Technical Materialisations and the Politics of Radical Contingency

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 14, Issue 29, 1999, Pages 105-118

  Mackenzie, Adrian ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0033415444     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/08164649993362     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Routledge) London & New York, 1993, p. 195.
2. John Traupman, The New College Latin Dictionary (Bantam Books) New York, 1995, p. 117.
3. Michel Foucault, 'What is Enlightenment?' in P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Penguin) Hammondsworth, 1984, p. 45. Emphasis added.
4. Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'Time Today' in The Inhuman. Reflections on Time, G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (trans.) (Stanford University Press) Stanford, 1991, p. 68. This view of technology as an ensemble of arrangements for the processing of contingency diverges from the more usual views of modern technology as either instruments for the rational domination of nature and others, or the view of technology as some kind of extension of the human organs, as something of human making.
5. This theme has been taken up and developed at length in Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on the Transhuman Condition (Routlcdge) London, New York, 1997, especially in the fifth chapter.
6. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, W. Lovitt (trans.) (Harper Torchbooks) New York, 1977, p. 15.
7. Jürgen Habermas, 'Technology and Science as "Ideology"' in Towards a Rational Society (Polity Press) Cambridge, 1987.
8. By contrast many feminist studies of technology have been recently heading in this direction. They include: Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge) New York and London, p. 1997; Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke University Press) Durham, NC, 1996; Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (Doubleday) New York, 1997.
9. By contrast many feminist studies of technology have been recently heading in this direction. They include: Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge) New York and London, p. 1997; Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke University Press) Durham, NC, 1996; Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (Doubleday) New York, 1997.
10. By contrast many feminist studies of technology have been recently heading in this direction. They include: Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ Feminism and Technoscience (Routledge) New York and London, p. 1997; Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke University Press) Durham, NC, 1996; Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (Doubleday) New York, 1997.
11. Pheng Chcah, 'Mattering', Diacritics, vol. 26, no. 1, Spring, 1996, p. 124.
12. See Ernesto Laclau, 'Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?', Emancipations (Verso Books) London, 1996; Ernesto Laclau, 'Subject of Politics, Politics of the Subject', Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 146-64.
13. See Ernesto Laclau, 'Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?', Emancipations (Verso Books) London, 1996; Ernesto Laclau, 'Subject of Politics, Politics of the Subject', Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 1995, pp. 146-64.
14. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 9.
15. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 252.
16. For instance, one must be either a man or a woman, or risk exclusion from sociality (through psychosis or failure to materialise as a subject). This imperative is predicated on materiality, since matter, and particularly the sexuate matter of human biology, is regarded as the necessary, irreducible, pre-discursive ground of sexed subjectivity.
17. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 29.
18. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 53.
19. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 54.
20. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 95.
21. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 52. The place or support of inscription can itself never be inscribed or figured as such because it is the condition under which forms and figurations materialise. Beyond the opposition between active form and passive matter, it is the domain within which that ideal opposition maintains itself. It is a site of 'linguistic impropriety' in which the apparent necessity of the delimitations and determinations of matter can be re-mapped as contingent violence (p. 53).
22. Hence, the distinction between form and matter is constituted rather than constitutive or regulative. The distinction between form and matter that allows the programming of contingency only comes into operation through a 'dissimulated citationality' (p. 13) which 'dematerializes' those bodies which do not support its force. This approach I think approximates very closely to those forgotten senses of contingency as bordering, touching, infecting and contamination that I mentioned at the outset.
23. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 53.
24. Exceptions to this would include Marx: see György Markus, 'Marx and the Problem of Technology', Language & Production, Appendix II (Reidel) Dordrecht, 1986, pp. 146-87.
25. Many such accounts introduce disjunctive chronological breaks between what the human was before technologisation and what it is becoming now. This certainty that we know what a human is or was should be questioned in the light of Butler's theory.
26. See Adrian Mackenzie, 'A Troubled Materiality: Masculinism and Computation', Discourse, vol. 18, no. 3, Spring, 1996, pp. 89-112.
27. Cf. John Law and Michel Callon, 'Agency and the Hybrid Collective', South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 94, no. 2, Spring, 1995, p. 481.
28. Cheah raises alimentation as a problem for Butler's politics from a different angle: that of the invisibility of hegemonies associated with food. Cheagh, 'Matterings', p. 120.
29. Butler, Bodies That Matter, pp. 53-4.
30. Media do not communicate events, they synthesise them for the use of mass audiences whose audiovisual attention-span correlates with economic exchange value. [T]echnicity . . . seizes the figure of the event in flight and figures it in instantancity'. Bernard Stiegler, La technique el le temps. 2. La desorientation (Galilée) Paris, 1996, p. 145.
31. In relation to living processes, the arrival of a transgenic cloned sheep like Dolly, represents another suspension of the rhythms of evolution through technological intervention.
32. Stiegler, La technique el le temps. 2. La désorientation, p. 167.
33. See Adrian Mackenzie, 'Undecidability: the History and Time of the Universal Turing Machine', Configurations, vol. 3, 1996, pp. 359-79.