Conceiving Ada, Conceiving Feminist Possibilities in the New Mediascape

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Notes

1. Notably, Sadie Plant's Zeros and Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture, London: Fourth Estate, 1997, presents Ada Byron as such a founding figure in cyberfeminism.

2. The turn towards deconstruction in feminist film theory consists of tearing apart, and ‘reading against the grain’ of, film texts that subscribe to dominant psychoanalytic readings so as to arrive at negotiated meanings that may support more woman (and queer) friendly conclusions. See Judith Mayne's Cinema and Spectatorship, London: Routledge, 1993, for an excellent elucidation of the approach. Such an approach finds its precedence in the legacy that Cahiers du cinéma bequeaths to film studies, especially its interest in classifying films according to their ideological progressiveness. See Cahiers du cinéma's analysis of Young Mr Lincoln (John Ford, 1939) for its ‘resistances’ to dominant ideology, reprinted in Screen 13 (3), pp. 5–43. The notion of affirming the feminine led feminist film theory down the cultural studies path in the 1980s and early 1990s, culminating in works that centre on women audiences such as Christine Geraghty's Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps, Oxford: Polity Press, 1991, and Charlotte Brunsdon's Films for Women, London: British Film Institute, 1986. While these are works of significance, they address only the symptoms of a psychoanalytically inclined feminist film theory.

3. The opportunities for the formulation of a feminist ethics presented by the ‘digital turn’ may be open to charges of technological determinism and the assumption of an (unnecessary) split between the digital and the analogue. Such concerns warrant an extensive qualification of the discussion that is beyond the scope of this essay. However, see Volkart's essay (2004, pp. 98–100) for a succinct survey of the discourse that suffices for the purpose of this essay. A major difference in the ways in which feminism and cyberfeminism view technology is encapsulated in this remark: ‘Whereas feminism claimed the appropriation of new technologies as tools for women's liberation, cyberfeminism promotes both the idea of being cyborgian and the pleasures involved in it. In other words, technologies are no longer perceived as protheses and instruments for liberation which are separated from the body, but a merging of body and technology takes place. It is the concept of the technological body which is the medium for pleasure and liberation, and not the technological tool itself’ (Volkart 2004, pp. 99–100).

4. According to Claire Colebrook, transcendental philosophy ‘asks the question of how the subject relates to the given’ as opposed to empirical philosophy ‘which locates the constitution of the subject within the given’ (1997, p. 163). She further observes that ‘the question of sexual difference as it has so far been articulated in feminist theory has, on this interpretation, been one of transcendental philosophy’ (ibid.), although how one conceives of philosophy ultimately determines the status of sexual difference (1997, p. 172). See Colebrook's ‘Is Sexual Difference a Problem?’ Social Semiotics 7 (2), pp. 161–74.

5. Increasingly, theorists have applied the Deleuzean philosophical project to think about new media and digital culture. See, for instance, Alexander R. Galloway's Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 2004, and my review of the book, ‘From Discipline to Control’, in Afterimage 33.6, May–June 2006, p. 49.

6. Harnessing a cyberfeminist discourse to the Deleuzean philosophical project towards the construction of a feminist ethics needs some clarification, given the documented gaps in Deleuze's understanding of gender politics. Rosi Braidotti, in particular, has commented extensively on the critical uses of Deleuzean philosophy for feminist purposes as well as the uncharacteristically Deleuzean orthodoxy that has built up around the philosopher's work. A major point of contention resides in the Deleuzean project's ultimate erosion of ‘the foundations of a specific feminist epistemology and of a theory of feminine subjectivity insofar as it rejects the masculine/feminine altogether’, Braidotti, ‘Teratologies’, 2000, p. 162. In Metamorphoses, Braidotti identifies herself as an undutiful Deleuzean daughter who, contrary to (male) followers of Deleuze seemingly intent on constructing a Deleuzean orthodoxy, manoeuvres with the Deleuzean road map towards infinite possibilities of feminist becomings (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002, pp. 86–7, 167–71).

7. See, for instance, Braidotti's Metamorphoses (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002), Grosz's Architecture from the Outside, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT, 2002, and Volatile Bodies, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.

8. Some critics have expressed concern over the supposed tendency towards utopianism in discourses of the virtual. For instance, Rob Shields writes: ‘Computers come to appear as essential, as a necessity. Despite all this hand-wringing, the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of utopianism into the mainstream which has only been partially quelled by the familiar journalistic doubt, accusations of political naivety and an unwarranted faith in technology to transform social relations and redress inequalities from a personal to a global scale’ (2003, p. 16). While one should be cautious of falling into the sort of utopianism and technological determinism that Shields describes, it is also worth noting that these concerns belong to another conversation, that is, one of a sociological discourse. The cyberfeminist context from which Plant writes finds its inflection in the discursive formations within Critical Theory which is, however, not to say that the twain would never meet. For the purpose of this essay, suffice it to say, these conversations feed into one another on different levels and at different junctures. As a counter-point to the pessimism of Shields's position, the digital turn has provided considerable space for the democratisation of media via tactical media, hacking, blogging, net art, independent news websites, and various strategies of grassroots media activism despite the presence and strength of transnational media conglomerates. See, for instance, Graham Meikle, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

9. See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek's ‘Cyberspace’, in Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Nights, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 96–125. In this essay, Žižek cries out against the threat of cyberspace to the notion of the unified subject. He rejects the application of an empirical philosophy of immanence to cyberspace in favour of a transcendent philosophy that submits completely to psychoanalytic logic and interpretation. See also footnote 4, above.

10. The weaving metaphor to which Plant refers resonates with Deleuze's illustration of the cinematic function with his particular weaving metaphor. Deleuze likens the frame to ‘the posts which hold the warp threads, whilst the action [of the shot] constitutes merely the mobile shuttle which passes above and below’ (1997, p. 202). Deleuze's cinematic taxonomy and his conception of weaving in relation to digitality share in the contingence of making and acquiring meanings, as opposed to being codified or imposed with psychoanalytic configurations.

11. For works that refer to Rebecca and Fatal Attraction in these terms, see, for instance, John Fletcher's ‘Primal Scene and the Female Gothic: Rebecca and Gaslight’ in Screen 36 (4), pp. 431–70; Karen Hollinger's ‘The Female Oedipal Drama of Rebecca from Novel to Film’ in Quarterly Review of Film and Video 14 (4), pp. 17–30; Chris Holmlund's ‘Reading Character with a Vengeance: The Fatal Attraction Phenomenon’ in The Velvet Light Trap 27, pp. 25–36; and Elayne Rapping's Media-tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars, Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1994.

12. See, for instance, Deleuze and Guattari's elucidation on the notions of becoming and desiring machines in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi, London: The Athlone Press, 1988.

13. For instance, Braidotti notes the reactionary agenda of psychoanalytic discourse. She observes, ‘Orthodox Lacanians like Kristeva have excelled of late in these panic exercises, whether it is in her analysis of horror and monstrous others, of ethnic diversity and inevitably, of loss and melancholia. There is often a semi-religious tone of tragic solemnity in these accounts of the collapse and destabilization of the self—not to speak of civilisation—under the attack of the abject others who seem to creep in everywhere. Any spectators of David Cronenberg's films will know, however, that this knee jerk conservative reaction is eminently comic and it can be dispelled as easily as an outburst of laughter’ (2002, p. 41).