11 responses to “xenofeminism on ectpodcast”

  1. feels like there are some pretty strong resonances between the xenofeminist stuff on alienation and the emphasis here on a post-nihilist praxis…
    was glad to see holly herndon’s work on there as her compositions n performance both formally and content-wise address alienation both critically and constructively. and cyborg-feminist/posthuman themes more broadly.

    • hey kp,there certainly are some common roots (at least on my branch of the family rhizome), still not sure if they are more akin to the accelerationists and other big-dreamers or more DIY like myself but certainly lots of good stuff to experiment with and otherwise entertain.

      • i would say there’s a pretty strong tendency towards an accelerationist bent (e.g. ‘Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. These are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed’ from the Interrupt section) but its tempered in part by their highly critical and historical reading of science/technology via Haraway. its that crucial analytic (of the history of science in relation to the oppression of women and marginalized communities, its ecological consequences, colonization and so on) that gets lost in the accelerationist discourse. and the discourse of mastery is questioned as well. time will tell i suppose.

      • indeed, i’m hoping they will try to apply some of this to particular (off the page if you will) tasks/projects and than see how it does or does not come together (needs to be bricolaged or even scrapped) and than does or does not scale up.
        of course they may stay in the speculative/scifi realm, as you say we shall see.
        did you catch:

        exploring feminist hacktivism w/ deep lab


        ?

  2. just scoped it. very very interesting. i downloaded their book and am looking forward to reading it. thanks for the heads up

  3. I really like the Xenofeminist Manifesto, and their project as a whole. It provides a very usual correction to the Left Accelerationists – my big gripe with them, aside from ultimately hollow shell their program appears to be (though perhaps this will change with Williams and Srnicek’s book comes out), is the difficulty in drawing a line between their vision’s and capitalism’s own Promethean projections. Reading the manifesto gives me the same feeling I get so often when reading Negri – it’s like talking to my friends who revel in our time, who see smart technologies, “cool” start-ups, neoliberal NGOs, farmers markets, social networks, so on and so forth, as forces capable of eliminating poverty, inequality, environmental degradation, and political gridlock. Sure, Accelerationism presents itself as a leftist revolutionary platform (as do the immaterial labor prophets of the post-Autonomia – hence their recent courting of one another), but how different really is unleashing the technological forces within capital from the embrace of capitalism’s promise via technological development and the ‘wiring’ of civil society?

    Anyways, I digress. The Xenofeminists tackle Accelerationism’s woeful lacking of a ‘subect’ by providing an analysis of alienation and its relationship to freedom (whatever that may be), while also giving us insightful tools for bridging the gap between technological entanglement and Anthropocenic forces. These two discourses had yet to be put into proper dialogue with one another, even those this is one of the most essential things that must be carried out now. At the same time, their debt to feminism, racial politics, and Marxist theories allows them to maintain a relevancy to everyday social struggles in a way that the common abstractions of critical theory do not. Unlike their Accelerationism cousins (or extended critical theory family tree), they also exhibit a punkish mentality that aligns it with more oppositional currents. All in all, Xenofeminism makes Haraway’s cyborg tangible in a very constructive way.

    My one beef with them is the assertion that Xenofeminism is “a rationalism”, though I guess we should that their wording seems to indicate a plurality of rationalisms. But then this rationalism is aligned with the Prometheanism exalted by the Accelerationists; all it takes, they say, is breaking apart the relationship between rationalism and patriarchy. OK, but would such a disjunction entail the elimination of rationalism as a category? Why continue, in an attack on patriarchy, to cling to rationalism? I don’t want to descend into a historico-philosophical game of the chicken and the egg, asking if rationalism preceded patriarchy and vice-versa – but the rationalism as order or rule is inherently tied to the processes of binarization that Xenofeminism hopes to undermine. As a value, it is bound first and foremost to Western notions of efficiency, serving as the Enlightenment’s logic of production. Rationalism is thus a governing mechanism in the division of labor, and is ultimately a logic of sacrifice. Our world is sinking into a quagmire driven by the valorization of progress, the division of people into classifiable chunks, the colonization of our lives by labor, and the dangerous seductions of the consumer marketplace. Progress, modernization, expansion, disciplinary orders and environmental collapse extends from this unity – an antagonist politics needs an element of refusal, a refusal of sacrifice to labor and consumption, and a refusal of capitulation to the manic rush of the networked world order. So much easier said than done (and very likely an impossibility at this time), but such a refusal would attack rationalism at its foundations.

    Maybe I read their rationalism as too close to Western, instrumental rationalism, and not giving them enough credit in seeing rationalism as a mutable category. I prefer the path staked out by Feyerabend, Haraway, Pickering and others, which eviscerates rationalism and leaves us with a mangle of resources and means to achieving knowledge. At the same time, maybe my problem is that I still haven’t properly shaken off the influence of ‘folk politics’ that these new texts, manifestos, and movements hope to provide an antidote to. Who knows!

    • hey eb, i’m not on twitter but it would be great if someone hereabouts could reach out to them and see if we can get some kind of dialogue/exchange going given the commonalities and the potentially fruitful differences, all sorts of possible sparks and spurs i think.
      @Xenofeminism

    • Edmund,
      woah lots of good stuff here. a few thoughts.
      it seems like the speculative wager concerning rationalism is that collective action, both politically and theoretically, could decouple rationalism from its patriarchical, colonial and capitalist roots. that while, yes, rationalism has historically and still is tied in with the logic capitalist production and its attendant patriarchal division of labor, it is not necessarily or essentially linked to it. that rationalism could change in kind, given mass intervention along lines resistant to capital. it seems like what they want to say is ‘yes, rationality and science are linked through practice to patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism; and this is precisely why a ‘we’ needs to intervene within it to emancipate it. if technoscience is the ground of domination across several scales, then perhaps intervening there could be an effective means of resistance.’ ‘But this is precisely why feminism must be a rationalism–because of this miserable imbalance, and not despite it,’ (from 0x04). they want to open up the question of whether rationality is ‘inherently bound to Western notions of efficiency, serving as the Enlightenment’s logic of production.’ whether or not opening this question is possible is, it seems, an open debate. it seems to be tied too with their attempt to recuperate the concept of the universal in light of postcolonial and feminist critiques.

      i don’t see this particular insight as especially new; Haraway’s work in the 80’s seems to be in many ways addressing this question. there’s something here about ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ debate as well.

      the prometheanism is something i worry about in the text as well. it still seems like there is a narrative of progress here, particularly with the lack of a focus on the ecological (perhaps i’m wrong on this, but i find scant mention of it in the manifesto). there seems to be no consciousness here of exhaustibility or of the earth as finite. i worry that any revolutionary project concerning technoscience unintentionally reifies the capitalist logic of progress when it does not think through the devastating ecological effects technoscience has wrought. the finitude of the earth, of our psyches, of the limitations of knowledge; these seem to me be absolutely necessary for re-configuring our concepts of futurity and progress.

      just wondering, what do you mean by ‘the logic of sacrifice?’ i came across this phrase many times in ‘Noise’ by Attali but i’m not quite sure what it means. anything good i could read on it?

      • Hey KP,

        I agree with what you surmise related to the “speculative wager” (what a good way to put it!) where rationalism and patriarchy/capitalism are concerned. Certainly technoscience is a progressive force, and I think at this point we need to have done with the reluctance toward technology in the name of some pastoral, as well as the impulse to scream “scientism!” when faced with scientific discourses or complexity in general. That’s one of the things that I admire so much about the XF manifesto. Ultimately, I suppose my squabble is pretty minor in the grander scheme – rationalism, in my understanding, is the rules dictating processes of knowledge and governing the application of it and the technics it gives rise to. In other words, rationalism is a governing protocol. Demolishing that protocol (which is directly tied to class power and the binarizations class calls into being), as the XFs hope to do, would make it not a rationalism in the historic sense of the word. Good! But I much prefer Feyerabend’s approach, which sees ‘rationalism’ as an exclusionary practice; rationalism vs. irrationalism becomes yet another binary that we need to do away. I think Haraway’s attempts carry this out quite well. At the same time, how do we approach the notion of the rational as a terrain of struggle without identifying the conceptual ground we stand on (i.e., the rational). Just thinking out loud here, but Haraway’s process begins by identifying first and foremost the power structures her discourses are embedded within and then proceeding outwards from them. Likewise, Feyerabend’s mode of thought extends in its own anarchist rationality.

        Ultimately, it’s the presence of Prometheanism in the text that causes me concern over the question of rationality. You put it perfectly: ” i worry that any revolutionary project concerning technoscience unintentionally reifies the capitalist logic of progress when it does not think through the devastating ecological effects technoscience has wrought.” That’s precisely the major misstep of the Accelerationists, which if I remember correctly makes a brief mention of climate change in its intro and then never addresses it again. It seems that the ecological is sort of implied in the XF manifesto – when one goes about collapsing binaries, the question of human/non-human should point directly to our relationship of the earth. Even if that’s not the case for the XFs, its quite easy to shift text towards the question of politics in the Anthropocene via the influence of Haraway. All in all, it would be a good thing to pose directly to the XFs!

        “just wondering, what do you mean by ‘the logic of sacrifice?’ i came across this phrase many times in ‘Noise’ by Attali but i’m not quite sure what it means. anything good i could read on it?” – My understanding is a bit different from Attali’s (which I have to confess still confuses me to certain degrees, even after repeated readings). It’s taken instead from Raoul Vaneigem, with his analysis of the ways in which notions of progress, efficiency and labor transferred from the theological to the secular following the Enlightenment. For example, under the ruling class of the church the poor were compelled to sacrifice and toil, hand over their time and money with the promise of eternal reward; after the so-called ‘death of God’ the poor were promised riches and wealth, if only they would sacrifice their time (to the capitalists) and their money (to the commodity). Ultimately his goal was forge theoretical links between various heresies (who proclaimed the realization of heaven on earth) and modern revolutionaries (who desire the realization of a world lived without sacrifice). Attali’s “Noise” seemed to bear a certain Situationist influence, so there would be congruence there (Vaneigem’s “Revolution of Everyday Life” and “Movement of the Free Spirit”, as well as Wark’s essay “Furious Media” are good touchstones).

        “the finitude of the earth, of our psyches, of the limitations of knowledge; these seem to me be absolutely necessary for re-configuring our concepts of futurity and progress.” – Seems to be the best examples of reconfigured notions of progress are those out there in the thick of the world, already putting into play experimental politics while taking crisis and collapse as the inevitability that they are!

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