«sadie plant's speculative turn» (rough translation)
FEDERICO FERNÁNDEZ GIORDANO
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These texts cover the years of greatest philosophical intensity in Sadie Plant’s work, between 1990 and 2000. A decade that saw the arrival of the Web, the fall of the Soviet Union and the spring of the third wave of feminism; a decade in which the hacker spirit merged with the exploratory impetus of the new multimedia artists, the first networks of on-line activism and net.art with rave culture and «cybertheory».[1] A high voltage shot that soon reached the most awakened theoreticians, who began to receive all that acceleration and channel it as if they themselves were the neurotransmitters of a Macluhanian (and posthuman) nervous network connected to the pulsating nodes of their time. The daughter of a mechanical engineer and a secretary, Plant received her PhD in 1989 from the University of Manchester with a thesis on the Situationists[2] —which, as we shall see below, constitutes the fundamental starting point in Plant’s later evolution towards cyberfeminism—; during those years she supported the mining protests against Thatcherism in the UK, connected with underground movements of the time such as the Transmaniacs in Italy and the «art strikes»,[3] and before the end of the 1990’s she had moved in and out of academic teaching, gone from being one of the UK’s most famous «media academics»[4] to an outsider, and published the three books for which she is usually recognized.[5]
Obviously, during the nineties Plant also wrote numerous articles, edited publications, signed reviews for art catalogs, anthologies and conferences, and as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham she gathered hosts of enthusiastic students who followed her everywhere seduced by her genius, such as the SWITCH study group (which included Mark Fisher), later reconverted into the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), which was created for her in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. In many ways, the articles from that period describe Plant’s academic and post-academic trajectory and are a concentrated synthesis of her thought, so the task of bringing them together for the first time in a single volume is a historic milestone, and even more so in the Spanish-speaking world, where these texts had remained mostly unread.
On the theoretical side, Plant’s initial interests were marked by a desire to respond to the many claudications of postmodernity, with a transdisciplinary approach often bordering theory-fiction that was all the rage in the cultural studies of her time. From her early years of clearly situationist and post-Marxist impetus, Plant’s position towards the violent political-economic upheavals of the 1990’s became more and more a discourse critical of humanism and of the stuck-in-the-past traditional Left, and her philosophical defense of immanent categories such as the «irrational», the «fluid» and the «decentralized» was often confused with the «technological optimism» of the California techno-gurus, if not with simple philo-neoliberalism. However, Plant was more interested in the analysis of capitalism as a «system of anti-markets», to use Manuel De Landa’s expression, and always put a lot of emphasis on fostering the dynamics of «self-organising activity: street markets, “the frontier zones of capitalism”, what De Landa calls “meshwork”»,[6] the new forms of collectivity and utopian micro-communities of the rave, the «bazaar» versus the mall, «horizontality» versus verticality, «DIY» versus corporate doctrine… and, as a common feature to all of them, the «bottom-up» structures, which for Plant constitute the basis of the fabric and intelligence. —These are appeals that, far from belonging to another era, continue to be the basics of many current theorists such as Marta G. Franco and her vindication of creative work «mostly from below», or the «material intelligences» of authors such as Laura Tripaldi—.[7] And, while Nick Land himself would end up literally merging with the more questionable neoliberal flows, Plant’s position, in contrast, always advocated for using the «decentering» and «fluidity» of the subject from a feminist perspective, as intensifiers for her total critique of humanism. Significantly, in a 2017 interview Plant still spoke of her desire to write a book on the speculative turn and its relation to «what are now rather unfashionable commitments to a politics of liberation and equality».[8]
The politics of liberation and equality, Plant says with irony, are things that today might seem to be «unfashionable», and it is true that these same politics are the first to be harmed by our giving up or renouncing to continue elaborating critical discourses and believing in radical ideas. Yes, this shows that we must be really fucked up if we have reached the point where the critique of capitalist ideology (i.e., the politics of liberation and equality) is confused with ideology. And, in our world of post-truth and fake news, no one can doubt that we have definitely settled into such confusion. Thus, if the critique of the «recuperation of critique» had any sense of being in the 1990s, it should have even more in the age of Google and Instagram. Reading Plant one might think: «The Internet in the nineties? What does this have to do with today’s world?…» But as we move forward, we go through successive transformations and levels of depth that would hardly have anything to do with a single historical period. And, even admitting the argument of expiration date, adopting a dismissive attitude towards critical discourses (be they those of feminism, those of the 1990’s, or any other) indexes how lacking we are of a true critical attitude. Finally, we surely could learn more from a positive reading of those critical attitudes of the 1990’s, instead of defeatist repetition of the postmodern mantra of capitalist realism.
Indeed, one of the usual objections directed against nineties cybertheory is that reality would have ended up surpassing it, and that capitalist realism would have ended up imposing itself irremediably, turning any speculation outside the norm into a parody, at best, if not mere utopian dreams belonging to an «innocent» era. But we should ask ourselves, as Plant did, if our alienated subjectivity is a singular quality of the capitalist Spectacle or if it has to do with a humanist interiority constituted as universal (for women and factory workers of the 19th century, for example, alienation and the cancellation of futures were already an existential framework with no escape long before anyone used GPS or cellphones). And, if one looks with feminist lens, it becomes clear that the notion of «there is no alternative» proper to neoliberal determinism is in fact a very androleukocentric notion. There is something very disturbing in this resurgence of postmodern dogmas, according to which, there would be no exteriority of the Spectacle, and everything, moreover, would consist of always stirring up the same signs and the same gestures without achieving substantial effects. Plant’s philosophy is important precisely because it offers us the necessary tools to avoid falling into defeatism and to keep searching for ways out of the Spectacle.
As she said in a 1990 review of the Art Strikes:
«If there is one characteristic of capitalism we may be sure of, it is that nothing can escape it. But faced with an impossible situation, the loud and active search for possibilities is an alternative to silent passivity.»[9]
And:
«The awareness that even the most radical of gestures can be disarmed continues to encourage a search for irrecuperable forms of expression and communication.»[10]
All this should be enough to eradicate the argument that Sadie Plant’s writings are confined to an «obsolete» framework, a hype or even a particular time (and, indeed, the typically Eurocentric notion of a temporality that moves «in a straight line» makes no sense in a fragmented world that is governed by very different speeds, depending on which region of the planet one goes to look at). And, perhaps more importantly, it may answer to the frequent accusations of «apolitical» (sometimes fueled by herself in her interviews) that were hurled against Plant’s philosophy. For, by moving from her initial neo-situationist positions to an anti-humanist and cyberfeminist discourse, Plant’s speculative turn torpedoes the always purported and never effective discursive sufficiency of subjects, originating therefore a true theory of the Other (or of the others, the zeros, non-human agencies, non-normative collectives, racialized or excluded from the Golden Temple of Humanity). A theory of the outside that has become one of the central axes for thinking, philosophy and arts in the 21st century, as can be seen in the currents of critical posthumanism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology or the xenofeminism of Laboria Cuboniks.[11]
Some of the articles featured here constitute the threads of Plant’s books, and in this sense, we can see the tremendous qualitative leap that takes place both in the author’s style and ideas: from an initial very academic and didactic tone, without many poetic displays, as found in «The Situationist International: a case of spectacular neglect» (which would be the embryo of the book The Most Radical Gesture), to the explosion of originality and narrative power that takes place with the irruption of feminism in her work. Capital texts such as «Beyond the screens» —where Plant lays the foundations of her cyberfeminism understood as K-feminism or inhuman feminism—, or «The future looms»[12] —in which many of her recurring themes such as the history of computing and Ada Lovelace appear—, could be said to be preparations, variations or condensations of Zeros and ones; and «Information war in the age of dangerous substances» is the marrow of Writing on drugs. However, there are also others, probably the least known to the Spanish-speaking public, which would be the missing links, if not the fundamental pieces that underpin the progression and perfect construction of Plant’s thought.
Specifically, «Baudrillard’s Woman», where Plant inflicts a mortal blow to the masculinism of post-structuralist philosophers, and particularly to Baudrillard, of whose discourse she will say that it has «the appearance of a radicalism», but «is really an attempt to protect the subject (…) against what he can only think as the void, the threat of dissolution». An important step that places Plant on the path of that more radical gesture that had occupied her in her previous works. «Baudrillard’s Woman» is undoubtedly a crucial piece in Plant’s trajectory, for its way of liquidating postmodernism and for opening the way towards the exit of the Spectacle and the radical otherness of feminism and machines.
For its part, «Coming into contact» appeared in a catalog of cyberfeminist art and it shows the features of body feminism, the critique of the specular economy indebted to Donna Haraway and Luce Irigaray, as well as tactility and materiality, which are examples of Plant’s pioneering work in the field of new materialisms.
Then there is «The virtual complexity of culture», written at the height of the Internet explosion, machine learning, biotechnology and the connectionist model. Connectionism is an interdisciplinary area that since the 1950’s has been gradually altering the way of understanding complex systems, and that, by the time we reach the 1990’s, marks the moment when Artificial Intelligence ceased to be a «command-and-control» science to become a process that «makes its own connections and learns to organize, and learn, for itself»[13] (just like Alan Turing wanted). Many people today still think of machine intelligence as a GOFAI process[14], i.e., computing as a mere mechanism that would only obey an axiomatic programmed by man (machines that «obey instructions from man»); but the reality is that such an approach to computing has long since been left behind (in the same way, Plant would say, that «women obeying instructions from men» has been left behind). One might ask, then, who is really obsolete (the machines or you)? A text that is also important for addressing many of Plant’s original conceptions on topics such as agency, humanism and cultural studies, the definition of intelligence and culture, etc.
Not forgetting the perverse «Coming across the future», an article on cybersex from one of the monographs published around the Virtual Futures seminars at the University of Warwick.[15] Far from singing the praises of virtual life, Plant will take a counter-intuitive path to show us the very corporeality of virtuality (or the virtuality of corporeality), also shedding important insights on non-reproductive sexuality and unregulated desire («an intensity uncoupled from genital sex and engaged only with the dismantling of selves»), and suggesting a direct relation between the phallic economy, the constitution of the organic/orgasmic and the human.
And finally, «On the Matrix», one of Plant’s most quoted and emblematic pieces, in which she addresses the cyberculture of her time, cyberfeminism and its distributed «origins» along with the Australian group VNS Matrix. A text that could be read as a manifesto, as a farewell without contrition for the age of man, with an inspired style that shines for its capacity for corrosion and synthesis, a summit of posthuman feminism that serves to close the end of the millennium (and prepare for the next).
For our edition we have put the texts chronologically, since Plant’s mature stage of cyberfeminism cannot be understood without first attending to her skirmishes with the poststructuralist critique of the Spectacle, as well as her early studies on the Situationist International. Since her 1989 PhD dissertation, Critique and Recuperation in Twentieth Century Philosophical Discourse, the core of Plant’s problematic has always been to find some kind of external position that would serve to counter the multiple insolvencies and dead ends of the postmodern debate, namely: a critical position that cannot be «recuperated» by power. A position that in her early works she will identify with the «most radical gesture» of the situationists, but which will end up finding its climax in the peculiar alliance between women and machines. Plant concedes to the poststructuralists that the Spectacle is total and alienation is a fact consubstantial to the human being, but, unlike them, she would remain committed to «the Situationist desire to find some external position (this time outside the human spectacle) where the critique of false appearances could be firmly anchored».[16] This is exactly where Plant’s masterful move lies, and which sets her apart from her initial purely situationist positions: for it is not the totality of the capitalist Spectacle, it is the totality of the human Spectacle that we can still circumvent and where it is possible to locate a renovating position for critique.
Thus, in her 1997 book Zeros and Ones, Plant devoted extensive passages to speak of the substrata, scaffolding, architectures and non-human intelligences that weave together our human reality. The critique of the Spectacle, Plant concludes, cannot be limited to the capitalist mode of production, but must be extended (or intensified) to human history as such —resulting, one might add, in the only possible revolutionary «subjects»: the posthuman and the non-human.
A problem that will lead Plant to speak of an «irresponsible feminism», or an inhuman feminism, in what constitutes one of the most controversial and to this day misunderstood points of her thought.
«It takes an irresponsible feminism —which may not be a feminism at all— to trace the inhuman paths on which woman begins to assemble herself as the cracks and crazes now emerging across the once smooth surfaces of patriarchal order.»[17]
Indeed, given that «the feminine» has for centuries constituted the outside of humanity designed by and for man, Plant will embrace that external position (inhumanity) as the anchor point for the more radical critique that is in fact feminism. An exteriority of human representations, it should be noted, that has always been populated by all sorts of marginalized collectives, the very space where political claims and struggles have been waged since the mid-twentieth century. Strictly speaking, the subjects of feminism and inhuman feminism or simply inhumanism (as feminism of the other, or «cyber» feminism) have always shared the same space of exclusion («Slaves, workers, women, and robots were never alone in their cyborg roles»); the only difference is that the latter do not aspire to be rehabilitated for the greater glory of man, but, re-appropriating their own marginal and imposed condition, they positivize it (in the cybernetic sense of the term) and turn it into their strength.
Plant’s movement here is crucial: for the strategy to prevent the re-appropriation of feminism is precisely the opposition to the identity, and to the position-taking of a transcendent subject.
With this renunciation of taking sides with the subject, Plant’s approaches caused havoc among the socialist feminists of her time, who accused her of proposing a feminism that did not work for the interests of «real» women or that did not take them into account as «subjects». But precisely, says Plant in her usual kaleidoscopic style:
«The subject can only be masculine, and man is the only subject.»[18]
Hence, the question should not be what we can do as subjects within patriarchy, but to imagine a world outside of patriarchy (once again, the exit from the Spectacle); that is, to build an insurgency capable of effectively disrupting the reproduction of the Same —where the «Same» is in essence the regime of patriarchy, and where this patriarchy behaves in a relation of pure negative-feedback with the construction of the human.
At a time when the women’s soccer team wins world trophies and bodies slide out of all codes, the incendiary feminism of authors like Plant or Irigaray might almost seem intemperate, but one should not be fooled: the convergence of the Spectacle with women is only a superficial layer, an outcome, the friendly face presented on the screens, while the primary productive process of feminism (the feminine) is a cyberpositive circuit that works in the background, so to speak, cracking the masculine order from within: «infiltrating disrupting disseminating».[19] A process that N1x has referred to as «unconditional feminism», that is «impossible to control and impossible to stop»[20] —an idea that makes perfect sense if one thinks of the legions of identity safeguards, womb-watchers, spokespersons for incel culture and women’s authenticity that continue arising today, for whom feminism cannot become entirely real, only «an effect of nothingness», a seduction without substance or bottom.
«Woman wants to become real [i.e., not solely symbolic] and this, for Baudrillard, is her great mistake.» For Baudrillard, it is better for woman to remain in the domain of the symbolic, where she can do no harm. For, says Plant, «man is without hope if the play becomes real, if the backdrop disappears, if woman becomes real, the game begins to play itself, if the machine refuses to be man’s interlocuter».[21]
So, far from being a mere symbolic struggle for equality, for identity or essence, we can understand feminism in general (and cyberfeminism in particular) as a speculative realism. The subject of cyberfemininity, Plant writes, is not exactly «a subject lacking an identity, but a virtual reality, whose identity is a mere tactic of infiltration» —the «camouflage» in CCRU, the «replicunts» in Plant.
Undoubtedly, the strategy of identifying the feminine with the fluid is a risky move that made many think that it was a kind of essentialism, but once again, this would be to fall back on the Thomasian game that presupposes an essence separate from the existent or the synthetic, and that is incapable of conceiving self-production. Synthetic self-production is what the essentialist paradigm cannot admit, and the whole propaedeutic on self-organization and machinic intelligences, in Plant, could not be sustained with such a Manichean and traditional definition. Moreover, fluidity, in English, also means «mutability», which clashes with the philosophical notion of essence as something fixed and immutable. If it is mutable, it is not an essence: the fluid is by definition a machinic/material process. And it is important, in this sense, Plant’s recourse to the natural sciences, to the realms of the technical and the biological —places long anathema to left feminism— or to the history of bacteria, fabric technologies and computing to describe a much stranger and weirder interzone where the fluid always operates as a decoder of genders, bodies, human hierarchies and binarisms. Actually, Plant may never have spoken of an «essence of woman» at all, for, as Amy Ireland has pointed out, cyberfeminism constitutes a structural approach to the subject of gender rather than an essentialist, metaphysical or performative one.
It is here that Plant’s machinic turn was not sufficiently (or correctly) read by an era that was too engrossed with the Francophone paradigm of the subject, speech and language, and that failed to deal with the radical novelty of Artificial Intelligence, seeing in it nothing more than an exclusive attribute of «the computers». Fluid or self-organizing instances are not limited to the new AI, but are found in abundance in nature, in forms of structuring and synthesizing matter —leading to the notion, so corrosive even today, that nature has always been artificial and synthetic.
«In philosophical terms, [these developments] they all tend towards the erosion of idealism and the emergence of a new materialism, a shift in thinking triggered by the emergent activity and intelligence of the material reality of a world which man still believes he controls.»[22]
Thus, Plant literally escapes from the constructivist and performative currents that prevailed in the cultural studies of her time, delineating a speculative materialism that would still take a few years to materialize in the 21st century, but that undoubtedly has in Plant one of its most complex and complete precursors —since, unlike the male names that popularized that movement, Plant articulates the nexus between the speculative turn and feminism—. However, the «counter-hegemonic» discourse deployed from the left at the turn of the century (with its desperate dialectic oscillating between a dying technophobia and a clericalism retreating to the ruins of humanism) still continued to reproduce the same errors that Plant’s cybertheory and her cronies had long since surpassed, and the great tsunami passed over us all (the presumptuous neoliberal end of History) due to the mistaken conviction that it is not possible to propose other approaches (and in particular, post-anthropocentric approaches). In this sense, the vanguard of theory was always in the «mutants of subjectivities»[23] of feminism and accelerationism, and the true determinists of capitalism were neither the cyberpunks nor the cybergrrrls, but those who stopped trying or simply never understood the importance of shifting subjectivities. A refusal to shift subjectivities that is even more unjustifiable if we take into account that the 1990s saw the birth of the third wave of feminism (the breeding ground of cyberfeminism), and with it an unprecedented mutation of subjectivity in which women, machines, inhuman and subaltern agencies are no longer seen as separate processes but as components of the same circuit of escape: the successors of a too long era of Homo sapiens’ senile dementia. If we have Plant to thank for anything, it is for having pushed this collapse of subjectivity to the limit and for having glimpsed its shadows, its matrices and its replicunts to come, torpedoing the specular economy and its supremacist regime of genders, races and species. Surely, those who distrust social changes and revolutionary ideas would be the same ones who would maintain without blushing that feminism does not count as a «great shift» for human history (whether in the West, or in any other location of the globe); the same ones who today continue to resist with renewed violence against the shift of planetary axis, without understanding that their misogynist temporality and their endogamous circuits have been evicted by the same machinic and feminine flows that (they believed) were going to provide them with a safe bed on which to continue sustaining the reproduction of the Same.
The ground shakes and cracks under their feet.
And, if there is something for sure, it is that Plant’s philosophy does not represent a repetition of the Same. These texts bear witness to the birth of a new epoch, a new language, and even a new thought. A new self-organized «individuation» in the «numbers to come». An epoch where the matrix has come to life and spits brazenly into the tomb of patriarchy. There, beyond human representations («beyond the screens»), we find the space of the future to which Sadie Plant’s texts point.
FFG
NOTES
[1] A term that commonly refers to the theory that dealt with the nascent cybernetic culture of the 1990s, but it can actually be traced back to the studies of Norbert Wiener in the 1940s.
[2] Sadie Plant: 1989.
[3] On this topic, see The Art Strike Papers or the publications of Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration, where Plant was on the editorial board. Edmund Berger has written about all these connections in Berger: 2021.
[4] Simon Reynolds: 2009.
[5] Sadie Plant: 1992; 1997 & 1999.
[6] Cited in Simon Reynolds: 2009.
[7] Marta G. Franco: 2024; Laura Tripaldi: 2024.
[8] Cited in Amalie Smith: 2017, p. 8.
[9] Sadie Plant: 1990.
[10] Sadie Plant: 1992, p. 177.
[11] Regarding the origins of speculative realism, is well known the story of «the Goldsmiths four» (2007): Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Graham Harman and Iain Hamilton Grant. Graham Harman has proposed his own genealogy, separating himself and pointing out the work of Maurizio Ferraris in the 1990s, or that of Markus Gabriel in the 21st century, and even adds a precursor as distant as Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950). Curiously, almost all stories about the origins of SR tend to ignore the cybernetic materialism from Plant and the CCRU; Plant’s approaches in «The International Situationist: a Case of Spectacular Neglect» and «Baudrillard’s Woman», for example, are pioneers of the so-called return of the real and the new materialisms; or the work of Land himself, who between 1988 and 1993 produced precursory texts of said currents such as «Spirit and Teeth», «Narcissism and Dispersion» or «Kant, Capital, and the prohibition of incest».
[12] Plant wrote three versions of «The Future Looms» in the mid-nineties. The first of them appeared in Plant: 1995a (published in Spanish in Plant: 2019), another in Plant: 1995b, and the one we present here, published in 1996. Amy Ireland has even pointed the existence of a fourth version, apparently featured in Geek Girl Zine.
[13] Sadie Plant: 1995a, p. 54.
[14] «Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence», an expression used for many years in AI research, before the connectionist model, and which was characterized by a «top-down» approach.
[15] Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy: 1998.
[16] Vincent Lê: 2022.
[17] Sadie Plant, ‘On the Matrix’, p. 274.
[18] Sadie Plant, ‘Baudrillard’s Woman’, p. 93.
[19] VNS Matrix: 1991.
[20] N1x: 2018.
[21] Sadie Plant, ‘Baudrillard’s Woman’, p. 101.
[22] Sadie Plant, ‘On the Matrix’, pp. 229-330.
[23] Edmund Berger: 2015.
«Sadie Plant’s Speculative Turn» was originally written in Spanish for its publication in Más allá de las pantallas y otros ensayos de Sadie Plant (Federico Fernández Giordano, ed., Barcelona, Holobionte, 2024). <https://edicionesholobionte.com/mas-alla-de-las-pantallas-y-otros-ensayos-de-sadie-plant/>