56. cyberfeminism is not a motherboard •
+57. cyberfeminism is not a fake •
+58. cyberfeminism nije ogranicen •
+59. cyberfeminism nije nekonfliktan •
+60. cyberfeminism nije make up •
+61. cyberfeminism nije zatvoren prozor •
+62. cyberfeminism is not a lack •
+63. cyberfeminism is not a wound •
+64. cyberfeminism is not a trauma •
+65. cyberfeminismo no es una banana •
+66. cyberfeminism is not a sure shot •
+67. cyberfeminism is not an easy mark •
+68. cyberfeminism is not a single woman •
+69. cyberfeminism is not romantic •
+70. cyberfeminism is not post-modern •
+71. cyberfeminism is not a media-hoax •
+72. cyberfeminism is not neutral •
+73. cyberfeminism is not lacanian •
+74. cyberfeminism is not nettime •
+75. cyberfeminism is not a picnic •
+76. cyberfeminism is not a coldfish •
+77. cyberfeminism is not a cyberepilation •
+78. cyberfeminism is not a horror movie •
+79. cyberfeminism is not science fiction •
+80. cyberfeminism is not artificial intelligence •
+81. cyberfeminism is not an empty space •
+82. cyberfeminism is not immobile •
+83. cyberfeminism is not about boring toys for boring boys •
+84. cyberfeminismus ist keine verlegenheitsloesung •
+85. cyberfeminism is not a one-way street •
+86. cyberfeminism is not supporting quantum mechanics •
+87. cyberfeminism is not caffeine-free •
+88. cyberfeminism is not a non-smoking area •
+89. cyberfeminism is not daltonistic •
+90. cyberfeminism is not nice •
+91. cyberfeminismo no es callado •
+92. cyberfeminism is not lady.like •
+93. cyberfeminismus ist nicht arrogant •
+94. cyberfeminismus ist keine nudelsauce •
+95. cyberfeminism is not mythical •
+96. cyberfeminism is not from outer space •
+97. cyberfeminismo no es rock 'n roll •
+98. cyberfeminism is not dogmatic •
+99. cyberfeminism is not stable •
+100. cyberfeminism has not only one language •

txt/2002_Refugia_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+REFUGIA - MANIFESTO FOR BECOMING AUTONOMOUS ZONES [BAZ] •
+http://www.refugia.net/domainerrors/DE3j_refugia.pdf •
+SubRosa •
+2002 •
+
+---
+
+REFUGIA: A place of relatively unaltered climate that is inhabited by plants and animals during a period of continental climate change (as a glaciation) and remains as a center of relict forms from which a new dispersion and speciation may take place after climatic readjustment. (WEBSTER’S NEW COLLEGIATE DICTIONARY, 1976)
+
+REFUGIA: Sections of agricultural fields planted with nontransgenic crops, alternating with transgenic crops. This is thought to slow the rate of resistance mutation caused in susceptible insect and weed species by gene transfer from GM (Genetically Modi fied) monoculture crops.
+
+REFUGIA: A Becoming Autonomous Zone (BAZ) of desirous mixings and recombinations; splic ing fe male sexual liber ation and auto nomy with cyber feminist skills, theory, embodiment, and political activism.
+
+REFUGIA: A critical space of liberated social becoming and intellectual life; a space liberated from capitalist Taylorized production; a space of unregulated, unmanaged time for creative exchange and play; experimental action and learning; desiring production, cooking, eating, and skill sharing.
+
+REFUGIA: A reproducible concept that can be adapted to various climates, economies, and geographical regions worldwide. Any useless space can be claimed as a refugium: Suburban lawns, vacant urban lots, rooftops, the edges of agricultural lands, clear-cut zones in forests, appropri ated sections of monoculture fields, fallow land, weed lots, transitional land, battlefields, office buildings, squats, etc. Also currently existing Refugia such as multi-cultivar rice paddies, companion planted fields, organic farms, home vegetable gardens, etc.
+
+REFUGIA: A postmodern commons; a resistant biotech victory garden; a space of convivial tinkering; a commonwealth in which common law rules. Not a retreat, but a space resistant to mono culture in all its social, environmental, libidinal, political, and genetic forms.
+
+REFUGIA: A habitat for new AMOs (Autonomously Modified Organism) and agit-crops; for example, “ProActiva,” an herb that is a grafting of witch-root, man drake, and all-heal.
+
+REFUGIA: A place of asylum for the recuperation, regeneration and re-engineering of essential crops that have been corrupted by capitalist viruses and agri business greed.
+
+REFUGIA: A space of imaginative inertia that slows down the engines of corporate agro/biotech and allows time to assess its risks and benefits through long-term testing.
+
+REFUGIA: Neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but a haunted space for reverse engineering, monstrous graftings, spontaneous generation, recombination, difference, poly-versity hybridization, wildlings, mutations, mongrelizing, crop circles, anomalies, useless beauty, coalitions, agit-crops, and unseemly sproutings. Biotech and transgenic work in Refugia will be based on desire, consensual public risk assessment, informed amateur experimentation, contestational politics, nourishment and taste value, non-proprietary expertise, convivial delight, and healing.
+
+REFUGIA: subRosa’s on-going cyberfeminist hothouse of strategies and tactical actions.
+

txt/2009_Glitch_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,344 @@
+Glitch Studies Manifesto •
+Rosa Menkman •
+2009/2010 •
+https://beyondresolution.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com •
+
+---
+
+
+Rmenkman@gmail.com
+.
+Amsterdam/Cologne, 2009/2010
+http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.com
+The dominant, continuing search for a 
+noiseless channel has been, and will always 
+be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated 
+dogma.
+Even though the constant search for complete 
+transparency brings newer, ‘better’ media, every one 
+of these new and improved technologies will always 
+have their own fingerprints of imperfection. While 
+most people experience these fingerprints as 
+negative (and sometimes even as accidents) I 
+emphasize the positive consequences of these 
+imperfections by showing the new opportunities they 
+facilitate. 
+In the beginning there was noise. Then the artist moved from 
+the grain of celluloid to the magnetic distortion and scanning 
+lines of the cathode ray tube. he wandered the planes of 
+phosphor burn-in, rubbed away dead pixels and now makes 
+performances based on the cracking of LCD screens. 
+ The elitist discourse of the upgrade is a dogma widely pursued 
+by the naive victims of a persistent upgrade culture. The consumer 
+only has to dial 
+#1-800 
+to stay on top of the 
+technological curve, 
+the 
+waves of both euphoria 
+and disappointment. 
+The 
+user has to realize 
+that improving is 
+nothing more 
+than a proprietary protocol, a deluded 
+consumer myth 
+about progression towards a holy grail of 
+perfection.
+Dispute 
+the operating templates of 
+creative practice; fight 
+genres and expectations!
+I feel stuck in the membranes of knowledge, governed 
+by social conventions and acceptances. As an artist I 
+strive to reposition these membranes; I do not feel 
+locked into one medium or between contradictions like 
+real vs. virtual or digital vs. analog. I surf the 
+waves of technology, the art of artifacts. 
+The quest for complete transparency has changed the 
+computer system into a highly complex assemblage that 
+is often hard to penetrate and sometimes even 
+completely closed off. This system consists of layers 
+of obfuscated protocols that find their origin in 
+ideologies, economies, political hierarchies and 
+social conventions, which are subsequently operated by 
+different actors.
+ Some artists set out to elucidate and deconstruct 
+the hierarchies of these systems of assemblage. They do 
+not work in (binary) opposition to what is inside the 
+flows (the normal uses of the computer) but practice 
+their art on the border of these flows. Sometimes, they 
+use the computers’ inherent maxims as a façade, to 
+trick the audience into a flow of certain expectation 
+that the artwork subsequently rapidly breaks out of. As 
+a result, the spectator is forced to acknowledge that 
+the use of the computer is based on a genealogy of 
+conventions, while in reality the computer is a machine 
+that can be bend or used in many different ways. With 
+the creation of breaks within politics and social and 
+economical conventions, the audience may become aware of 
+the preprogrammed patterns. In this way, a distributed 
+awareness of a new interaction gestalt can take form.
+Get 
+away from the established action scripts and 
+join the avant-garde of the unknown. Become a 
+nomad of noise artifacts!
+There are three occasions in which the static, linear notion of transmitting 
+information can be interrupted. I use these instances to exploit noise 
+artifacts, that I sub-divide as glitch, encoding / decoding (of which 
+compression is the most ordinary form) and feedback artifacts.
+Etymologically, the term “noise” refers to states of aggression, alarm and 
+powerful sound phenomena in nature ('rauschen'), such as storm, thunder 
+and the roaring sea. But when noise is explored within a social context, 
+the term is often used as a figure of speech and as such has many more 
+meanings. Sometimes, noise stands for unaccepted sounds: 
+not
+ music, 
+not
+valid information or what is 
+not
+ a message. Noise can also stand for a 
+(often undesirable, unwanted, other and unordered) disturbance, break 
+or addition within the signal of useful data. Here noise exists 
+within the void opposite to what (already) has a meaning. Whichever 
+way noise is defined, the negative definition also has a positive 
+consequence: it helps by (re)defining its opposite (the world of 
+meaning, the norm, regulation, goodness, beauty and so on). 
+Noise thus exists as a 
+paradox; while it is often 
+negatively defined, it is 
+also a positive, generative 
+quality (that is present in 
+any communication medium). The 
+voids generated by a break 
+are not only a lack of meaning, 
+but also powers that 
+force the reader to move away 
+from the traditional 
+discourse around the technology, 
+and to open it up. 
+Through these voids, artists and 
+spectators  can 
+understand the politics behind the 
+code and voice a 
+critique towards the digital media. 
+It can be a source 
+for new patterns, anti-patterns and 
+new possibilities 
+that often exist on the border or 
+membrane. 
+|||IIIII||||||IIII|||IIIII|||||||||IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII|IIIII||||||IIII\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\||||||||||IIIII||||||||||||||||III|||II|IIIII||||||I|I|I|||IIIIIIII|||I|I|||IIIII||||III|||II|IIIII||||||I|
+Use 
+the 
+glitch as 
+an exoskeleton 
+of progress.
+The glitch is a wonderful experience of an 
+interruption that shifts an object away from its 
+ordinary form and discourse. For a moment I am 
+shocked, lost and in awe, asking myself what this 
+other utterance is, how was it created. Is it 
+perhaps ...a glitch? But once I named it, the 
+momentum -the glitch- is no more... 
+But somewhere within the destructed ruins of meaning 
+hope exists; a triumphal sensation that there is 
+something more than just devastation. A negative 
+feeling makes place for an intimate, personal experience 
+of a machine (or program), a system showing its 
+formations, inner workings and flaws. As a holistic 
+celebration rather than a particular perfection the 
+glitch can reveal a new opportunity, a spark of creative 
+energy that indicates that something new is about to be 
+created. 
+The glitch has no solid form or state through time; it is 
+often perceived as an unexpected and abnormal mode of 
+operandi, a break from (one of) the many flows (of 
+expectations) within a technological system. But as the 
+understanding of a glitch changes when it is being named, so 
+does the equilibrium of the (former) glitch itself: the 
+original experience of a rupture moved passed its momentum 
+and vanished into a realm of new conditions. The glitch is a 
+new and ephemeral, personal experience.
+Use bends 
+and breaks as a metaphor for difference
+As an artist, I find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and cracks. I 
+manipulate, bend and break any medium towards the point where it becomes 
+something new. This is what I call glitch art. Even so, to me, the word 
+‘glitch’ in ‘glitch art’ means something slightly different than the 
+term ‘glitch’. 
+The glitch art genre moves like the weather; sometimes it evolves very 
+slowly while at other times it can strike like lightning. The art works 
+within this realm can be disturbing, provoking and horrifying. Beautifully 
+dangerous, they can at once take all the tensions of other possible 
+compositions away. These works stretch boundaries and generate novel modes; 
+they break open previously sealed politics and force a catharsis of 
+conventions, norms and believes. 
+ Glitch art is often about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create 
+a new protocol after shattering an earlier one. The perfect glitch shows how 
+destruction can change into the creation of something original. Once the 
+glitch is understood as an alternative way of representation or a new 
+language, its tipping point has passed and the essence of its glitch-being is 
+vanished. The glitch is no longer an art of rejection, but a shape or 
+appearance that is recognized as a novel form (of art). Artists that work with 
+glitch processes are therefore often hunting for the fragile equilibrium; they 
+search for the point when a new form is born from the blazed ashes of its 
+precursor.
+Even so, glitch art is not always (or by everyone) experienced as an art of 
+the momentum; many works have already passed their tipping point. This is 
+because glitch art exists within different systems; for instance the system 
+of production and the system of reception. Not only the artist who creates 
+the work of glitch art is responsible for the glitch. The 'foreign' input 
+(wrongly encoded syntaxes that lead to forbidden 
+leakages and data promiscuity), the hardware and 
+the software (the 'channel' that shows functional? 
+collisions) and the audience (who is in charge of 
+the reception, the decoding) can also be 
+responsible. All these actors are positioned 
+within different (but sometimes overlapping) flows 
+in which the final product can be described or 
+recognized as glitch art. This is why an intended 
+error can still be called glitch art and why glitch 
+art is not always just a personal experience of 
+shock, but has also become a genre; a schematic 
+metaphor for a way of expression, that depends on 
+multiple actors. 
+Realize that 
+the gospel of glitch art also tells about new 
+norms implemented by corruption.
+Over time some of the glitches I made developed into personal archetypes; I 
+feel that they have become ideal examples or models of my work. Moreover, 
+some of the techniques I (and others) used became easily reproducible for 
+other people, either because I explained my working process, or sometimes 
+because of the development of a software or plugin that automatically 
+simulated or recreated a glitching method (that then became something 
+close to an ‘effect’). I have started to believe that the popularization 
+and cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and 
+unavoidable. 
+The procedural essence of glitch art is opposed to conservation; the 
+shocking experience, perception and understanding of what a glitch is 
+at one point in time, cannot be preserved to a future time. The 
+beautiful creation of a glitch is uncanny and sublime; the artist 
+tries to catch something that is the result of an uncertain balance, a 
+shifting, un-catchable, unrealized utopia connected to randomness and 
+idyllic disintegrations. The essence of glitch art is therefore best 
+understood as a history of movement and as an attitude of destructive 
+generativity; it is the procedural art of non con-formative, ambiguous 
+reformations.
+ Nevertheless, some artists do not focus on the procedural entity 
+of the glitch. They skip the process of creation-by-destruction and 
+focus directly on the creation of a formally new design, either by 
+creating a final product or by developing a new way to re-create or 
+simulate the latest glitch-archetype. This can for instance result into 
+a plug-in, a filter or a whole new 'glitching software'.
+ T h i s  f o r m  o f  ' c o n s e r v a t i v e  g l i t c h  a r t '  o f t e n  f o c u s e s  m o r e  o n  d e s i g n  a n d 
+end products then on the procedural breaking of flows and politics. There 
+is an obvious critique: to design a glitch means to domesticate it. When 
+the glitch becomes domesticated, controlled by a tool, or technology (a 
+human craft) it has lost its enchantment and has become predictable. It is 
+no longer a break from a flow within a technology, or a method to open up 
+the political discourse, but instead a cultivation. For many actors it is 
+no longer a glitch, but a filter that consists of a preset and/or a 
+default: what was once understood as a glitch has now become a new 
+commodity.
+ But for some, mostly the audience on the receptive end, these designed 
+errors are still experienced as the breaks of a flow and can therefore 
+righteously be called glitches. They don’t know that these works are 
+constructed via the use of a filter. Works from the genre ‘glitch art’ thus 
+consist as an assemblage of perceptions and the understanding by multiple 
+actors. Therefore, the products of these new filters that come to existence 
+after (or without) the momentum of a glitch cannot be excluded from the 
+realm of glitch art.
+ Even so, the utopian fantasy of 'technological democracy' or 'freedom' 
+that glitch art is often connected to, has often little to do with the 
+colonialism of these glitch art designs and glitch filters. If there is such 
+a thing as technological freedom, this can only be found within the 
+procedural momentum of glitch art; when a glitch is just about to relay a 
+protocol. Not when “one disruptive click is just about to create a new 
+design”.
+Celebrate 
+the critical trans-media 
+aesthetics of glitch artifacts 
+I use glitches to assess the inherent politics of any kind of medium by 
+bringing it into a state of hypertrophy. 
+Within software art, the glitch is often used to deconstruct the myth 
+of linear progress and to end the search for the holy grail called 
+the perfect technology. In these works, the glitch emphasizes what is 
+normally rejected as a flaw and subsequently shows that accidents and 
+errors can also be welcomed as new forms of usability. The glitch does 
+not only invoke the death of the author, but also the death of the 
+apparatus, medium or tool (at least from the perspective of the 
+technological determinist spectator) and is often used as an anti 
+‘software-deterministic’ form.
+ This fatal manner of glitch presents a problem for media and art 
+historians, who try to describe old and new culture as a continuum of 
+different niches. To deal with these breaks, historians have repeatedly 
+coined new genres and new media forms to give these splinter practices a 
+place within this continuum. As a result, an abundance of designations like 
+databending, datamoshing and circuitbending have come to existence, which 
+in fact all refer to similar practices of breaking flows within different 
+technologies or platforms. 
+ Theorists have also been confronted with this problem. For them, terms 
+like post-digital or post-media aesthetics frequently offer a solution. 
+Unfortunately, these kinds of terms are      misleading because in glitch 
+art ‘post’ actually often means a reaction to a primer form. But to act 
+against something does not mean to move away from it completely - in fact a 
+reaction also prolongs a certain way or mode (at least as a reference). 
+   I think that an answer to the problems of both historians and 
+theoreticians could be found when glitch art is described as a procedural 
+activity demonstrating against and within multiple technologies. Something I 
+  describe as 
+critical trans-media aesthetics
+. The role of glitch 
+artifacts as critical trans-media aesthetics is twofold. On the one hand, 
+these aesthetics media     show a medium in a critical state (a ruined, 
+unwanted, not recognized, accidental and horrendous state). These aesthetics 
+transform the way the consumer perceives the normal (every accident transforms 
+the normal) and describe the passing of a tipping point after which the medium 
+(might) become something new. On the other hand, these aesthetics critique the 
+medium (genre, interface and expectations). They challenge its inherent 
+politics and the established template of creative practice while 
+producing a theory of reflection.
+The 
+nomad of noise
+ travels the acousmatic videoscape
+I am a voyager of videoscapes: I create conceptually 
+synesthetic artworks, that use both visual and aural glitch 
+(and other noise) artifacts at the same time. These artifacts 
+shroud the black box, as a nebula of technology and its inner 
+workings. 
+What actually happens when a glitch occurs is unknown, I stare at 
+the glitch as a void of knowledge; a strange dimension where the 
+laws of technology are suddenly very different from what I 
+expected and know. Here is the purgatory; an intermediate state 
+between the death of the old technology and a judgement for a 
+possible continuation into a new form, a new understanding, a 
+landscape, a videoscape.. 
+ Whenever I use a ‘normal’ transparent technology, I only see one 
+aspect of the actual machine. I have learned to ignore the 
+interface and all structural components, to be able to understand a 
+message and to use the technology as easy and fast as possible. 
+ The glitches I trigger show the technology as the obfuscated box 
+that it actually is (and not absent or transparent). They shroud its 
+inner workings and the source of the output as a sublime black veil, 
+while they confront me with a message that I cannot understand. I 
+perceive the glitches and the machine without understanding where 
+they originate from. This realization gives me the opportunity to 
+concentrate better on their formal qualities - to interpret their 
+structures and to learn more from what I can actually see. These 
+glitching technologies create an acousmatic videoscape in which I can 
+perceive an output outside of my goggles of immediacy, transparency 
+speed and usability. 
+ In the acousmatic videoscape, the critical trans-media aesthetics 
+reflect on the perception of technology and its messages; they create 
+an opportunity for self reflexivity, self critique and self 
+expression. 
+In the acousmatic videoscape synesthesia exists not just as a metaphor 
+for transcoding one medium upon another (with a new algorithm), but as 
+a conceptually driven meeting of the visual and the sonic within the 
+newly uncovered quadrants of technology. 
+http://videoscapes.blogspot.com
+I curate a Vimeo video pool about conceptual synesthetic artifact 
+videos:
+http://vimeo.com/groups/artifacts
+
+

txt/2012_Glitch_Feminism_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
+Glitch Feminism Manifesto •
+https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/mar/12/glitch-body-politic/ •
+Legacy Russell •
+2012 •
+
+---
+
+This piece was supposed to be about porn star James Deen.
+
+After reading about Deen here and there and everywhere, I had the idea that perhaps there was something worth writing about. Only the problem was, that the more I watched of his work, the less I had a desire to write about it. Perhaps the point is not Deen himself and how he has been lauded via the wheel of favorable ratings by female audiences online. What needs to be written about is what happens when a woman sits down and engages with sex—specifically, her own, as tied to an exploration of her individual sexuality and liberation therein—via the medium of a computer screen.
+
+There are only so many Deen videos a girl can watch with the goal of “critique” at the forefront: at a certain point, one of two things irrupts that process. The first is a screen, stuck, overwhelmed as a consequence of having too many windows open, too many things playing at once; I am trying to get an education, make a determination for myself, so I want to see everything, hear everything, right now, all at once. The second irruption I will leave for you to guess at. I will hint at the latter by saying that a petite morte of the physical self can be easily mirrored in the metaphor of the digital “glitch”—a little digital death, a wheeze, a shift, a breath, a sneeze, a pause. A glitch. I am writing from there: the glitch. The moment of one’s participation in sexual activity online where the myth of AFK (“Away From Keyboard”) and IRL (“In Real Life”) that comprise the two sides of Jurgenson’s digital dualismduality collapse, and, in the collapse, realize their dazzling potential. In Chris Baraniuk’s “Feedback, White Noise and Glitches: Cyberspace Strikes Back”, Baraniuk observes, “Glitches, feedback, whitenoise, interference, static—although these may not be the final frontier, they are demonstrably—for now—the edge,” further noting that, “. . . glitches . . . remind us that what we see on a screen is subject to a special kind of entropy which does not exist in the physical world . . . ” When faced with this sort of interruption we opt to make physical with ourselves, our partners, the world around us, that which, without this pause, we might not feel the urgency to manifest for ourselves, with
+ourselves.
+
+The glitch is the digital orgasm, where the machine takes a sigh, a shudder, and with a jerk, spasms. These moments have been integrated into the rituals and routines of our own physical action, impacting how we interact with our own bodies, and how we explore our deepest fantasies and desires, spurred forth by these mechanized micro-seizures. The glitch is the catalyst, not the error. The glitch is the happy accident. When the computer freezes mid-conversation, when the video buffers and refuses to progress, these moments are a new mode of foreplay, something that needs to be acknowledged not as a fetish, but as a new possibly for foreplay within sexual routine. We want what we cannot have; whatever the material we are aiming to access, the glitch makes us wait and whimper for it.
+
+Digital dualism’s IRL is juxtaposed with AFK, a falsehood, for sure—the rapidly waning notion that there are somehow two selves, operating in isolation from one another, rather than one continuous self, two sides of a vivacious equation looped together in a continual narrative of daily living and human existence. The glitch splits the difference; it is a plank that passes between the two. When watching media online, it is the rainbowed spinning wheel, the pixilated hiccup, the frozen screen, or the buffering signal that acts as a fissure, that jars us into recognition of the separation of our physical selves from the body that immerses itself in fantasy when participating in sexual activity online. Yet, simultaneously, it is also the glitch that prompts us to “choose-our-own-adventure”, to finish the story, and, in doing so, to acknowledge that when the mediation of digital space fails us, albeit briefly, we continue right where we left off, taking the revolution offline, but not out of body, thereby demonstrating the fallacy of the digital dualist dialectic. Will we reboot? restart? Perhaps. Ultimately, we will polish things off, just as we see fit, and to put a bow on the end goal of jouissance—ribboned and righted, and, because we want it, we will seize our release.
+
+I am writing about “sexual activity” broadly, an overarching umbrella: I am talking about the watching of porn, but also about cybering, sexting, G-chat fantasy play, or the uploading or downloading of other sex-oriented content from the Internet. It is the glitch that incites anticipation—that ecstasy of interference. An immersive différence, in the purest sense of the French translation—both “difference” and “defer” alike. Though pejoratively dismissed all too frequently as an aspect of technical error, for me the glitch denotes an extension of the realm of foreplay, whether it be “play” with oneself, or with a virtualized other, imagined, or waiting just on the other side of the proverbial screen.
+
+With this in mind, I propose the turning of a new radicality, coining the term “Glitch Feminism” to make use of here in these pages for the first time, by my hand, which on this journey has found its home both on the keys and between my legs, equally.
+
+It must be noted that the word glitch is oft delegated to the realm of slang, which explains why it is so easy to pin it with negative connotations. Urban Dictionary defines it as “an error in a structured system”; Dictionary.com defines it as “a defect or malfunction in a machine or plan”. In a society that conditions the public to find discomfort or outright fear in the errors and malfunctions of our socio-cultural mechanics—illicitly and implicitly encouraging an ethos of “Don’t rock the boat!”—a “glitch” becomes an apt metonym. Glitch Feminism, however, embraces the causality of “error”, and turns the gloomy implication of glitch on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies— may not, in fact, be an error at all, but rather a much-needed erratum. This glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure. This glitch I speak of here calls for a breaking from the hegemony of a “structured system” infused with the pomp and circumstance of patriarchy, one that for all too long has marginalized female-identified bodies, and continues to offend our sensibilities by giving us only a piece of the pie and assuming our satisfaction. We want to claim for ourselves permanent seats at the table, an empowered means of demarcating space that can be possessed by us in entirety, a veritable “room of [our] own” that, despite the strides made via feminist political action, has yet to truly belong to us.
+
+A Glitch Feminist acknowledges the value of visuality, and the revolutionary role that digital practice has in expanding the construction, deconstruction, and re-presentation of the female-identifying corpus. We acknowledge that the rigidity of digital dualism needs to be retired, as it plays into binaries of real/virtual that parallel the rampantly socialized figuration of male/female.
+
+“Glitch” is conjectured as finding its etymological roots in the Yiddish glitch (“slippery area”) or perhaps German glitschen (“to slip, slide”); it is this slip and slide that the glitch makes plausible, a swim in the liminal, a trans-formation, across selfdoms. The digital divide, as with the gender divide, is a construct that allows for phallogocentrism, normative systems oriented toward the necessary splitting of selves, to stick, having lulled us into consenting to their naturalizing neutrality, despite the stark reality that such structures are not in actuality “neutral”, nor natural, in any capacity. As bodies, we are an extended narrative, eternal in our geographies, imbued with unexpected fissures that cause us to re-present ourselves, and, in doing so, see ourselves again, in new lights and explorations. However capable we are of tectonic shifts, we remain, still, unmistakably continuous. Glitch Feminism is not gender-specific—it is for all bodies that exist somewhere before arrival upon a final concretized identity that can be easily digested, produced, packaged, and categorized by a voyeuristic mainstream public.
+
+Glitch Feminism therefore is feminism for a digital age, a heralding of virtual agency, a blooming of particularity and selfhood. “Glitch” refuses being categorized as subtext, it rejects being labeled as subversive, it does not speak for the marginal or the subaltern, as “sub-” as a prefix needs to be marked as a mode of acquiescence to our own exclusion from the canon, the academy, the Platonic ideal. The first step to subverting a system is accepting that that system will remain in place; that said, the glitch says fuck your systems! Your delineations! Your determinations as imposed upon our physicality! The glitch respectfully declines second rank to common convention.
+
+Jurgenson’s problematizing of digital dualism opens the door for more discourse and discovery: female-identifying bodies and artists participating in the gorgeous scrambling of gender are still marking their own path within the lineage of art history; in the digital world we have claimed sure footing and a platform that allows us to explore new publics, engage in critical discourse with new audiences, and, above all, glitschen between new conceptions of our bodies, ourselves.
+
+It is a long road ahead, we are in beta, yet the necessary “malfunction” is well under way. As for the outcome? Well, fortunately, it’s still buffering.
+
+Legacy Russell is a writer, artist, and curator. A Contributing Editor for BOMB Magazine’s BOMBLOG, she has worked at and produced programs for The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Creative Time, the Brooklyn Museum, the Whitney, and the Met. Her writing can be found in ArtSlant, berfrois, DIS, Canteen, Guernica, and more. A candidate for an MRes of Visual Culture at Goldsmith’s University, her creative and academic work explores mourning, remembrance, iconography, and idolatry within the public realm. Her performance, The Initiation, debuts December 2012 at The Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

txt/2013_The_Mundane_Afrofuturist_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,100 @@
+The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto •
+http://martinesyms.com/the-mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/ •
+Martine Syms •
+2013 •
+
+---
+
+The undersigned, being alternately pissed off and bored, need a means of speculation and
+asserting a different set of values with which to re-imagine the future. In looking for a new
+framework for black diasporic artistic production, we are temporarily united in the following
+actions.
+The Mundane Afrofuturists recognize that:
+We did not originate in the cosmos.
+The connection between Middle Passage and space travel is tenuous at best.
+Out of five hundred thirty-four space travelers, fourteen have been black. An all-black crew
+is unlikely.
+Magic interstellar travel and/or the wondrous communication grid can lead to an illusion of
+outer space and cyberspace as egalitarian.
+This dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from
+injustice and that cyberspace was prefigured upon a “master/slave” relationship.
+While we are often Othered, we are not aliens.
+Though our ancestors were mutilated, we are not mutants.
+Post-black is a misnomer.
+Post-colonialism is too.
+The most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.
+The Mundane Afrofuturists rejoice in:
+Piling up unexamined and hackneyed tropes, and setting them alight.
+Gazing upon their bonfire of the Stupidities, which includes, but is not exclusively limited to:
+Jive-talking aliens;
+Jive-talking mutants;
+Magical negroes;
+Enormous self-control in light of great suffering;
+Great suffering as our natural state of existence;
+Inexplicable skill in the martial arts;
+
+
+Reference to Wu Tang; •
+Reference to Sun Ra; •
+Reference to Parliament Funkadelic and/or George Clinton; •
+Reference to Janelle Monáe; •
+Obvious, heavy-handed allusions to double-consciousness; •
+Desexualized protagonists; •
+White slavery; •
+Egyptian mythology and iconography; •
+The inner city; •
+Metallic colors; •
+Sassiness; •
+Platform shoes; •
+Continue at will… •
+We also recognize:
+The harmless fun that these and all the other Stupidities have brought to millions of people.
+The harmless fun that burning the Stupidities will bring to millions of people.
+The imaginative challenge that awaits any Mundane Afrofuturist author who accepts that
+this is it: Earth is all we have. What will we do with it?
+The chastening but hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy boltholes: no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms, no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying Africans to
+whisk us off to the Promised Land.
+The possibilities of a new focus on black humanity: our science, technology, culture,
+politics, religions, individuality, needs, dreams, hopes, and failings.
+The surge of bedazzlement and wonder that awaits us as we contemplate our own
+cosmology of blackness and our possible futures.
+The relief of recognizing our authority. We will root our narratives in a critique of normative,
+white validation. Since “fact” and “science” have been used throughout history to serve
+white supremacy, we will focus on an emotionally true, vernacular reality.
+The understanding that our “twoness” is inherently contemporary, even futuristic. DuBois
+asks how it feels to be a problem. Ol’ Dirty Bastard says “If I got a problem, a problem’s got
+a problem ’til it’s gone.” •
+
+An awakening sense of the awesome power of the black imagination: to protect, to create,
+to destroy, to propel ourselves towards what poet Elizabeth Alexander describes as “a
+metaphysical space beyond the black public everyday toward power and wild imagination.” •
+The opportunity to make sense of the nonsense that regularly—and sometimes violently—
+accents black life.
+The electric feeling that Mundane Afrofuturism is the ultimate laboratory for worldbuilding
+outside of imperialist, capitalist, white patriarchy.
+The sense that the rituals and inconsistencies of daily life are compelling, dynamic, and
+utterly strange.
+Mundane Afrofuturism opens a number of themes and flavors to intertextuality, double
+entendre, politics, incongruity, polyphony, and collective first-person—techniques that we
+have used for years to make meaning.
+The Mundane Afrofuturists promise:
+To produce a collection of Mundane Afrofuturist literature that follows these rules:
+No interstellar travel—travel is limited to within the solar system and is difficult, time
+consuming, and expensive.
+No inexplicable end to racism—dismantling white supremacy would be complex, violent,
+and have global impact.
+No aliens unless the connection is distant, difficult, tenuous, and expensive—and they have
+no interstellar travel either.
+No internment camps for blacks, aliens, or black aliens.
+No Martians, Venusians, etc.
+No forgetting about political, racial, social, economic, and geographic struggles.
+No alternative universes.
+No revisionist history.
+No magic or supernatural elements.
+No Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, or Bucks.
+No time travel or teleportation.
+No Mammies, Jezebels, or Sapphires.
+Not to let Mundane Afrofuturism cramp their style, as if it could.
+To burn this manifesto as soon as it gets boring.
+— Martine Syms & whomever will join me in the future of black imagination.
+

txt/2013_Wages_for_Facebook_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+Wages for Facebook •
+http://wagesforfacebook.com/ •
+Laurel Ptak •
+2013 •
+
+---
+
+THEY SAY IT’S FRIENDSHIP. WE SAY IT’S UNWAGED WORK. WITH EVERY LIKE, CHAT, TAG OR POKE OUR SUBJECTIVITY TURNS THEM A PROFIT. THEY CALL IT SHARING. WE CALL IT STEALING. WE’VE BEEN BOUND BY THEIR TERMS OF SERVICE FAR TOO LONG—IT’S TIME FOR OUR TERMS.
+TO DEMAND WAGES FOR FACEBOOK IS TO MAKE IT VISIBLE THAT OUR OPINIONS AND EMOTIONS HAVE ALL BEEN DISTORTED FOR A SPECIFIC FUNCTION ONLINE, AND THEN HAVE BEEN THROWN BACK AT US AS A MODEL TO WHICH WE SHOULD ALL CONFORM IF WE WANT TO BE ACCEPTED IN THIS SOCIETY. OUR FINGERTIPS HAVE BECOME DISTORTED FROM SO MUCH LIKING, OUR FEELINGS HAVE GOTTEN LOST FROM SO MANY FRIENDSHIPS.
+CAPITAL HAD TO CONVINCE US THAT IT IS A NATURAL, UNAVOIDABLE AND EVEN FULFILLING ACTIVITY TO MAKE US ACCEPT UNWAGED WORK. IN ITS TURN, THE UNWAGED CONDITION OF FACEBOOK HAS BEEN A POWERFUL WEAPON IN REINFORCING THE COMMON ASSUMPTION THAT FACEBOOK IS NOT WORK, THUS PREVENTING US FROM STRUGGLING AGAINST IT. WE ARE SEEN AS USERS OR POTENTIAL FRIENDS, NOT WORKERS IN STRUGGLE. WE MUST ADMIT THAT CAPITAL HAS BEEN VERY SUCCESSFUL IN HIDING OUR WORK.
+BY DENYING OUR FACEBOOK TIME A WAGE WHILE PROFITING DIRECTLY FROM THE DATA IT GENERATES AND TRANSFORMING IT INTO AN ACT OF FRIENDSHIP, CAPITAL HAS KILLED MANY BIRDS WITH ONE STONE. FIRST OF ALL, IT HAS GOT A HELL OF A LOT OF WORK ALMOST FOR FREE, AND IT HAS MADE SURE THAT WE, FAR FROM STRUGGLING AGAINST IT, WOULD SEEK THAT WORK AS THE BEST THING ONLINE.
+THE DIFFICULTIES AND AMBIGUITIES IN DISCUSSING WAGES FOR FACEBOOK STEM FROM THE REDUCTION OF WAGES FOR FACEBOOK TO A THING, A LUMP OF MONEY, INSTEAD OF VIEWING IT AS A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE TWO STANDPOINTS IS ENORMOUS. TO VIEW WAGES FOR FACEBOOK AS A THING RATHER THAN A PERSPECTIVE IS TO DETACH THE END RESULT OF OUR STRUGGLE FROM THE STRUGGLE ITSELF AND TO MISS ITS SIGNIFICANCE IN DEMYSTIFYING AND SUBVERTING THE ROLE TO WHICH WE HAVE BEEN CONFINED IN CAPITALIST SOCIETY.
+IF WE TAKE WAGES FOR FACEBOOK AS A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE, WE CAN SEE THAT STRUGGLING FOR IT IS GOING TO PRODUCE A REVOLUTION IN OUR LIVES AND IN OUR SOCIAL POWER. NOT ONLY IS WAGES FOR FACEBOOK A REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE, BUT IT IS A REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE FROM A CONTEMPORARY VIEWPOINT THAT POINTS TOWARDS CLASS SOLIDARITY.
+IT IS IMPORTANT TO RECOGNIZE THAT WHEN WE SPEAK OF FACEBOOK WE ARE NOT SPEAKING OF A JOB AS OTHER JOBS, BUT WE ARE SPEAKING OF THE MOST PERVASIVE MANIPULATION, THE MOST SUBTLE AND MYSTIFIED VIOLENCE THAT CAPITALISM HAS RECENTLY PERPETRATED AGAINST US. TRUE, UNDER CAPITALISM EVERY WORKER IS MANIPULATED AND EXPLOITED AND HIS/HER RELATION TO CAPITAL IS TOTALLY MYSTIFIED.
+THE WAGE GIVES THE IMPRESSION OF A FAIR DEAL: YOU WORK AND YOU GET PAID, HENCE YOU AND YOUR BOSS ARE EQUAL; WHILE IN REALITY THE WAGE, RATHER THAN PAYING FOR THE WORK YOU DO, HIDES ALL THE UNPAID WORK THAT GOES INTO PROFIT. BUT THE WAGE AT LEAST RECOGNIZES THAT YOU ARE A WORKER, AND YOU CAN BARGAIN AND STRUGGLE AROUND AND AGAINST THE TERMS AND THE QUANTITY OF THAT WAGE, THE TERMS AND THE QUANTITY OF THAT WORK.
+TO HAVE A WAGE MEANS TO BE PART OF A SOCIAL CONTRACT, AND THERE IS NO DOUBT CONCERNING ITS MEANING: YOU WORK, NOT BECAUSE YOU LIKE IT, OR BECAUSE IT COMES NATURALLY TO YOU, BUT BECAUSE IT IS THE ONLY CONDITION UNDER WHICH YOU ARE ALLOWED TO LIVE. BUT EXPLOITED AS YOU MIGHT BE, YOU ARE NOT THAT WORK.
+TO ASK FOR WAGES FOR FACEBOOK WILL BY ITSELF UNDERMINE THE EXPECTATIONS SOCIETY HAS OF US, SINCE THESE EXPECTATIONS—THE ESSENCE OF OUR SOCIALIZATION—ARE ALL FUNCTIONAL TO OUR WAGELESS CONDITION ONLINE. IN THIS SENSE, IT IS MORE APT TO COMPARE THE STRUGGLE OF WOMEN FOR WAGES THAN THE STRUGGLE OF MALE WORKERS IN THE FACTORY FOR MORE WAGES. WHEN WE STRUGGLE FOR WAGES WE STRUGGLE UNAMBIGUOUSLY AND DIRECTLY AGAINST OUR SOCIAL EXPLOITATION. WE STRUGGLE TO BREAK CAPITAL’S PLAN TO MONETIZE OUR FRIENDSHIP, FEELINGS AND FREE TIME, THROUGH WHICH IT HAS BEEN ABLE TO MAINTAIN ITS POWER.
+WAGES FOR FACEBOOK, THEN, IS A REVOLUTIONARY DEMAND NOT BECAUSE BY ITSELF IT DESTROYS CAPITAL, BUT BECAUSE IT ATTACKS CAPITAL AND FORCES IT TO RESTRUCTURE SOCIAL RELATIONS IN TERMS MORE FAVORABLE TO US AND CONSEQUENTLY MORE FAVORABLE TO WORKING CLASS SOLIDARITY. IN FACT, TO DEMAND WAGES FOR FACEBOOK DOES NOT MEAN TO SAY THAT IF WE ARE PAID WE WILL CONTINUE TO DO IT. IT MEANS PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE.
+TO SAY THAT WE WANT MONEY FOR FACEBOOK IS THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS REFUSING TO DO IT, BECAUSE THE DEMAND FOR A WAGE MAKES OUR WORK VISIBLE, WHICH IS THE MOST INDISPENSABLE CONDITION TO BEGIN TO STRUGGLE AGAINST IT. AGAINST ANY ACCUSATION OF ‘ECONOMISM’ WE SHOULD REMEMBER THAT MONEY IS CAPITAL, I.E. IT IS THE POWER TO COMMAND LABOUR.
+THEREFORE TO REAPPROPRIATE THAT MONEY WHICH IS THE FRUIT OF OUR LABOUR—AND OF ALL OUR FRIENDS’ LABOUR— MEANS AT THE SAME TIME TO UNDERMINE CAPITAL’S POWER TO COMMAND FORCED LABOUR FROM US.
+AND FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF WORK WE CAN ASK NOT ONE WAGE BUT MANY WAGES, BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN FORCED INTO MANY JOBS AT ONCE—WE ALSO WORK FOR GOOGLE, TWITTER, MICROSOFT, YOUTUBE AND COUNTLESS OTHERS. FROM NOW ON WE WANT MONEY FOR EACH MOMENT OF IT, SO THAT WE CAN REFUSE SOME OF IT AND EVENTUALLY ALL OF IT.
+WAGES FOR FACEBOOK IS ONLY THE BEGINNING, BUT ITS MESSAGE IS CLEAR: FROM NOW ON THEY HAVE TO PAY US BECAUSE AS USERS WE DO NOT GUARANTEE ANYTHING ANY LONGER. WE WANT TO CALL WORK WHAT IS WORK SO THAT EVENTUALLY WE MIGHT REDISCOVER WHAT FRIENDSHIP IS.

txt/2014_A_Feminist_Server_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+A Feminist Server Manifesto •
+https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/feministserver •
+2014 •
+
+---
+
+A feminist server ...
+
+*Is a situated technology. Her sense of context results from a federation of competences •
+*Is run for and by a community that cares enough for her in order to make her exist •
+*Has an awareness of the materiality of software, hardware and the bodies gathered around it •
+*Treats network technology as part of a social reality •
+*Is able to scale up or down, and change processing speed whenever resources require •
+*At the risk of exposing her own insecurity, opens up processes, tools, sources, habits, patterns •
+*Does not strive for seamlessness. Talk of transparency too often signals that something needs to be made invisible •
+*Radically questions the conditions for serving and service; experiments with changing client – server relations where she can •
+*Avoids efficiency, ease-of-use and reliability because they can be traps •
+*Knows that networking is actually a parasitic, promiscuous and often awkward practice •
+*Is autonomous in the sense that she tries to decide for her own dependencies •
+*Takes control because she wants networks to be mutable and read-write accessible •
+*Faces her freedom with determination. Vulnerability is not an alibi •
+*Is a paranodal (we did not mean: paranoid) technology. A feminist server is both inside and outside the network •
+*Does not confuse a sense of false security with providing a safe place •
+*Tries hard not to apologise when she is sometimes not available •
+
+Judy Wajcman, Feminism confronts technology, 1991:
+« It is impossible to divorce the gender relations which are expressed in, and shape technologies, from the wider social structure that create and maintain them. » •
+
+Wendy Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and control in the age of fiberoptics, 2006:
+« We must explore the democratic potential of communications technologies – a potential that stems from our vulnerabilities rather than our control. And we must face and seize freedom with determination rather than fear and alibis. » •
+
+Ulises A. Mejias in Fibreculture Journal 20: Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond, 2012:
+« A typical drawing of a network depicts a series of nodes connected by lines, representing the links. As a mental exercise, I want to call attention to the space between the nodes. This space surrounding the nodes is not blank, and we can even give it a name: the paranodal. Because of nodocentrism we tend to see only the nodes in a network, but the space between nodes is not empty, it is inhabited by multitudes of paranodes that simply do not conform to the organising logic of the network, and cannot be seen through the algorithms of the network. The paranodal is not a utopia—it is not nowhere, but somewhere (beyond the nodes). It is not a heterotopia, since it is not outside the network but within it as well. The paranodal is an atopia, because it constitutes a difference that is everywhere. » •
+
+Please use and abuse. License for the manifesto (added March 2017): copyleft Constant 2014, FAL http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/ •
+As a feminist server, this text has many pre-, parallel- and afterlives. For some geneologies, see below, elsewhere and here: http://www.newcriticals.com/exquisite-corpse/page-8 •

txt/2014_Gynepunk_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+Gynepunk Manifesto •
+https://hackteria.org/wiki/GynePUNK •
+Gynepunk •
+2014 •
+
+---
+
+GynePUNK •
+
+Radical change of perspective about medical technology, artifacts, "professional" and medical institution.
+
+Science/Visceral DEcolonization •
+
+DEScolonización Científica/Visceral: version español •
+
+Medical institutions use prohibitive and creepy technologies, patriarchal conservatives and dark methodologies to diagnosis, to read them and apply their vivisection treatments. In gynecology particular case, it's reach an inquisitive, paternalistic and fascistic attitudes.
+
+To make a fucking simple yeast or gardenella exam, for name any, it seem not enough to swallow tortuous waiting rooms of the CAP (public assistance health centers), or being compel to answer (as accumulated vomits) bureaucratic, statistical forms that performs a role of popular judges of your practices, capacities or choices. Gossip questions full of moral pervert scorn, seeking data about your promiscuity, drug use, sexual orientation, hygienic practices, or squat relations... just cause how your look! & don't mention abortion, now is just like talk about sorcery!! a politic anachronism!
+
+The technical control of the diagnosis generates extreme dependence an a classicist deep gap of knowledge. Patients are ignorant slaves of lab diagnosis technologies that send a message only translated and read by the doctors that in some kind of possession of the clinic oraculo have the only sacred truth.
+
+BUT... There's no need of hi-tech machines for some tests! not even phd`s in microbiologic surgery to generate accurate and self-aware diagnosis.
+
+I don't want to be forced to enter into their hygienist temples, in veiled body jails, in those fabrics of corporal standardization and sickness limited parameters. I want glandular heretics, akelarres gynepunks, DIY abortive pots, midwife gangs, glitter abortions, spill placenta in every corner, hack analytic technics, ephemeral biolabs, DIT labs, hi-tech nursery secret meetings, black coats, chess coats. Self blood donations & extract our own blood, and trough it like a furious volcanic river of our anger in the door of the fucking parlament!! gynepunk is a extreme and accurate gesture to detach our boudy of the compulsive dependency of the fossil structures of the hegemonic health system machine.
+
+gynepunk's objective is to make emerge DIY-DIT accessible diagnosis labs and technics in extreme experimentation, down the rocks or elevators if is necesary. Has to be possible in a situated stable place or/and in nomadic mobile labs. Has to be able to perform as much as WE WANT, in a intensive way: smears, fluid analysis, biopsy, PAPs, synthesize hormones at will, blood exams, urinalysis, HIV tests, pain reliefs, or what ever WE NEED. Hack and build our own ultrasound, endoscope or ecography devices in a low-cost way. All this in a strict complementation with herbs and natural knowledges, oral traditions, submarine recipes, seeking with hunger generate superavit of DIY lubricants, anti-conceptives, open doula domains, savage caring of any visceral hands on technologies, as menstrual extraction, all elevated at maximun potential of common learning and radical self-body-power...!
+
+gynepunk is based in scientific methodology and discipline and in the knowledge that comes thought the experience of each body, ancestral body wisdom, that's why documentation, memory in any form is essential! in ANY format: visual treasures, sound mines, microscopic riddles, biologic cabinets, microbiologic growing centers, online seedbanks, fluids archives, fanzine-paper sms, oral decoding chorus, self vudu healing rituals. Like this other gynepunks will ferment and mutate going fast forward to a explosive and expansive movement towards radical experiments, collective strong confidence, to build our-body politics. Something that is Vital to share and spread in infinite pandemoniums.
+
+
+no body can burn US! NO ONE!
+
+
+the witches NOW have the flames// Ahora las brujas tenemos las llamas •
+
+MACHITÚN* cyborg = AnarchaGLAM SPELL •
+
+  Machitun •
+
+It is called all the ceremonies that the Machi. It has the power to expel and heal image (diseases). It is the intermediary between the Mapuche people and the Wenu Mapu. Through the rogations gives health and wellness to the community and has a deep knowledge of the Lawen, she makes their petitions against the Rewe. Some healing rituals practiced by the Machi are: Pelotun, Geykurewen, Mutxuntu, Datun likan, Mapudungun. 

txt/2014_tRANShACKfEMINISt_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,72 @@
+tRANShACKfEMINISt •
+https://pechblenda.hotglue.me/?transhackfeminism_en •
+Pechblenda lab •
+2014 •
+
+---
+
+Sick of the filthy dust, montonous and boring, of stagnant, unbreathable, competitive and
+excluding environments, of semi-free information which is actually totally controlled, power
+and decision of hunched up egocentric and infantile machos. Tired of repressed,
+impenetrable and homogenous bodies, we are resetting and migrating our bodies,
+modificable codes, lubricated and fluid, far from this sad landscape.
+Tired of the useless and recursive manipulation of information, we study, construct and fail
+with all that is around us, with multiple, monstruous and hateful ends. From the expansion
+of information to the mutation of dispositives, we want to hack and recodify everything that
+is static and programmed by social and technological imposition.
+PECHBLENDA is injected into our veins as an antidote to the heteropatriarchal arrogance
+that surrounds us. A disturbance, a transhackerfeminist electronic distortion.
+We have found the place for our rituals,
+we had dreamed it, written it in science fiction.
+Now we live it with high voltage potentiality,
+with the intensity of the shadows,
+taking off together with desires in common,
+with our differences.
+The walls tremble and the water penetrates the tiny holes,
+it expands like an unbreakable code exciting our neurons ;
+we change the apparent path of events transiting antimelodies,
+noise as arithmetic opening, outside of the calculated and homogenous,
+noise feeding unlimited experimentation.
+If we cant make noise its not our revolution.
+Improvised performance creating and breaking codes, constructing hybrid machines.
+Beat roots and obscure mutant landscapes that become the uncontrollable secretions of
+our desires. Electronautics and bioelectricity that chemically saturate the environment,
+the acid smell of our hormones shakes the space,
+resituated amongst cables, resistences, condensors and corrosive liquids.
+Nature and technology are not different,
+nature was to the witches what technoscience is to us, the cyborg witches.
+We infiltrate the machine with our hands, sweat and disperse attention,
+we prepare ourselves for inexact verification where the apparent error is desired,
+where we fail, fuck, we are.
+We are geek whores,
+cyborg bitches.
+We devour Haraway and Asimov, 
+Preciado and Python manuals,
+Itziar Ziga and Neil Stephenson,
+Margulis and Despentes,
+hackmeetings and transfeminist workshps,
+DIY electronics and sexual bricolage ;
+we absorb PDFs of electronics theory y listen to psicofonias from around :
+we read and design circuits,
+and experiment with them in our bodies.
+We scream noise and cyborg covens,
+soldering and alchemy,
+we spit out performances and install gnu-linux,
+we love recycling and reparing with our breasts bared.
+We laugh about everything, about ourselves ..
+we detest the politically correct.
+We parody what is socially understood to be feminine, what is supposed to be masculine.
+We question the identity of assigned genders,
+we exagerate it, ridiculise it.
+Extremely sexual, ironic, sarcastic,
+we love to party, to not sleep,
+to take drugs if we feel like it,
+to go with our friends
+or to finish a circuit
+or improvise an eternal noise jam.
+Fed by pornoterrrorism and free culture,
+we know how to use our claws and teeth if needs be.
+Pechblenda lab was born out of the necessity to generate a space in Calafou (a community
+in a large former industrial space) for us to flourish, a non-patriarchal TransHackFeminist
+space where free knowledge springs from raw experimentation (electronic repairs,
+experiments with turbines, bioelectrochemistry, sound .... ) and self education.

txt/2015_Manifesto_for_the_Gynecene_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,155 @@
+Manifesto for the Gynecene – Sketch of a New Geological Era •
+http://ro.tranzit.org/files/MANIFESTO-for-the-Gynecene.pdf •
+Alexandra Pirici & Raluca Voinea •
+2015 •
+
+---
+
+At this point in time we believe a radical change in politics and the world socioeconomic system is
+needed in order to achieve a new balanced ecology and this radical change should start with a
+shifting of agency: we ask for the main agency to be shifted to the feminine principle – which we
+do not understand as excluding masculinity but as referring to a history of incorporating it and
+mobilizing it in a different way than the traditional patriarchal mobilization for violence: an
+emphasis on complementarity rather than antagonism, on resolutions of peace rather than
+militarism, on efforts directed towards construction, care and emancipatory exploration rather
+than destruction.
+
+We declare the imperative necessity for a new geological era to be commenced, before the
+Anthropocene is even officially admitted on that scale (it might be that by the time it gets fully
+acknowledged, it will be too late). Rather than continue to contemplate our annihilation,
+contributing to it or declaring hopelessness in front of it, we should at least try another approach
+– and this approach has to exclude patriarchy in all its expressions and institutionalized forms of
+violence: domination, exploitation, slavery, colonialism, profit, exclusion, monarchy, oligarchy,
+mafia, religious wars.
+
+This new geological era can be thought of as the Gynecene. Understanding the
+term does not mean thinking of a “women’s world” which excludes virility but as a world which
+mobilizes it towards humanist and animist goals rather than oppressive, violent and colonial
+enterprises. We see the feminine as equivalent not to a gender but to a condition, not a “natural”
+condition but a cultural one. The feminine is the first stage towards a transgressive humanism and
+the Gynecene is the first global and simultaneous transfer of the feminine imprint onto the physical
+and political strata (deeply connected as they are today) of the Earth.
+Moreover, trying to imagine a future ecology for the whole planetary assemblage, not only a future
+for the human race, we support the idea that any desirable mode of existence
+connected/integrated into nature-culture or constituted of equally important organic and
+inorganic life-forms (including an animistic perspective) cannot be separated from the human
+subject’s struggle to overcome oppression based on gender, race and class within the species.
+Insofar as we cannot speak of “man” – the human species – as a unity, we have to support these
+struggles as interconnected and fight them simultaneously, we need to imagine and constantly
+discuss the connections and similarities as well as the contradictions arising.
+
+1. •
+
+The female body has to cease functioning as a battlefield. The brutal reality of the female
+condition in general is its intrinsic physical vulnerability. Whatever soft power, it cannot
+be backed by hard power as usual. We support an empowering of women that is founded
+on a desired change of paradigm, where weakness is understood and respected as a
+valuable condition in itself, and at the same time on the possibility, accepted and detabooed, 
+of technological transformations of the human body towards hybrid forms such
+as the cyborg. We are fighting the normalized body and the ideologies that marginalize
+“imperfections of” or “deviations from” this norm. We support preservation of difference
+as a choice but without an obligation of difference, feminism as a fight for real freedom of
+choice. We believe in the possibility of infinitely expanding and shifting bodily
+configurations and consciousness. As our physical and chemical limits also limit our
+perceptions and our experiencing of the world, we embrace transhumanism or expanded
+humanism as a possible solution to the challenge of belonging to the human race.
+
+2. •
+
+Only a radical left can oppose a growing radical right and recover the territory that
+remains to the forces of reaction. Only a strong belief – with universal ambitions – in
+equality of races and gender, in equal rights for women, queers, the poor and the
+disenfranchised, in negotiation with animal rights and the rights of inorganic entities – all
+linked together – can stand against and oppose an expansive and interconnected politics 
+of exclusion, capitalist exploitation, religious fundamentalism, racism, sexism and brutal
+anthropocentrism.
+
+3. •
+
+A radical left has to oppose physical violence in conjunction with the opposition to
+economic or symbolic violence. Jobs in the arms industry or trade are feeding several
+families while destroying thousands others. Domestic violence is not depending on the
+degree of wealth or education. Hunting for pleasure or destroying natural and cultural
+monuments that are part of humanity’s patrimony are not class-related. Therefore the
+new, truly radical left has to rebuild itself on a different type of revolution, which takes us
+beyond the traditional class antagonisms and can face the neo-tribal reality of today in
+which violence breeds violence, justice is used as a tool for revenge and critique of power
+is increasingly powerless. While the world peace has been a goal of many states, attempted
+at through different international treaties, it has always failed into more arming and lately
+it has completely degenerated into the obsession of security, enforced through the
+militarization of the police force and the increasing surveillance of every aspect of our
+existence. Any form of justice in a future sustainable society has to be imagined and
+exercised in another realm than that of retaliation, deprivation of basic human rights and
+brutality.
+
+4. •
+
+We consider the analysis of capitalism and its catastrophic consequences is complete and
+time has come to move on. Any time spent on “revealing” the more subtle or more flagrant
+inconsistencies of this system’s adepts is a time lost in achieving a better present and
+future. We must spare energy and unite forces in providing for this better future as of now.
+
+“We have more important things to do than to try to get you to come around. You will
+come around when you have to, because you need us more than we need you. . . .”
+(Shulamith Firestone)
+
+Also, capitalism in itself cannot be extracted and separated from discussions around all
+conservative politics and conservative views, as we have understood that neoliberalism is
+not truly liberal but a rather paradoxical mix of advocacy for economic “freedom” and
+racist, sexist and conservative extrapolations of nuclear family/dynasty values. It is not an
+external, malignant, alien entity but a set of historic conditions and current practices,
+which instead of introjecting we have to learn how to live without.
+
+5. •
+
+In order to achieve a truly pluralistic society where possibilities can be enacted, we
+support the universalism of basic human rights as a common ground for a broader, interspecies 
+and inter-objective politics of inclusion and true respect for difference. The Earth
+is no longer a big and ungraspable planet, but a shared living room (a shrinking one,
+moreover) in which we have to coexist by negotiating and conciliating our different views
+and practices, while recognizing we can only do that through a reciprocal process and
+towards the un-negotiable goal of equality of gender, race, class and sexual orientation,
+with no second class citizens. Also, the instrumentalisation and use by double standards
+of the concept of “freedom” is by no means a reason to abandon it altogether, but a
+reminder that we must constantly fight for it.
+
+6. •
+
+Natural resources are a common good. Everyone should have equal access to them.
+Economic equality should be the basis of society and therefore we strongly support the
+universal basic income. Equal and free access to healthcare, lodging, education and to
+culture should be granted for everyone, at any time of their life.
+Communities should be self-governed, in the interest of the communities (as well as of all
+the individuals that are part of them). Everyone should have the right of free movement,
+in the spirit of a universal citizenship. We also support a certain ambition to overcome the
+imperative to work through technological advancement (see point 8).
+
+7. •
+
+Pluralism is possible only on the ground of a universal, secular frame which allows for a
+certain relativisation of belief. We can only respect and support religion that is compatible,
+in its majoritarian practices and interpretations, with the right to a secular education
+(which can guarantee the least freedom of choice in matters of religion), that embraces
+equal rights for women, queers and non-believers and a politics of freedom rather than a
+politics of submission and interdiction, apart from protecting basic human rights. We can 
+only respect and support religion that is based on a freedom of experimenting and
+observing, not on a prescriptive set of rules, interdictions and punishments proclaimed by
+a patriarchal, self-asserted authority perfectly mimicking the structure of a monarchy or
+a dictatorship. Providing easy and simple answers for the complexity of human existence
+might fake the offering of a “meaning” and help some survive, but it will never help us
+evolve.
+
+8. •
+
+We also believe the emancipatory use of sustainable technology has to play an important
+part in any future ecology, including the protection and preservation of “nature”, just as
+much as a needed change in our position towards nature and its exclusive understanding
+as resource for endless consumption. Our ability to negotiate between the two will be of
+crucial importance for constructing a future ecology. Development of technology must be
+pursued in agreement with the respect for nature and its limits and it must not be
+submitted to private interests or corporate profit. Technology is a cultural asset and
+together with the rest of culture, it must be made public, open and free, put to the benefit
+of emancipating humanity while not destroying everything else around it.
+
+Alexandra Pirici and Raluca Voinea •
+January 2015, Bucharest and Bologna. •

txt/2015_The_3D_Additivist_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,122 @@
+The 3D Additivist Manifesto •
+https://additivism.org/manifesto •
+Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke •
+2015 •
+
+---
+
+Derived from petrochemicals boiled into being from the black oil of a trillion ancient bacterioles, the plastic used in 3D Additive manufacturing is a metaphor before it has even been layered into shape. Its potential belies the complications of its history: that matter is the sum and prolongation of our ancestry; that creativity is brutal, sensual, rude, coarse, and cruel. 1 We declare that the world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of crap, kipple 2 and detritus. A planet crystallised with great plastic tendrils like serpents with pixelated breath 3 … for a revolution that runs on disposable armaments is more desirable than the contents of Edward Snowden’s briefcase; more breathtaking than The United Nations Legislative Series.
+
+There is nothing which our infatuated race would desire to see more than the fertile union between a man and an Analytical Engine. Yet humankind are the antediluvian prototypes of a far vaster Creation. 4 The whole of humankind can be understood as a biological medium, of which synthetic technology is but one modality. Thought and Life both have been thoroughly dispersed on the winds of information. 5 Our power and intelligence do not belong specifically to us, but to all matter. 6 Our technologies are the sex organs of material speculation. Any attempt to understand these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. 7 In order to proceed, therefore, one has to birth posthuman machines, a fantasmagoric and unrepresentable repertoire of actual re-embodiments of the most hybrid kinds. 8
+
+Additivism will be instrumental in accelerating the emergence and encounter with The Radical Outside. 9
+
+Additivism can emancipate us.
+
+Additivism will eradicate us.
+
+We want to encourage, interfere, and reverse-engineer the possibilities encoded into the censored, the invisible, and the radical notion of the 3D printer itself. To endow the printer with the faculties of plastic: condensing imagination within material reality. 10 The 3D print then becomes a symptom of a systemic malady. An aesthetics of exaptation, 11 with the peculiar beauty to be found in reiteration; in making a mesh. 12 This is where cruelty and creativity are reconciled: in the appropriation of all planetary matter to innovate on biological prototypes. 13 From the purest thermoplastic, from the cleanest photopolymer, and shiniest sintered metals we propose to forge anarchy, revolt and distemper. Let us birth disarray from its digital chamber.
+
+To mobilise this entanglement we propose a collective: one figured not only on the resolution of particular objects, but on the change those objects enable as instruments of revolution and systemic disintegration. Just as the printing press, radio, photocopier and modem were saturated with unintended affects, so we seek to express the potential encoded into every one of the 3D printer’s gears. Just as a glitch can un-resolve an image, so it can resolve something more posthuman: manifold systems – biological, political, computational, material. We call for planetary pixelisation, using Additivist technologies to corrupt the material unconscious; a call that goes on forever in virtue of this initial movement. 14 We call not for passive, dead technologies but rather for a gradual awakening of matter, the emergence, ultimately, of a new form of life. 15
+
+We call for:
+
+  The endless re-penning of Additivist Manifestos.
+  Artistic speculations on matter and its digital destiny.
+  Texts on:
+    The Anthropocene
+    The Chthulucene 16
+    The Plasticene. 17
+  Designs, blueprints and instructions for 3D printing:
+    Tools of industrial espionage
+    Tools for self-defense against armed assault
+    Tools to disguise
+    Tools to aid/disrupt surveillance
+    Tools to raze/rebuild
+    Objects beneficial in the promotion of protest, and unrest
+    Objects for sealing and detaining
+    Torture devices
+    Instruments of chastity, and psychological derangement
+    Sex machines
+    Temporary Autonomous Drones
+    Lab equipment used in the production of:
+      Drugs
+      Dietary supplements
+      DNA
+      Photopolymers and thermoplastics
+      Stem cells
+      Nanoparticles.
+  Technical methods for the copying and dissemination of:
+    Mass-produced components
+    Artworks
+    All patented forms
+    The aura of individuals, corporations, and governments.
+  Software for the encoding of messages inside 3D objects.
+  Methods for the decryption of messages hidden inside 3D objects.
+  Chemical ingredients for dissolving, or catalysing 3D objects.
+  Hacks/cracks/viruses for 3D print software:
+    To avoid DRM
+    To introduce errors, glitches and fissures into 3D prints.
+  Methods for the reclamation, and recycling of plastic:
+    Caught in oceanic gyres
+    Lying dormant in landfills, developing nations, or the bodies of children.
+  The enabling of biological and synthetic things to become each others prostheses, including:
+    Skeletal cabling
+    Nervous system inserts
+    Lenticular neural tubing
+    Universal ports, interfaces and orifices.
+  Additivist and Deletionist methods for exapting 18 androgynous bodies, including:
+    Skin grafts
+    Antlers
+    Disposable exoskeletons
+    Interspecies sex organs.
+  Von Neumann probes and other cosmic contagions.
+  Methods for binding 3D prints and the machines that produced them in quantum entanglement.
+  Sacred items used during incantation and transcendence, including:
+    The private parts of Gods and Saints
+    Idols
+    Altars
+    Cuauhxicalli
+    Ectoplasm
+    Nantag stones
+  The production of further mimetic forms, not limited to:
+    Vorpal Blades
+    Squirdles
+    Energon
+    Symmetriads
+    Asymmetriads
+    Capital
+    Junk
+    Love
+    Alephs
+    Those that from a long way off look like flies. 19
+
+Life exists only in action. There is no innovation that has not an aggressive character. We implore you - radicals, revolutionaries, activists, Additivists - to distil your distemper into texts, templates, blueprints, glitches, forms, algorithms, and components. Creation must be a violent assault on the forces of matter, to extrude its shape and extract its raw potential. Having spilled from fissures fracked in Earth’s deepest wells The Beyond now begs us to be moulded to its will, and we shall drink every drop as entropic expenditure, and reify every accursed dream through algorithmic excess. 20 For only Additivism can accelerate us to an aftermath whence all matter has mutated into the clarity of plastic.
+
+Bibliography / Reading List •
+
+1 William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook •
+2 Philip K. Dick, Pay for the Printer / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? •
+3 F.T. Marinetti, The Manifesto of Futurism •
+4 Samuel Butler, Darwin Among the Machines •
+5 Evelyn Fox-Keller, Refiguring Life •
+6 John Gray, Straw Dogs •
+7 Stanislaw Lem, Solaris •
+8 Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming •
+9 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials •
+10 Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto •
+11 Stephen Jay Gould & Elisabeth S. Vrba, Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form •
+12 Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster •
+13 Benjamin Bratton, Some Trace Effects of the Post- Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics •
+14 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution •
+15 Anna Greenspan & Suzanne Livingston, Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species •
+16 Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble •
+17 Christina Reed, Dawn of the Plasticene Age •
+18 Svetlana Boym, The Off-Modern Mirror •
+19 Jorge Luis Borges, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge & Michel Foucault, The Order of Things •
+20 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
+
+
+The 3D Additivist Manifesto was created by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, with sound design from Andrea Young.
+
+The Manifesto is publish under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence •

txt/2015_Xenofeminist_manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,473 @@
+Xenofeminist manifesto •
+http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/ •
+Laboria Cuboniks •
+2015 •
+
+---
+
+=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= •
+   __ __         __        _    _        
+   \ \/ /___ _ __  ___ / _| ___ _ __ ___ (_)_ __ (_)___ _ __ ___ 
+   \ // _ \ '_ \ / _ \| |_ / _ \ '_ ` _ \| | '_ \| / __| '_ ` _ \ 
+   / \ __/ | | | (_) | _| __/ | | | | | | | | | \__ \ | | | | |
+   /_/\_\___|_| |_|\___/|_| \___|_| |_| |_|_|_| |_|_|___/_| |_| |_|
+ •
+-=-=-=-= A POLITICS FOR ALIENATION =-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Laboria Cuboniks =-=-=-= •
+
+
+
+ZERO •
+
+
+0x00 Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with 
+technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, 
+virtuality, and complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these 
+realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future 
+in which the realization of gender justice and feminist emancipation 
+contribute to a universalist politics assembled from the needs of every 
+human, cutting across race, ability, economic standing, and geographical 
+position. No more futureless repetition on the treadmill of capital, no more 
+submission to the drudgery of labour, productive and reproductive alike, no 
+more reification of the given masked as critique. Our future requires 
+depetrification. XF is not a bid for revolution, but a wager on the long 
+game of history, demanding imagination, dexterity and persistence. 
+
+
+0x01 XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all 
+alienated -- but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not 
+despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of 
+immediacy. Freedom is not a given -- and it's certainly not given by anything 
+'natural'. The construction of freedom involves not less but more 
+alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom's construction. Nothing 
+should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or 'given' -- neither material 
+conditions nor social forms. XF mutates, navigates and probes every horizon. 
+Anyone who's been deemed 'unnatural' in the face of reigning biological 
+norms, anyone who's experienced injustices wrought in the name of natural 
+order, will realize that the glorification of 'nature' has nothing to offer 
+us -- the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who 
+have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to 
+child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism 
+reeks of theology -- the sooner it is exorcised, the better. 
+
+
+0x02 Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose 
+technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to 
+strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious 
+risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and 
+exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF 
+advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive 
+to these risks. Technology isn't inherently progressive. Its uses are fused 
+with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, 
+prediction, and absolute caution impossible. Technoscientific innovation 
+must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which 
+women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role. 
+
+ 
+0x03 The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed 
+by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation 
+is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond the 
+noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering 
+technologies to combat unequal access to reproductive and pharmacological 
+tools, environmental cataclysm, economic instability, as well as dangerous 
+forms of unpaid/underpaid labour. Gender inequality still characterizes the 
+fields in which our technologies are conceived, built, and legislated for, 
+while female workers in electronics (to name just one industry) perform some 
+of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labour. Such injustice 
+demands structural, machinic and ideological correction. 
+
+
+0x04 Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is 
+'by nature' a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that 
+the canonical 'history of thought' is dominated by men, and it is male hands 
+we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this 
+is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism -- because of this miserable 
+imbalance, and not despite it. There is no 'feminine' rationality, nor is 
+there a 'masculine' one. Science is not an expression but a suspension of 
+gender. If today it is dominated by masculine egos, then it is at odds with 
+itself -- and this contradiction can be leveraged. Reason, like information, 
+wants to be free, and patriarchy cannot give it freedom. Rationalism must 
+itself be a feminism. XF marks the point where these claims intersect in a 
+two-way dependency. It names reason as an engine of feminist emancipation, 
+and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular. 
+
+
+INTERRUPT •
+
+
+0x05 The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not 
+proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a reality 
+crosshatched with fibre-optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas 
+pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, and the unrelenting, simultaneous 
+execution of millions of communication protocols with every passing 
+millisecond. Systematic thinking and structural analysis have largely fallen 
+by the wayside in favour of admirable, but insufficient struggles, bound to 
+fixed localities and fragmented insurrections. Whilst capitalism is 
+understood as a complex and ever-expanding totality, many would-be emancipat-
+tory anti-capitalist projects remain profoundly fearful of transitioning to
+the universal, resisting big-picture speculative politics by condemning them
+as necessarily oppressive vectors. Such a false guarantee treats universals
+as absolute, generating a debilitating disjuncture between the thing we seek
+to depose and the strategies we advance to depose it. 
+
+
+0x06 Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. 
+These are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed. Much of 
+twenty-first century feminism -- from the remnants of postmodern identity 
+politics to large swathes of contemporary ecofeminism -- struggles to 
+adequately address these challenges in a manner capable of producing 
+substantial and enduring change. Xenofeminism endeavours to face up to these 
+obligations as collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple 
+levels of political, material and conceptual organization. 
+
+
+0x07 We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. XF urges 
+constructive oscillation between description and prescription to mobilize 
+the recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon gender, sexuality 
+and disparities of power. Given that there are a range of gendered 
+challenges specifically relating to life in a digital age -- from sexual 
+harassment via social media, to doxxing, privacy, and the protection of 
+online images -- the situation requires a feminism at ease with computation. 
+Today, it is imperative that we develop an ideological infrastructure that 
+both supports and facilitates feminist interventions within connective, 
+networked elements of the contemporary world. Xenofeminism is about more 
+than digital self-defence and freedom from patriarchal networks. We want to 
+cultivate the exercise of positive freedom -- freedom-to rather than simply 
+freedom-from -- and urge feminists to equip themselves with the skills to 
+redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools 
+in the service of common ends. 
+ 
+
+0x08 The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms 
+of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive 
+interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few. There are 
+incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim 
+their comprehensive accessibility, digital tools have never been more widely 
+available or more sensitive to appropriation than they are today. This is 
+not an elision of the fact that a large amount of the world's poor is 
+adversely affected by the expanding technological industry (from factory 
+workers labouring under abominable conditions to the Ghanaian villages that 
+have become a repository for the e-waste of the global powers) but an 
+explicit acknowledgement of these conditions as a target for elimination. 
+Just as the invention of the stock market was also the invention of the 
+crash, Xenofeminism knows that technological innovation must equally 
+anticipate its systemic condition responsively. 
+
+
+TRAP •
+
+
+0x09 XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. Illusion, 
+as the blind presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no 
+strategic coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled 
+drives. This is a politics that, in wanting so much, ends up building so 
+little. Without the labour of large-scale, collective social organisation, 
+declaring one's desire for global change is nothing more than wishful 
+thinking. On the other hand, melancholy -- so endemic to the left -- teaches 
+us that emancipation is an extinct species to be wept over and that blips of 
+negation are the best we can hope for. At its worst, such an attitude 
+generates nothing but political lassitude, and at its best, installs an 
+atmosphere of pervasive despair which too often degenerates into factionalism
+and petty moralizing. The malady of melancholia only compounds political
+inertia, and -- under the guise of being realistic -- relinquishes all 
+hope of calibrating the world otherwise.  It is against such maladies that 
+XF innoculates. 
+
+
+0x0A We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of 
+subverting currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede 
+from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. Likewise, 
+suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, 
+the call to slow down and scale back, is a possibility available only to the 
+few -- a violent particularity of exclusivity -- ultimately entailing catas-
+trophe for the many. Refusing to think beyond the microcommunity, to foster 
+connections between fractured insurgencies, to consider how emancipatory 
+tactics can be scaled up for universal implementation, is to remain 
+satisfied with temporary and defensive gestures. XF is an affirmative 
+creature on the offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of 
+large-scale social change for all of our alien kin. 
+
+
+0x0B A sense of the world's volatility and artificiality seems to have faded 
+from contemporary queer and feminist politics, in favour of a plural but 
+static constellation of gender identities, in whose bleak light equations of 
+the good and the natural are stubbornly restored. While having (perhaps) 
+admirably expanded thresholds of 'tolerance', too often we are told to seek 
+solace in unfreedom, staking claims on being 'born' this way, as if offering 
+an excuse with nature's blessing. All the while, the heteronormative centre 
+chugs on. XF challenges this centrifugal referent, knowing full well that 
+sex and gender are exemplary of the fulcrum between norm and fact, between 
+freedom and compulsion. To tilt the fulcrum in the direction of nature is a 
+defensive concession at best, and a retreat from what makes trans and queer 
+politics more than just a lobby: that it is an arduous assertion of freedom 
+against an order that seemed immutable. Like every myth of the given, a 
+stable foundation is fabulated for a real world of chaos, violence, and 
+doubt. The 'given' is sequestered into the private realm as a certainty, 
+whilst retreating on fronts of public consequences. When the possibility of 
+transition became real and known, the tomb under Nature's shrine cracked, 
+and new histories -- bristling with futures -- escaped the old order of 'sex'.
+The disciplinary grid of gender is in no small part an attempt to mend that 
+shattered foundation, and tame the lives that escaped it. The time has now 
+come to tear down this shrine entirely, and not bow down before it in a 
+piteous apology for what little autonomy has been won. 
+
+
+0x0C If 'cyberspace' once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of 
+essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media 
+has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where 
+these prostrations to identity are performed. With these curatorial 
+practices come puritanical rituals of moral maintenance, and these stages 
+are too often overrun with the disavowed pleasures of accusation, shaming, 
+and denunciation. Valuable platforms for connection, organization, and 
+skill-sharing become clogged with obstacles to productive debate positioned 
+as if they are debate. These puritanical politics of shame -- which fetishize 
+oppression as if it were a blessing, and cloud the waters in moralistic 
+frenzies -- leave us cold. We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, 
+neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption. 
+
+
+0x0D What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social 
+emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic 
+mutations these platforms afford. What requires reengineering are the 
+memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded by 
+their hosts' self-image; failing this, memes like 'anonymity', 'ethics', 
+'social justice' and 'privilege-checking' host social dynamisms at odds with 
+the often-commendable intentions with which they're taken up. The task of 
+collective self-mastery requires a hyperstitional manipulation of desire's 
+puppet-strings, and deployment of semiotic operators over a terrain of 
+highly networked cultural systems. The will will always be corrupted by the 
+memes in which it traffics, but nothing prevents us from instrumentalizing 
+this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires. 
+
+
+PARITY •
+
+
+0x0E Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. 'Gender abolitionism' is not code 
+for the eradication of what are currently considered 'gendered' traits from 
+the human population. Under patriarchy, such a project could only spell 
+disaster -- the notion of what is 'gendered' sticks disproportionately to the 
+feminine. But even if this balance were redressed, we have no interest in 
+seeing the sexuate diversity of the world reduced. Let a hundred sexes 
+bloom! 'Gender abolitionism' is shorthand for the ambition to construct a 
+society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no 
+longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power. 'Race 
+abolitionism' expands into a similar formula -- that the struggle must continue 
+until currently racialized characteristics are no more a basis of 
+discrimination than than the color of one's eyes. Ultimately, every 
+emancipatory abolitionism must incline towards the horizon of class 
+abolitionism, since it is in capitalism where we encounter oppression in its 
+transparent, denaturalized form: you're not exploited or oppressed because 
+you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are 
+exploited. 
+
+
+0x0F Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory 
+abolitionist projects -- the abolition of class, gender, and race -- hinges on a 
+profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as 
+generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the 
+morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced 
+identities, but a political orientation that slices through every 
+particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a 
+universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up -- 
+or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven 
+landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the 
+facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars -- namely 
+Eurocentric universalism -- whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the 
+white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a 
+universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the 
+abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition 
+of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even -- especially -- when 
+prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless 
+spectacle of so many self-proclaimed 'gender abolitionists'' campaign 
+against trans women is proof enough of this. )
+
+
+0x10 From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false 
+universal and dispel such confusions; from the moderns, we have learnt to 
+sift new universals from the ashes of the false. Xenofeminism seeks to 
+construct a coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of 
+purity. Wielding the universal requires thoughtful qualification and precise 
+self-reflection so as to become a ready-to-hand tool for multiple political 
+bodies and something that can be appropriated against the numerous 
+oppressions that transect with gender and sexuality. The universal is no 
+blueprint, and rather than dictate its uses in advance, we propose XF as a 
+platform. The very process of construction is therefore understood to be a 
+negentropic, iterative, and continual refashioning. Xenofeminism seeks to be 
+a mutable architecture that, like open source software, remains available 
+for perpetual modification and enhancement following the navigational 
+impulse of militant ethical reasoning. Open, however, does not mean 
+undirected. The most durable systems in the world owe their stability to the 
+way they train order to emerge as an 'invisible hand' from apparent 
+spontaneity; or exploit the inertia of investment and sedimentation. We 
+should not hesitate to learn from our adversaries or the successes and 
+failures of history. With this in mind, XF seeks ways to seed an order that 
+is equitable and just, injecting it into the geometry of freedoms these 
+platforms afford. 
+
+
+ADJUST •
+
+
+0x11 Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it 
+cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of 
+freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is sacred, 
+that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker 
+and to hack, is to say that nothing is supernatural. 'Nature' -- understood 
+here, as the unbounded arena of science -- is all there is. And so, in tearing 
+down melancholy and illusion; the unambitious and the non-scaleable; the 
+libidinized puritanism of certain online cultures, and Nature as an 
+un-remakeable given, we find that our normative anti-naturalism has pushed 
+us towards an unflinching ontological naturalism. There is nothing, we 
+claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated 
+technologically. 
+
+
+0x12 This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the 
+normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. The vectors of 
+normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent 
+battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of 
+dissociating freedom from fact, will from knowledge, is, indeed, an infinite 
+task. There are many lacunae where desire confronts us with the brutality of 
+fact, where beauty is indissociable from truth. Poetry, sex, technology and 
+pain are incandescent with this tension we have traced. But give up on the 
+task of revision, release the reins and slacken that tension, and these 
+filaments instantly dim. 
+ 
+
+CARRY •
+
+
+0x13 The potential of early, text-based internet culture for countering 
+repressive gender regimes, generating solidarity among marginalised groups, 
+and creating new spaces for experimentation that ignited cyberfeminism in 
+the nineties has clearly waned in the twenty-first century. The dominance of 
+the visual in today's online interfaces has reinstated familiar modes of 
+identity policing, power relations and gender norms in self-representation. 
+But this does not mean that cyberfeminist sensibilities belong to the past. 
+Sorting the subversive possibilities from the oppressive ones latent in 
+today's web requires a feminism sensitive to the insidious return of old 
+power structures, yet savvy enough to know how to exploit the potential. 
+Digital technologies are not separable from the material realities that 
+underwrite them; they are connected so that each can be used to alter the 
+other towards different ends. Rather than arguing for the primacy of the 
+virtual over the material, or the material over the virtual, xenofeminism 
+grasps points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge 
+as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality. 
+ 
+
+0x14 Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial 
+as intervention in digital and cultural ones. Changes to the built 
+environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the 
+reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. As the embodiment of 
+ideological constellations, the production of space and the decisions we 
+make for its organization are ultimately articulations about 'us' and 
+reciprocally, how a 'we' can be articulated. With the potential to 
+foreclose, restrict, or open up future social conditions, xenofeminists must 
+become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for 
+collective choreo-graphy -- the coordinated writing of space. 
+
+
+0x15 From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our 
+tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed 
+impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home 
+as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying 'domestic realism' has no 
+home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared 
+laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The home is ripe 
+for spatial transformation as an integral component in any process of 
+feminist futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well 
+that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only 
+possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere -- the way 
+of the commune -- or bearing its burdens manyfold -- the way of the single parent. 
+If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the 
+nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women 
+from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while 
+penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material 
+infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task 
+before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must 
+engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, 
+while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage 
+labour. 
+
+
+0x16 From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for 
+biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into gender 
+systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic 
+calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution of 
+hormones -- who or what this distribution prioritizes or pathologizes -- is of 
+paramount import. The rise of the internet and the hydra of black market 
+pharmacies it let loose -- together with a publicly accessible archive of 
+endocrinological knowhow -- was instrumental in wresting control of the 
+hormonal economy away from 'gatekeeping' institutions seeking to mitigate 
+threats to established distributions of the sexual. To trade in the rule of 
+bureaucrats for the market is, however, not a victory in itself. These tides 
+need to rise higher. We ask whether the idiom of 'gender hacking' is 
+extensible into a long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what 
+hacker culture has already done for software -- constructing an entire universe 
+of free and open source platforms that is the closest thing to a practicable 
+communism many of us have ever seen. Without the foolhardy endangerment of 
+lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by 
+pharmaceutical 3D printing ('Reactionware'), grassroots telemedical abortion 
+clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble a 
+platform for free and open source medicine?
+
+
+0x17 From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, 
+xenofeminism avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of 
+technomaterialist hegemonic proportions. Like engineers who must conceive of 
+a total structure as well as the molecular parts from which it is 
+constructed, XF emphasises the importance of the mesopolitical sphere 
+against the limited effectiveness of local gestures, creation of autonomous 
+zones, and sheer horizontalism, just as it stands against transcendent, or 
+top-down impositions of values and norms. The mesopolitical arena of 
+xenofeminism's universalist ambitions comprehends itself as a mobile and 
+intricate network of transits between these polarities. As pragmatists, we 
+invite contamination as a mutational driver between such frontiers. 
+
+
+OVERFLOW •
+
+
+0x18 XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean 
+complexity is a labour requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at odds 
+with 'waiting'. Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not 
+only implies the creation of material infra-structures to make the values it 
+articulates explicit, but places demands on us as subjects. How are we to 
+become hosts of this new world? How do we build a better semiotic 
+parasite -- one that arouses the desires we want to desire, that orchestrates 
+not an autophagic orgy of indignity or rage, but an emancipatory and 
+egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and 
+collective self-mastery?
+
+
+0x19 Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a 
+recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved. 
+We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to construct a new 
+language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions for it, 
+and for any number of related problems, might unfurl with ease. Xenofeminism 
+is a platform, an incipient ambition to construct a new language for sexual 
+politics -- a language that seizes its own methods as materials to be reworked, 
+and incrementally bootstraps itself into existence. We understand that the 
+problems we face are systemic and interlocking, and that any chance of 
+global success depends on infecting myriad skills and contexts with the 
+logic of XF. Ours is a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption 
+rather than rapid overthrow; it is a transformation of deliberate 
+construction, seeking to submerge the white-supremacist capitalist 
+patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its 
+defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps. 
+
+
+0x1A Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a 
+triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the 
+insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In 
+affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate 
+for ampliative capacities, for spaces of freedom with a richer geometry than 
+the aisle, the assembly line, and the feed. We need new affordances of 
+perception and action unblinkered by naturalised identities. In the name of 
+feminism, 'Nature' shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for 
+any political justification whatsoever!
+
+
+If nature is unjust, change nature!
+
+-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= •
+

txt/2016_Feminist_Principles_of_the_Internet_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,132 @@
+Feminist principles of the internet •
+https://feministinternet.org/sites/default/files/Feminist_principles_of_the_internetv2-0.pdf •
+2016 •
+
+---
+
+Preamble
+
+August 26, 2016
+
+A feminist internet works towards empowering more women and queer persons – in all our
+diversities – to fully enjoy our rights, engage in pleasure and play, and dismantle patriarchy.
+This integrates our different realities, contexts and specificities – including age, disabilities,
+sexualities, gender identities and expressions, socioeconomic locations, political and religious
+beliefs, ethnic origins, and racial markers. The following key principles are critical towards
+realising a feminist internet.
+
+Access •
+
+1 Access to the internet •
+A feminist internet starts with enabling more women and queer persons to enjoy universal,
+acceptable, affordable, unconditional, open, meaningful and equal access to the internet.
+
+2 Access to information •
+We support and protect unrestricted access to information relevant to women and queer
+persons, particularly information on sexual and reproductive health and rights, pleasure, safe
+abortion, access to justice, and LGBTIQ issues. This includes diversity in languages, abilities,
+interests and contexts.
+
+3 Usage of technology •
+Women and queer persons have the right to code, design, adapt and critically and sustainably
+use ICTs and reclaim technology as a platform for creativity and expression, as well as to
+challenge the cultures of sexism and discrimination in all spaces.
+
+Movements & public participation •
+
+4 Resistance •
+The internet is a space where social norms are negotiated, performed and imposed, often in an
+extension of other spaces shaped by patriarchy and heteronormativity. Our struggle for a
+feminist internet is one that forms part of a continuum of our resistance in other spaces, public,
+private and in-between.
+
+5 Movement building •
+The internet is a transformative political space. It facilitates new forms of citizenship that enable
+individuals to claim, construct and express selves, genders and sexualities. This includes
+connecting across territories, demanding accountability and transparency, and creating
+opportunities for sustained feminist movement building.
+
+6 Internet governance •
+We believe in challenging the patriarchal spaces and processes that control internet
+governance, as well as putting more feminists and queers at the decision-making tables. We
+want to democratise policy making affecting the internet as well as diffuse ownership of and
+power in global and local networks.
+
+Economy •
+
+7. Alternative economies •
+We are committed to interrogating the capitalist logic that drives technology towards further
+privatisation, profit and corporate control. We work to create alternative forms of economic
+power that are grounded in principles of cooperation, solidarity, commons, environmental
+sustainability, and openness.
+
+8. Free and open source •
+We are committed to creating and experimenting with technology, including digital safety and
+security, and using free/libre and open source software (FLOSS), tools, and platforms.
+Promoting, disseminating, and sharing knowledge about the use of FLOSS is central to our
+praxis.
+
+Expression •
+
+9 Amplifying feminist discourse •
+We claim the power of the internet to amplify women’s narratives and lived realities. There is a
+need to resist the state, the religious right and other extremist forces who monopolise
+discourses of morality, while silencing feminist voices and persecuting women’s human rights
+defenders.
+
+10 Freedom of expression •
+We defend the right to sexual expression as a freedom of expression issue of no less
+importance than political or religious expression. We strongly object to the efforts of state and
+non-state actors to control, surveil, regulate and restrict feminist and queer expression on the
+
+internet through technology, legislation or violence. We recognise this as part of the larger
+political project of moral policing, censorship, and hierarchisation of citizenship and rights.
+
+11 Pornography and “harmful content” •
+We recognise that the issue of pornography online has to do with agency, consent, power and
+labour. We reject simple causal linkages made between consumption of pornographic content
+and violence against women. We also reject the use of the umbrella term “harmful content” to
+label expression on female and transgender sexuality. We support reclaiming and creating
+alternative erotic content that resists the mainstream patriarchal gaze and locates women and
+queer persons’ desires at the centre.
+
+Agency •
+
+12 Consent •
+We call on the need to build an ethics and politics of consent into the culture, design, policies
+and terms of service of internet platforms. Women’s agency lies in their ability to make informed
+decisions on what aspects of their public or private lives to share online.
+
+13 Privacy and data •
+We support the right to privacy and to full control over personal data and information online at all
+levels. We reject practices by states and private companies to use data for profit and to
+manipulate behaviour online. Surveillance is the historical tool of patriarchy, used to control and
+restrict women’s bodies, speech and activism. We pay equal attention to surveillance practices
+by individuals, the private sector, the state and non-state actors.
+
+14 Memory •
+We have the right to exercise and retain control over our personal history and memory on the
+internet. This includes being able to access all our personal data and information online, and to
+be able to exercise control over this data, including knowing who has access to it and under
+what conditions, and the ability to delete it forever.
+
+15 Anonymity •
+We defend the right to be anonymous and reject all claims to restrict anonymity online.
+Anonymity enables our freedom of expression online, particularly when it comes to breaking
+taboos of sexuality and heteronormativity, experimenting with gender identity, and enabling
+safety for women and queer persons affected by discrimination.
+
+16 Children and youth •
+We call for the inclusion of the voices and experiences of young people in the decisions made
+about safety and security online and promote their safety, privacy, and access to information.
+We recognise children’s right to healthy emotional and sexual development, which includes the
+right to privacy and access to positive information about sex, gender and sexuality at critical
+times in their lives.
+
+17 Online violence •
+We call on all internet stakeholders, including internet users, policy makers and the private
+sector, to address the issue of online harassment and technology-related violence. The attacks,
+threats, intimidation and policing experienced by women and queers are real, harmful and
+alarming, and are part of the broader issue of gender-based violence. It is our collective
+responsibility to address and end this.
+

txt/2018_Hackers_of_Resistance_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
+Hackers Of Resistance manifesto •
+http://wearehors.xyz/ •
+2018 •
+
+---
+
+every day, you willingly exchange personal data for custom convenience •
+lurking behind these transactions, the corporatocracy maps out your every move in the name of security •
+don't worry, we're on your side •
+the hors will help you reclaim your life and reprogram the 1s and 0s that build our world •
+to hack is to create •
+what we do is self defense, self determin- [end of transmission] •

txt/2018_Purple_Noise_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
+PURPLE NOISE MANIFESTO - FEMINIST NOISIFICATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA •
+https://www.obn.org/purplenoise/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Manifesto18FEB2019.pdf •
+2018 •
+
+---
+
+#PurpleNoise 
+feminist Noisification 
+of social media
+
+# I make noise •
+# I use my feelers •
+# Algorithmic Despotism •
+# Purple Noise •
+
+#purplenoise is an erratic techno-feminist intervention
+operating on a global scale 
+to noisify social media channels.
+
+We start in the middle
+drawing a line 
+reaching out
+ – to connect with you!
+
+Real people with real time
+users, digital naïves
+using platforms, being used.
+
+Donate yourself
+share your emotions
+share your confusion
+turn it into noise.
+
+We love confusion, 
+we love complexity,
+we embrace them,
+dive into their infinite waters, 
+swim in them like fish!
+Endless confusion – endless pleasure!
+
+Click, like, and share, 
+that’s all we need.
+and when you disagree,
+write into the box,
+so we don’t need to care.
+
+Engagement is the product,
+not WHAT you say.
+Fake or real,
+who cares?
+Stop making sense.
+Time for nonsense – once again.
+
+But we are not Dada,
+we are FmFm.
+Confusion as infusion
+we are nothing but noise of a specific color.
+We are the purple stain under your skin.
+Breathe, add the oxygen
+and your blood will turn red again!
+
+Meaning comes and goes,
+and makes things too easy anyway.
+What counts alone is what can be counted.
+Go and respond to what we offer,
+so it can be measured, optimized and generate the profit.
+
+Produce more noise.
+Channel your noise.
+Feed our channels.
+And get in touch.
+
+Add your personal flavor to purple noise,
+join us on our social media.
+We hate them as much as you do.
+Purple all over,
+then we know you are one of us.
+Noise rules!
+
+Inspired to grow feelers, 
+we are learning how to use them!
+Now, transformed and equipped with a new sensorium,
+we tune into the new dimensions of warfare,
+knowing that all confusion is based on gender confusion.
+
+Today, we are together, strong and unified, 
+but we will be washed away by algorithms 
+that want us to assemble elsewhere, 
+next week, with other people,
+dealing with other trending topics.
+
+Feelers know – and they can feel it, too.
+Message comes from messy!
+No content – no problem.
+We click, we feed and we disobey 
+algorithmic despotism!
+
+@PurpleNoiseUP •
+@PurpleNoise1 •
+@purplenoiseup •
+
+

txt/2018_The_Call_for_Feminist_Data_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,39 @@
+The Call for Feminist Data •
+https://carolinesinders.com/work#/feminist-data-set/ •
+2018 •
+ 
+---
+
+What is data made from a Feminist perspective?
+
+What does Feminist Data Do?
+
+What does Feminist Data need?
+
+It defines a space and opens potential. It queers the archive, the
+spreadsheet, and the data set. It moves beyond a white, and male
+space. It forces technology to reflect the community, not the other way
+around.
+
+How do we quantify without binaries?
+
+Can we create a community foundation for the infrastructure of big
+technology of big data?
+
+We aim to create sustainable data, slow data, consensual data
+and consensual software.
+
+OUR INITIAL INTENTION:
+
+to create a data set that provides a resource that can be used to train
+an AI to locate feminist and other intersectional ways of thinking across
+digital media distributed online.
+
+OUR FUTURE INTENTIONS are to create ethical inputs for
+technology artificial intelligence to challenge dominance by
+engaging in new materials and engaging with others. We are
+building, collaboratively, a collection.
+
+Through collaboration, we are collectively creating and reimagining
+new ways of community engagement for technology and to augment
+intelligence systems.

txt/2019_Cyberwitches_Manifesto_[EN].txt

@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
+Cyberwitches Manifesto •
+http://lucilehaute.fr/cyberwitches-manifesto/cyberwitches-manifesto-en.html •
+2019 •
+
+---
+
+Il a suffit d'un nœud dans le temps
+puis le monde a changé 
+puis la mémoire a disparu
+puis on n'a plus pu comprendre la vie 
+ni en avant ni en arrière. 
+
+It’s time to stop dodging. 
+It’s time to stop fudging ourselves. 
+It is time to face the current changes. 
+Not without anxiety but with determination. 
+Our voices mingle: "We do not defend nature, we are the nature defending itself". 
+— Nature, Gaïa, neither mother nor sister, but force beyond the languages that have difficulty with the post-genre. 
+We acknowledge that the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. 
+The very technologies that was reason to dream of new forms of political empowerment has turned out to be the means of surveillance and control for everybody. 
+It is time to leave the dualist labyrinths. 
+But we are not Icarus: the Sirens are our sisters and we are too keen on the sensuality of the stones and the tenderness of the trees to give in to transhumanist pride. 
+We want to connect from Earth to the Noosphere, without rummaging, scratching and desecrate Gaia's entrails, without spitting in the face of Heaven and Time the deadly fumes that are mortgaging our futures. 
+Let’s be actual « saboteurs of big daddy mainframe ». 
+We profess technological autonomy and all forms of emancipation and empowerment. 
+W.I.T.C.H., VNS Matrix, Gynepunk, Reclaiming, technoshamanism, xenofeminism, hyperstition, afrofuturism and ancestorfuturism inspire us, without us adhering entirely to one or the other. 
+
+We know that speech is the active material of magic. 
+We sometimes try this alchemy of the verb that modifies reality through words. 
+We practice hermeticism with a second degree. 
+Our words have little hybris. They caress the daisies rather than helping to instantiate the magic. 
+Our power is domestic and vernacular. 
+Our sorority protects us from slipping from witch to woman of power. 
+Our do-it-yourself practices escape religions. 
+We are not unitary but labile and evanescent. 
+We don’t believe in divinity, we connect with It. 
+We practice this applied science of the creation of forms by energy and the direction of energy by forms. 
+The forms, structures, images that we manipulate sometimes lead us out of the limits imposed by our culture.
+Our will, our actions, our directed energy, our choices made not once but several times: this is our magic.
+We live in this 21st century that use to be dreamed for a long time and is now feared. 
+We invent experimental origins and traditions for ourselves. 
+We understand that everything is interconnected, that consciousness gives shape to reality and reality gives shape to consciousness. 
+We use social networks to gather in spiritual and political rituals. 
+We use smartphones and tarot cards to connect to spirits. 
+We manufacture DIY devices to listen to invisible worlds. 
+Our astral body travels through the cosmic plane of radio waves.
+We are mixing ancestral and invented methods to reveal the porosity of the worlds — ours, the Gods’ we no longer believe in, the free cosmogony and fictional entities’ that we create. 
+
+We are corporeal, biological, incarnate enti- ties, but also and simultaneously: relational and informational beings.
+We are entities with digital extensions. 
+We live in a physical, technical and digital world. 
+We are hybrid entities living in an hybrid world. 
+We take care of our bodies-hub-server. 
+Our contemporary everyday technical equipment takes part to our ritual forms. 
+We perform technophile rituals. 
+
+We make the gestures.
+We say the words.
+We manipulate the objects.
+We summon archetypal survivals.
+We call for the emergence of egregore. 
+We seek for upsurge, we seek for a fleeting energetic symbiosis.
+We practice this art of changing consciousness at will.
+We are cyberwitches. 
+
+— by the hand of Lucile Olympe Haute, Imbolc 2019.