G2G = tics & tags

http://people.hws.edu/dean/fem_tech.html
Jodi Dean

The question of this paper is the impact of technoculture on feminism. My basic premise is that the sense of the contemporary designated by terms like "the networked society," "the information age," "the digital era," and "technoculture" points to the post to postmodernity. More descriptively, this new economic-political-cultural formation, a formation I refer to by the terms "technoculture" and "cyberia," is characterized by the rise of networked communication as in the Internet, satellite broadcasting, and the global production and dissemination of motion pictures; by the consolidation of wealth in the hands of transnational corporations and the migration and immigration of people, technologies, and capital; by the rise of a consumerist entertainment culture and the corresponding production of sites of impoverishment, violence, starvation, and death. The ideology of this new formation links the following elements: speed, virtuality, hybridity, morphing, publicity, and interconnection.

In considering what this new politico-techno-cultural formation means for feminism, I emphasize two additional and interrelated characteristics of technoculture: the decline of partriarchy and the decline of symbolic efficacy. First, I agree with Manuel Castell's claim that technoculture is marked by the end of patriarchalism.(1) This does not mean that women are no longer victims of violence, oppression, and discrimination. On the contrary, there are still patriarchal religions and societies. Part of the renewed appeal of fundamentalism has been its promise of restored power and cohesion to the patriarchal family in the wake of the improved condition of women. Nevertheless, as Castell's overview of survey data from across the globe makes clear, the end of the twentieth century has witnessed "what amounts to a mass insurrection of women against their oppression throughout the world, albeit with different intensity depending on culture and country."(2) Some examples: fewer women marry and when they do they marry later and are more likely to divorce; more children are born to single women and there are more single-parent and single-member households; women make up an increasing percentage of the paid global workforce. (Globally, most women work in agriculture. The fastest rates of increase, however, are in technical and managerial categories. Castells attributes this to women's flexibility as workers and the flexibilization of work in the networked economy.) Finally, in part because of the combined impacts of feminist and sexual liberation movements, there has been a general delinking of marriage, family, heterosexuality, and sexual activity. Recent survey data in the United States, for example, reflects an increase in sexual experimentation, sex among teenagers, recreational sex, and non-marital sex. Overall, then, a key feature of technoculture is a decline in the significance of the patriarchal family; it's become one option among an increasingly diversified set of living and working relations.(3)

Second, technoculture is marked by another crucial development, what Slavoj Zizek calls the "decline of symbolic efficiency."(4) This is like a societal version of the uncertainty principle in physics: we can't be sure; a fundamental uncertainty characterizes people's relation to their world; there is always the possibility of something unexpected, some kind of chance or contingency--"I might get better;" "I might get mugged;" "I might get lucky." Meaning is multiple, indeterminate. That a symbol or identity works in one place, doesn't mean it works in another place. The arguments or authorities that might be persuasive in one context, may have no weight in another one, primarily because there are lots of different kinds of authorization. Further, the identity we perform in one setting might have little to do with the one we perform in another. There isn't an automatic connection or coordination among contexts. Importantly, most people in wired cultures experience this uncanny excess and lack of meaning with ever increasing frequency: we get conflicting information from nonstop multiple media; we more frequently come into contact with views and opinions different from our own; we don't know what to believe, whom to trust, or the criteria with which to decide questions of trust and belief. Strangeness, unassimilated weird things, is familiar; the everyday is uncanny.(5)

Thinking about technoculture in terms of the collapse of symbolic efficiency is important for feminists because it clicks on a key repercussion of post-patriarchy: the decline of the big Other. No master signifier or ultimate authority holds everything together. The rule of the phallus is over. Of course, the big Other never existed-but now everyone knows it.

Given feminist critiques of partriarchy, one might think that technoculture represents a feminist victory. But, as many no doubt suspect, if this is post patriarchy, something is definitely lacking. We haven't really gotten what we wanted. I want to think about why and, in the process, address the new challenges feminists face in the information age.

I'll begin by drawing from Zizek's account of three fathers to think through the collapse of symbolic efficacy. I'll then move to a consideration of feminist responses to networked communication as a specific case of a more general feminist response to technoculture. My argument will be that feminists have rightly identified fear, desire, and perfection as primary techocultural problematics, but that they don't go far enough because they haven't linked these problematics with the decline of symbolic efficiency. Third, I'll connect this theorization to more general currents in feminist theory, in particular the claim that feminism is multiple. I'll conclude by pointing to paths feminists might take through cyberia.

I Three Fathers

In The Ticklish Subject, Zizek revisits three Freudian accounts of symbolic authority as it is invested in the father: the standard Oedipal myth, the parricide in Totem and Taboo, and the willful, uncompromising God-the-father in Moses and Monotheism. These three accounts provide three different combinations of the father-function. First, the standard Oedipal myth unites the father as pacifying ego ideal or point of ideal identification with the father as ferocious superego or agent of prohibition. Second, in Totem and Taboo, the obscene father, the presymbolic noncastrated father, is killed. The dead-father returns in the name of symbolic authority. Finally, in Moses and Monotheism, the father who is killed embraces the logos, the unified rational structure of the universe. And with the death of this rational father what returns is God-the-father, the father of the uncompromising No!, the unforgiving father who prohibits everything.

The collapse of symbolic efficiency or the nonexistence of the big Other today can be thought of in terms of the absence of these three fathers. Beginning with God-the-father in Moses and Monotheism: because he provides a space of absolute willing, of pure decision, this God opens up the gap that establishes the domain of symbolic law as such. He represents the ultimate separation between the Symbolic and the Real because his word, his law, is grounded only in itself and accountable to nothing and no one. With his demise, everything is permitted. The repercussion of this is that with the demise of this father, there is no gap between the Symbolic and the Real. Nothing is certain. Everything is radically open, indistinguishable, like a great big soup, or like the World Wide Web. Zizek argues that the nonexistence of the big Other should be understood in terms of the demise of this father. For, it is the collapse of belief in a general structure of norms (a structure that never existed in the first place but nevertheless had actual effects) that has resulted in all sorts of ethical committees and rule books and risk assessments and mini-authorities that evaluate issues in the Real and use these evaluations to instruct behavior-even though everyone is already reflexively aware that these very assessments and evaluations may be faulty, tainted, or undermined by particular political or corporate interests. This account of the decline of symbolic efficiency can be supplemented by attention to the repercussions of the collapse of patriarchal authority in the other two instances. With the demise of the dead father of Totem and Taboo we have the return of the obscene father. On the one hand, this reappearance of the father of enjoyment smears symbolic authority with all sorts of obscene excesses. I think here of the kind of knowledge that US senators and judges have when they investigate pornography. It's hard to take them seriously, to see them as authorities rather than just as pathetic, dirty old men. They are simply despotic, authoritarian censors who want all the enjoyment for themselves. On the other hand, the return of the obscene father means that transgression is no longer possible. There is no symbolic order that demands complete sexual conformity. Of course, there are mini-orders and rules still in play in particular instances. But transgression simply isn't shocking. The television show "Friends" captures this in an episode where a male figure skater "comes out" as straight. The joke is that it is so normal and expected and fabulous for him to be gay that straightness would be a shock. The same holds true for drag-think RuPaul. Even S/M appears in mainstream contexts.

Finally, with the demise of the father as ego-ideal, the father emerges as "the humiliated father," the rival. He no longer bars us from the objects of desire; they are no longer his alone; now we, too, have access to it, can achieve it or have it. It's within our reach. The prohibitive norms formerly provided by the father as ego-ideal are thus replaced by imaginary ideals of success, fitness, achievement. Released from the authority of the father, we can achieve perfection. Zizek describes this in terms of a kind of "direct 'super-egoization' of the imaginary Ideal, caused by the lack of the proper symbolic Prohibition."(6) Our own goals and ideals, our own imaginative idiosyncracies, creativities, and delights come to confront us with a force of their own: my very personality is at stake in a drive to be unique. We might think here of a kind of compulsion in feminism, a drive to make wild claims, to be as radical as possible. What is now the case is that rather than having this sort of radicality have a contestatory or transgressive effect, it simply is part of the system of getting noticed, getting published; it plays in to the larger ideology of publicity in technoculture. It's now part of the market-Zizek gives the example of hackers and gamers who work for software companies; their play is their work. The very part of ourselves that was supposed to be the key to our autonomy, authenticity, or humanity, now looks very much like precisely that which binds us into global technoculture.

Tom Tykwer's 1998 film Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run) provides an account of the collapse of symbolic authority via the demise of the father in terms remarkably similar to Zizek's. The basic story of the film is that Lola has twenty minutes to save her boyfriend Manni from certain death. In so doing, Lola will prove the power of love, that love can do anything. Manni has lost 100, 000 DM and will be killed by a nasty gangster or mafia-guy if this guy finds out. Manni both blames Lola for this lost--because she was late picking him up he ended up taking the subway and losing the money there--and calls on her to save him. The rest of the movie consists of three alternative scenarios regarding what happens next. Now this overall structure itself suggests the collapse of symbolic authority. Why? Because no ending is complete. There is no real or authentic ending, just shifting parallel universes or alternative chains of causes and contingencies. Indeed, this very phenomena of parallel universes is appearing with growing frequency: from theoretical physics to movies like Groundhog Day, television shows like The X-Files, and even some conspiracy theories, plots, storylines, and accounts of actions have become delinked from single time-lines. No one account of time wins out or carries the day; there are always alternatives. As one of the film's epigraphs states: "After the game is before the game."

This general collapse of the big Other is reiterated in Lola Rennt's three scenarios. In each, Lola runs to her father, an executive at Deutsche Transfer Bank, for help. It should come as no surprise that in none does he actually help her. In the first scenario, when Lola arrives at the bank to ask her father for help, the security guard refers to her as a little princess come to see Big Daddy. But, of course, he is not the Big Daddy. When Lola enters his office, she interrupts a confrontation between her father and his mistress, who has just informed him that she's pregnant. Further, not only does her father refuse to give her any money, but as he throws her out of his office, he tells her that he isn't even her father, that her real father died before she was born. This scenario, then, suggests the return of the obscene father in the collapse of the big Other. With the father's authority smeared by obscenity to the point where he isn't a father at all, Lola is free to join Manni in robbing a store to get the money. And, little, inept authorities try to reemerge: from the guard in the store who helplessly confronts the robbery to the inadequate little cop who accidently shoots Lola. Her death is not even a tragedy: not only is it merely an accident, but the fact that there is another scenario, another universe or dimension, makes it hard to get worked up about.

In the second scenario, Lola's father is the impotent obverse of the father as ego-ideal, the humiliated father who emerges when symbolic authority disintegrates. This time, the father's mistress is pregnant, but by someone else. The father is now inept, emasculated, not really a father, just an impotent guy whose mistress is sleeping aound. The father's impotence frees up Lola to take control: so, when her father denies her the money, she takes him hostage. She's in control now, the perfect agent able to get things done and save Manni. But still she confronts the collapse of the big Other: no matter what she does, things don't work out, the world is ultimately senseless. For example, police surround the bank, but they are so inadequate that they let Lola go because they don't recognize her as the robber. And, even though Lola gets the money, Manni is killed. Again death is an accident: Manni is hit by an ambulance.

Finally, in the third scenario, Lola's father is killed in a car wreck. Lola doesn't even get to ask him for the money because he isn't there; he's already gone when she arrives at the bank. Here the nonexistence of the big Other, the demise of the father is the demise of the commanding God of the uncompromising No! In this scenario, the mistress-the sign of the father's knowledge of jouissance-doesn't even appear. In this world, all of Lola's actions are gambles. She has to make choices, but under completely unclear and undecideable circumstances. Lola's situation illustrates Zizek's point that, "far from being experienced as liberating, this compulsion to decide freely is experienced as an anxiety-provoking obscene gamble, a kind of ironic reversal of predestination: I am held accountable for decisions which I was forced to make without proper knowledge of the situation."(7) Lola's third world is ruled by chance: in fact, she gets the money for Manni by winning at roulette in a casino that she just happens upon. At the same time, a series of coincidences enables Manni to recover the money he originally lost. So they get the money, they even double it. But in this world of luck and chance there is no meaning, no struggle, no tragedy. In this context, that the whole endeavor was supposed to prove the power of love makes no sense; love itself is lost.

Of course, the collapse of patriarchal authority in Lola Rennt is linked to the impact of another force, of another, non-patriarchal figure of the big Other: money. Everything is set in motion by the need to get money. The father's failure is his failure to provide money. Lola's success is measured by her capacity to get money. The very strength of her love for Manni depends on money. This, too, illustrates Zizek point that "the spectral presence of Capital is the figure of the big Other which not only remains operative when all the traditional embodiments of the symbolic big Other disintegrate, but even directly causes this disintegration . . . today's subject is perhaps more than ever caught in an inexorable compulsion that effectively runs his life."(8)

To sum up, I've used Lola Rennt to make two points about technoculture as a post-patriarchal power formation: it's characterized by the collapse of symbolic efficacy, the decline of the big Other, first, and this collapse is linked to and reinforces the vigor of global capital, second. I now move to a consideration of feminist engagments with the Internet as a specific example of feminist responses to technoculture.

II Feminists in Real Life

In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Zizek recounts the joke about a painting called "Lenin in Warsaw."(9) The painting depicts Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, far from Warsaw, in fact, at home in Moscow and in bed with a Komsomol member. The joke is that Lenin isn't even in the picture; he's in Warsaw. The title refers to an absence. Of course, and here is a second meaning of the painting, Lenin is in the picture if we think of the picture as his fantasy. The picture represents Lenin's desire. Lenin is free to see to his business in Warsaw because someone else is taking care of his responsibilities at home. Lenin is relieved from having to perform sexually for his wife and this relief allows him to do his work.

I mention this joke because the heading for this section is "feminists in real life." The heading's double meaning gestures to the different ways feminists have theorized cyberia. Like Lenin, when it comes to cyberspace, feminists aren't even in the picture. Or, at least this is the way some feminist engagements with the Net begin. So, first we have the critical feminist version of cyberspace as a dangerous, lawless frontier.(10) Women and children are unprotected, easily falling prey to the pornographic fantasies of adolescent males overdosing on testosterone. As in the old mythos of the American west, the "civilizing" or "disciplining" of the new frontier is coded as feminine, as making everything safe for women and children.(11) The Net is full of pornography and profanity and all sorts of unreliable hackers, rapists, and thieves because feminists aren't there; they aren't in the picture.

Why aren't the feminists there? They've been blocked out, excluded. Feminists, the argument runs, have been denied access to technoculture by the continued impact of masculinist structures of power and privilege. Girls are taught to fear computers; boys are encouraged to "fall in love" with the machine through the seductions and stimulations of graphic, violent, addictive video games.(12) The computer industry keeps women in low pay, low status positions assembling chips and serving a masculine economy. What happens when women arrive in cyberspace? They are raped in chatrooms, interrupted, disregarded, exposed to graphic porn, and segregated into the sentimental banalities of "woman culture," an Oprah-world of sharing and shopping and swapping stories of diets and desire.

Given their exclusion from the Net, it makes sense that feminists are focusing on real life, on the continued material inequities that face women in their everyday lives. Thus, this first version of feminists in real life ends up treating the perceived absence of feminists on the Net as a virtue: feminists don't waste their time with virtuality, play, and mechanical toys. They have real problems of survival and equity to address.

A second feminist account of technoculture celebrates the play, desire, and multiplicity available on the Net.(13) Here, the real life of feminists is the cyberian imaginary. Like Lenin, their desire is represented. That is to say, the Net is a space where all feminist fantasies of liberation from the constraints of gender and of freedom to experiment with multiple identities are realized. The Web offers spaces for difference, where no one is limited by their bodies or by the presumptions of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Everyone has the opportunity to be and experience anything they like. On the Net, women can write the feminine in flows of bytes and bits that enfold into themselves. "Matrix," as Sadie Plant reminds us, comes from the Latin word for "womb."(14) The Net is a web of repetitions, a web of copies without an original and creations without a creator. It disembodies the "intuitive leaps and cross-connections once pathologized" as hysteria, reconfiguring them as creative non-linearity, as thinking outside the box.(15) Surely, the old stories of modernity no longer apply: subjectivity, truth, logic, and meaning have all become unmoored, or better, digitized in an ever flowing digital torrent.

Finally, there is a third way to think about cyberia and feminists in real life, namely, that feminists are sensibly incorporating new communication technologies into their lives. The powerful vision of cyberfeminists aware of the pitfalls of technophobia and technomania suggests a cautious, reconfiguring engagement with cyberspace. Much of this work draws attention to how women are using new technologies: they are actively creating websites, setting up businesses, searching for information.(16) Feminists are connecting, working the global networks. With the Internet, these feminists say, women can really have it all. They can realize themselves, share their experiences with other women, shop online, get the information they need about their health, and come across some top notch erotica without leaving the house. Like the second reading of "Lenin in Warsaw," the Net frees up feminists to do what they need to do in real life. So what if men and boys are enjoying tons of pornography: this may mean that the women involved with them are freed from time-consuming and exhausting sexual responsibilities and able to get some work done.

The three feminist responses that I've presented in stark, iconic terms, can be tagged as "fear," "desire," and "perfection." The first feminist response tends to concentrate on all those ways that new technologies are dangerous to women. To be sure, this concentration is part of a critique. Nevertheless, this critique has the unfortunate consequence of contributing to the representation of technologies and the Net as dangerous to women. Put somewhat differently, an emphasis on cyberian dangers participates in a gendering that links femininity to vulnerability in need of protection. Counter to the claims of the multiple, playful identities crowd, these fear-oriented accounts reiterate a kind of gender-polarity where women are technologically naive and clumsy and men are knowing and aggressive. Such a gendering, moreover, is easily deployable in support of new authorities. For example, arguments for censorship technologies and content authorities tend to rely on the claim that "harms to women and children" make their product, technology, or authority necessary.(17) At the same time, anxieties about sexual harassment and virtual rape in chatrooms support increased surveillance as well as an increase in the power of those behind the screens. I should add that there are also important feminist accounts of fear in technoculture that don't reiterate a stereotypic gender polarity. Zillah Eisenstein, for example, notes the fear of job loss that characterizes the global marketplace, a fear heightened by the elimination of social welfare provisions in countries like the United States and Britain.(18)

The second feminist response celebrates the multiplicity that networked communication enables. In so doing, it emphasizes the potential for the realization of desire outside restrictive patriarchal frameworks. Here the very binary of gender is refused: in cyberia not only can users engage in specific, disconnected, performances of gender, but they can present themselves as animals, robots, monsters, associations, and fictional characters of multiple, indeterminate gender. We're limited only by our imaginations. To be sure, in such a context, identity play is not necessarily transgressive-there isn't an authority to transgress. With the commercialization of the World Wide Web, moreover, the play of desire encouraged by multiplicity tends to be replaced by an ever increasing search for even momentary relief from the demands of consumer culture.

Put somewhat differently, might it not be possible that multiple subjectivities are morphing into consuming subjectivities, that desiring subjects are becoming conspiring subjects? Subjects freed from identifying attachments may nevertheless search for identities, finding them, however momentarily, in the ready-made identities of consumer-culture that promise them beauty and success, that hold out the markers of class and nobility or trendy bohemianism.(19) Why remain content with cyberian multiplicity if one can buy the products to put together different identities in real life? Similarly, desire on the Net has never been simply about one-handed typing or even voyeurism. No, networked desire has involved desires to violate the inviolate sovereignties of states and corporations, the desire to find and distribute previously classified information, the desire to produce and disseminate information and entertainment for oneself, without the mediating force of large corporations. Indeed, the promised freedom of networked communication has always emphasized the power of information in the hands of the people, as if secrecy remained in the 21st century the same key to power it was in the 18th.(20)

Finally, the third feminist response to technoculture feeds into demands for perfection.(21) It recognizes that women are part of a new globalized economy and not only wants to make sure that women get their share but also thinks that new technologies are the ways to do it. This reaches, of course, far beyond communication technologies that let women decide for themselves about their health, diets, families, and finances. Just as feminism extended to larger numbers of women the privileged disconnection between childbearing and child-rearing, so have reproductive technologies decoupled sex and reproduction. From abortion and the pill to artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, postmenopausal pregnancy, cloning, and even Viagra, women are becoming able to control aspects of their lives previously thought of as forces of nature, fate, or the divine.(22) Women can set up perfect reproductive schedules. We can have cosmetic surgery to perfect our bodies. We can, it sometimes seems, use the abundant information on the Net, consult the relevant surveys, and predict nearly perfectly the possible outcomes of any decision.

Of course, the fantasy of perfection has another side, a side that brings us back to fear and desire. Perfection as a goal is premised on an overriding sense of present inadequacy. Consequently, perfection's allure becomes all the greater not because new technologies make it possible to attain but because they demonstrate radically and persistently how far one is from the goal, how completely inadequate one is in facing the demands of the present. The demands are absolute, never-ending, ever increasing, ultimately unsatisfiable. So might not the fears stimulated by cyberia have less to do with pornography and stalkers than they do with fears of what we don't know, but should, fears rooted precisely in the new technologies themselves? The speed of networked communications, for example, gives many of us the sense of being forever behind, of forever lacking what everyone else has. The promise of information gives us the sense of being always uninformed, unsure, never quite certain that what we think we know hasn't been proven otherwise and that were we diligent enough we would have discovered our error. Our fears, then, are linked to an overwhelming doubt that can never be resolved. And this brings with it the risk that our desires may become desires for relief, desires for some acquisition or authority that can release us from the overwhelming multiplicity of options, possibilities, facts, and fantasies confronting us daily.

Again, I've deliberately overstated the feminist cases for fear, desire, and perfection. This is not because they aren't helpful. On the contrary, these cases accurately pinpoint some of the most pressing areas of feminist concern today. The politics of fear, desire, and perfection produce desperate, suspicious, unstable subjectivities ever increasing in their vulnerability, dependence, and longing for domination. They produce the subjectivities that technoculture needs, the subjectivities that point and click and search and link and cruise and consume. Far from the liberated subjects promised by the sexual revolution or the free citizens longed for in the velvet revolution, we have the paradoxical situation of subjects dependent on risk analyses, opinion polls, top-ten lists such that they are wired into the Nets even as information barely passes through them. So what concerns me is that these three cases don't go far enough. They don't give us a sense as to why exactly fear, desire, and perfection present themselves as such obvious sorts of concerns today. In stopping too soon, these cases risk treating as patriarchal what should be understood in terms of post-patriarchy. And, at the same time, they risk not noticing exactly how far the changes they've identified extend.

As I see it, the three feminist responses to technoculture point to the effects of the demise of symbolic efficiency, the fact that the big Other doesn't exist. If we return to the joke, it might be the case that rather than viewing feminists as Lenin, we should think of them as Krupskaya and as very much in the picture. What's missing, then, is Lenin, the big Other who isn't there at all. Feminists are free to do what they want, to express and act out their desires. Yet, they risk reinstating some kind of little brother, little authorities whose demands are seductive, unfulfillable, unrelenting, and inescapable-in part because they seem to be giving us what we want. Feminists

may well be in bed with this simulacra of the big Other, unable to tell the difference or unaware that the big Other is even gone.

III Life in Real Feminists

I'll explain what's at stake here by linking feminist responses to technoculture to current feminist orthodoxy. Few would deny today that feminism is not a monolithic movement based on a common understanding of feminist practices or concerns. On the contrary, feminism is represented today in terms of multiplicity. There are all sorts of different feminisms, some-but not all-of which claim identity as an important locus of feminist politics. Feminists work in various organizations, ally through various networks, coalesce with various other groups. As a consequence of feminists' embrace of multiplicity, many tend to be critical not simply of essentialism but of exclusionary reassertions of the priority of monolithic definitions of feminism, on the one hand, and of gender as the primary focus of feminist struggle and analysis, on the other. Efforts to define feminism and to say that gender is the key concept within this definition seem attempts to replace the hard-won multiplicity of feminisms with yet another exclusive category.

This is not to say that feminism is so multiple that it's completely indeterminate. Most American feminists tend to be critical of fundamentalist organizations such as the Promise Keepers. They are pro-choice. They are skeptical about neo-conservative redeployments of notions that "the personal is political." They reject the racism and anti-Semitism of the militia movement and join in anti-racist and anti-homophobic struggles. But, of course, most American liberals and what passes for an American left share these concerns. Even conservatives distance themselves from the militia movement. Moreover, the idea that people should be all that they can be, unhindered by their gender, sexuality, race, and class has become inscribed in law and has emerged as a daily part of televisual life-it's the very mantra of the Internet, "leaving the meat." Women on television series are doctors, lawyers, lesbians, cops, single parents, cab drivers, promiscuous, successful, and criminal. Women in commercials are multi-hued, multi-aged, and multi-aged-advertisers know that many viewers know not to trust the Man. My point is that while feminism may not be totally indeterminate, in its current "multiple feminisms" version it isn't radical.

In fact, this idea of multiple feminisms is barely distinguishable from the version of multiculturalism espoused by global capital. It suggests a kind of flowing multiplicity of happy, interlinked cultures, communicating and trading in a global network. Again, this is not to say that feminists don't criticism globalization. Many do. My point is that feminism does not provide a position from which such a general critique can be raised.

I fully acknowlege that this claim isn't particularly innovative or outageous. As Chandra Mohanty writes, "The term feminism is itself questioned by many third world women. Feminist movements have been challenged on the grounds of cultural imperialism, and of shortsightedness in defining the meaning of gender in terms of middle-class, white experiences, and in terms of interal racism, classicism, and homophobia. All of these factors, as well as the falsely homogeneous representation of the movement by the media, have led to a very real suspicion of 'feminism' as productive ground for struggle."(23) Given the critical stance toward feminism raised by many women, it shouldn't be surprising that feminism doesn't provide a position from which a general critique of technoculture can be raised. Additionally, one should not forget that there are of course feminists who are not so interested in criticizing technoculture, the various kinds of cyber chicks, riot grrls, and power feminists who want to claim the successes of netculture and global capital for women.

Oddly, the "power feminists" may well be more feminist than the multiplicity feminists. By power feminists, I have in mind a version of media-friendly, pro-capitalist, pro-sex feminism that was particularly strong in the US in the mid-nineties and is associated with people like Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, and Camille Paglia.(24) In claiming a piece of the economic pie for women, these power feminists appeal to what has always been feminism's radical core, namely, women's power. In fact, in a weird sort of way what has always been most threatening to feminism are the blatant cries for women's power that reveal that feminism is about more than care, equality, and ending oppression. Feminism is a bid for women's power, an effort to claim, take, use, construct, access, and embody power for and through women. This is one of the reasons that it was difficult for white American feminists to hear and acknowledge the issues raised by African-American feminists and womanists. By adding "race" to the analysis, women of color seemed to be undermining a claim for women's power by championing alliances with men in an effort to combat racism. In a different direction, lesbians and radical feminists were threatening because they openly argued for women's power and let ideas of fairness and equality fall by the wayside. Similarly, the S/M and pro-porn side of the feminist sex wars were thought dangerous not because they didn't have politically correct non-dominant sex and not because they claimed desire for women. What made them dangerous was that they didn't cloak a claim for women's power in a touchy-feely rhetoric of caring and connection. The pro-media, pro-capital strand of popular feminism in the United States, continues in this tradition: its interests are not in organizing the poor, uniting with other oppressed groups, or equalizing relations between men and women. Its interests are in power and how to help women get it. Naomi Wolf describes learning about the power of money, "If you are using them to further positive goals, it is really fun to use power, to use money . . . Not only was it permissible to learn to ask for more, always more, but it was a political act."(25) Of course, in this strand power remains untheorized, interchangeable with money, economic opportunity, and financial success. And this means that subjectivity is untheorized as well. In self-help style analyses like Naomi Wolf's, for example, women are urged to choose power, pretty much simply to get over themselves and just be powerful.

To return to multiple feminisms: it is virtually indistinguishable from the view of multiculturalism used to win mindshare for global capital. To this extent, the very emphasis on multiplicity services globalization-by providing another locus of demographic thinking, by linking specific identities to specific consumeristic choices, and by participating in a politics of representational inclusion that emphasizes publicity, visibility, and revelation with little regard for what happens next. At the same time, because of the ways it blurs into corporate multiculturalism, this plural feminism displaces attention from feminism's radical core-claiming power for women.

Indeed, the problem runs even deeper. What if anything holds multiple feminisms together if not a refusal to speak for women? In fact, this refusal is good; it's held up as the ideal, the model. The strength of multiple feminisms comes from its fluidity and flexibility; its capacity to shift and lack of a center. To me, this sounds a lot like the rhetoric that supports the Internet, new computers, and global corporate capitalism capital itself.

Feminist multiplicity is structured around a lack, around that which exceeds it, that which can never be brought within it. Let me give an example here: I have been increasingly frustrated by the criticisms I both receive and level at other feminists, criticisms that point to failures to include the voices of specific groups of women, criticisms that ask things like "how would race complicate your analysis?" These criticisms are frustrating not because they are wrong, but because they are right. They always point to gaps that can never be filled, to the excesses and remainders in any conceptualization. And this isn't just about race-it appears with respect to mothering, sexuality, work, desire, to theorization itself. Uma Narayan deals with similar gaps in the context of accusations of being overly-Western and not-nationalist, not cultural, not real Indian enough.(26) Multiple feminisms is structured through such gaps. In Zizek's words, "the condition of impossibility of realizing the Goal is simultaneously its condition of possibility"(27) As feminists today, we can never be multiple enough.

Too often feminist multiplicity is treated as a critical weapon that demands that these very constitutive gaps be filled in. That there are multiple feminisms is never enough; each particular kind of feminism is itself supposed to be multiple, to be, ultimately, as open and indeterminate as the more general discourse. How often are specific feminist analyses attacked for not being sufficiently multiple, as if multiplicity referred to the terms for each individual analysis rather than the creative clashes and combinations that result from differing perspectives? The response to the hegemony of multiple feminisms, moreover, has been the historicist turn away from general claims. It's safer to study very, very specific things, to become an expert on particular temporal/cultural events. The irony is that these authoritative little expert analyses don't necessarily contribute to interconnective multiplicity. Instead, they are often used as trumps and weapons, self-sufficient islands rather than links in an integrative network. They protect those who write as well as those who wield them. (What I'm describing here is linked to what others have attacked as academia's star system). They provide the information that the information age tells us we need, that the information age has convinced us is the key to democratic freedom and cultural, political, and economic power. The little authorities, then, participate in the drive to fill the very gaps that are supposed to sustain feminist multiplicity.

This demand for us to be more than we can be, for us to fill in a structurally necessary gap without remainder, is the same demand placed on us by global technoculture. In fact, the very force, the very antagonism of global capital in its informational mode of development, is what is excluded from multiple feminisms.(28) This exclusion is its condition of impossible possibility. I think this is true on a very simple level: technological developments bring people from all over the world into contact with each other. Some of us fly, use the Internet, and watch television. Others of us work in the industries that produce these technologies or that provide the even more fundamental supports that enable technological production. Networked media and the widespread circulation of information increase feminist awareness of the vast differences in women's experiences and opportunities and this in a very "in-your-face," immediate sort of way. But what happens is that feminists tend to worry about the multiplicity and focus on the content rather than on the means through which this content is circulated and produced: global capitalist technoculture. The emphasis is on different sites instead of on the ways that flows of transnational capital flows and global corporations deploy differences in interest and location to maintain their power. Feminists try to include everything in their analyses, but too often the emphases on women's different cultural, historical, national, and class experiences fragments into an embrace of heterogeneity that cannot and will not acknowledge the underlying conditions of global corporate technoculture.(29) So weirdly, if we return to the joke about feminists in real life, it's not that feminists are left out of cyberia, it's that cyberia, the fundamental challenges of technoculture, seems left out of feminism!

Mohanty, for example, urges "an analysis of the employment of third world women workers by multinational capital in terms of ideological constructions of race, gender, and sexuality."(30) This is important. But what is also important is an analysis of multinational capital in terms of the employment of third world women, an analysis that focuses on multinational capital. Such an analysis would highlight the spaces, genders, demands, fears, and desires produced by global capital, the subjectivities it requires. Global capital is not simply one site or one issue or part of a larger analysis; in contemporary technoculture it is the network in which everything else is situated. Similarly, Mohanty, like others, urges attention to the multiple voices of women as subjects.(31) Not only does this invocation of women's subject position tend to overlook the post-patriarchal changes in subjectivity, but it also reasserts the importance of publicity, of going public, as the ideology of the information age: everyone should speak for herself, perhaps on her own web page, on by writing letters to the editor, or by going on the radio.(32) Technoculture makes the fantasy of multiple speaking subjects seems so realizable, that we forget that it's still a fantasy, and one with dangerous potential.

Finally, the multiple feminisms line, like the feminist critiques of networked technology and, I should add, the power feminists, fails to take seriously the fundamental excess of meaning that characterizes the present. This is odd because really the multiple feminisms line is about the ways that women don't signify similarly, how meanings are fluid, unstable, unpredictable. In many ways, then, the multiple feminisms line is a productive and appropriate response to the end of patriarchy, to the decline of symbolic authority associated with the Name-of-the-Father. But, for the most part, this nonexistence of the big Other isn't dealt with in any significant degree.(33) So, again, feminists emphasize multiplicity, and then reinvoke little authorities as if there were a coherent, stable discourse. Or, they refer to women's choices, as if global technoculture hadn't completely restructured the conditions under which choices are made even as the demands of post-patriarchal subjectivity compel us to choose.

This is where the feminist critiques of the Internet are particularly helpful. They point to the ways that the collapse of the big Other, the new post-patriarchal disorder, has been configured to the benefit of the global capital. Fear, desire, and perfection are vital characteristics for reproduction of cyberian subjectivities. And these characteristics remain, of course, inflected by gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality even as they are part of technocultural reconfigurations of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Fear, desire, and perfection are vehicles for our interpellation into the new world order. Zizek asks, "Why does the decline of paternal authority and fixed social and gender roles generate new anxieties, instead of opening up a Brave New World of individuals engaged in the creative 'care of the Self' and enjoying the perpetual process of shifting and reshaping their fluid multiple identities?"(34) The answer, as he suggests, involves the demands of and for perpetual, accelerating change associated with the information age, on the one hand, and the effects of these demands on post patriarchal subjects. We are overwhelmed by conflict, choice, and possibility. We know that there are alternatives, alternative ways of thinking, alternative forms of assessment, alternative lifestyle arrangements. Everything, it seems, has to be negotiated, reflected upon. We are forced to choose even though we have no criteria for choice. And, we are forced to choose even as we are becoming constructed as subjects who can no longer trust, who simply have to find out and know for ourselves.

IV Link, Feminists, Link

To conclude, I've been reflecting on the implications of technoculture for feminism. On the one hand, we face the collapse of symbolic efficiency, the demise of the big Other such that everything is open, uncertain, and undecideable. We are enjoined to reflect, and we can do that. But under these conditions, it doesn't seem to get us anywhere, in fact it makes things worse, contributing to the inexorable logic of information age publicity. On the other, we face the globalizing force of the capitalist information economy, a force that, in the age of networked media and communications, contributes to, furthers, and depends on the collapse of the big Other to interpellate new subjectivies through fear, desire, and perfection. Feminist multiplicity recognizes the former, the multiple play of meanings and collapse of symbolic efficiency, while, paradoxically, the power feminists recognize the latter. Multiple feminisms seems unable to grapple with the perhaps unescapable force of global technoculture because it is structured around the excesses and lack that can never be brought together (the same excesses and lacks upon which technoculture relies and which it furthers). At the same time, the power feminists embrace globalization, urge women to use new technologies, start companies, get publicity, but they ignore the impact of the collapse of the big Other on subjectivity.

Now, a good Zizekian or Lacanian solution to this is to "traverse the fantasy." Honestly, I'm rarely sure what this means, especially with regard to politics. I know it has something to do with the "act"-as I think we all do. That is, no one disagrees that political action is important, vital, necessary. The question is what act? And this I can't answer. Nonetheless, it seems that the fantasy to be traversed here involves the two versions of multiple and power feminism. A traversal might then involve understanding the ways that technoculture limits and produces opportunities for and fantasies of women's power, and how these fantasies and opportunities are implicated in the constitution of subjectivies oriented around fear, desire, and perfection. What might it mean to take the ideal of women's power at its word? Surely the potentials for this are far more radical than power feminists like Naomi Wolf suggest-wouldn't there have to be some kind of major restructuring of the global information economy (something British socialist feminists argued decades ago)? Traversing the fantasy might also entail thinking through multiplicity in terms of the decline of symbolic efficiency and the implications of this in how little authorities appeal to our fears, desires, and fantasies of perfection. If multiplicity reinforces the demands, interests, and ideology of technoculture and unity is a false, dangerous, impossible alternative, what are we left with? Does a critical link to global capitalist technoculture suggest another option? I think it does and so I want to end by suggesting a few guidelines or paths that feminists might take as we make our way through cyberia, these new conditions of technoculture.

* Ask how gender is produced to service the information economy. In so doing, be attentive to the ways that patriarchal images and norms have been reconfigured in a guise that treats them now as products of a free choice. Understand that this sense of choice is ideological and that we may be seduced by the desire for little authorities, for the relief promised by new rules and old rules in new guises.
* Ask how subversion, innovation, and gender trouble are reconfigured as the spectacles that drive entertainment culture and hence service the information economy. In so doing, be attentive to importance of avoiding reauthorizing the little censors who want to claim enjoyment for themselves.
* Treat multiple feminisms as strengths, using the gaps not to discipline feminists and feminism but to stimulate the growth of networks of connection and exchange.(35) In so doing, be attentive to possibilities for multi-front attacks on global capital. Feminist multiplicity is particularly useful here. Avoid thinking that global capital must be confronted as and by totalizing unities; it functions through networks, through shifting and non-localizing flows of capital, access, influence, DNA, and opportunity. We can also draw on networks--as cyberfeminists and transnational activists are already demonstrating.(36)
* Take the system at its word. That is, reject irony and parody as modes already reincorporated in networked advertising and media, and take completely seriously the ideological claims of the information age-access, speed, virtuality, freedom, multiplicity, prosperity, publicity. In so doing, push at each so that their realization is tranformed in the direction of reconfigurations of power that benefit women rather than multinational corporations and global entertainment networks.
* Finally, animate a feminist imaginery. I'm inspired here by Drucilla Cornell's evocation of an imaginary domain of freedom and connection, on the one hand, and Rosi Braidotti's gesture to feminist cyberpunk and science-fiction, on the other.(37) Braidotti's gesture has particular appeal in that it reminds us of the very real impact that cyberpunk literature is having on the configuration of technoculture. Much of the imagery and language of writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson reappears in the films, magazines, browers, and websites that link together to produce contemporary experiences of cyberspace. What if, like in Lola Rennt, we integrate these animated portions of our imaginations and desires into fantasies of action, freedom, and opportunity? It could inspire us with a sense of hope, humor, and bemusement as it takes the edge of the demand for perfection, makes fun of our fears, and restores the dream in our desires.

Notes

This paper was presented as a keynote address at the conference Feminism 2000, Centre for Women's and Gender Research, University of Bergen, Norway, April 28-29, 2000. I'm indebted to Lee Quinby for her careful readings and critical suggestions. Thanks also to Van Zimmerman and Judith Grant.

1. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997) ch. 4.

2. Castells, 135.

3. Zillah Eisenstein acknowledges these changes while nevertheless asserting the continuation of partriarchy. Referring to "the process by which capitalist technologies unsettle established forms of patriarchy in favor of more modern ones," she writes: "Global capital and its technologies begin to undo some of very power relations it depends on even as it repositions these racialized patriarchal relations in postmodern form," global obscenities (New York: New York University Press, 1998) 138.

4. Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999) 322.

5. I make this argument in Aliens in America: Conspiracy Culture from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

6. Zizek, 368.

7. Zizek, 337-338.

8. Zizek, 354.

9. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).

10. For an interesting account of gender in the construction of the Internet via the spatial metaphor of "frontier," see Laura Miller, "Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier," in Resisting the Virtual Life, eds. James Brook and Iain A. Boal (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995) 49-58.

11. I owe this point to Van Zimmerman.

12. See, for example, Dale Spender, Nattering on the Net (North Melbourne, Australia: Spinifex Press, 1995).

13. See, for example, Alluquère Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996).

14. Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones (New York: Doubleday, 1997) 59.

15. Plant, 173.

16. See, for examples, the contributions to Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, eds. Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert(London: Routledge, 1997).

17. See my argument in "Virtual Fears," Signs 24, 4 (Summer 1999) 1069-1078.

18. Eisenstein, 117.

19. See Rhonda Lierberman's fascinating account of the "abject consumer desire" that "thrives in the dislocation between wanting to be recognized for what your represent (that is, through identification with your commodity signifer) and wanting to be recognized for what you 'are,'" "Shopping Disorders," in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 253.

20. For a critical account of the dynamic of secrecy and publicity see my Publicity's Secret (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

21. I draw heavily here from Lee Quinby's discussion of "programmed perfection" in Millennial Seduction: A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) esp. ch. 7.

22. Lee Quinby analyses the connections between virtuality and perfectionism in "Virile-Reality" From Armageddon to Viagra," Signs 24, 4 (Summer 1999) 1079-1088.

23. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism," in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991) 7.

24. For analyses of the "victim/power" views of feminism popular in American media in the early and mid 1990s, see the contributions to "Bad Girls"/"Good Girls:" Women, Sex, and Power in the Nineties, eds. Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996).

25. Naomi Wolf, Fire with Fire (New York: Random House, 1993) 242-243.

26. Uma Narayan, "Contesting Cultures: 'Westernization,' Respect for Cultures, and Third-World Feminists," in The Second Wave, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997) 396-414.

27. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997) 129.

28. The term "capital in its informational mode of development" comes from Castells. For a clarifying analysis of Castells, see Simon Bromley, "The space of flows and timeless time: Manuel Castells's The Information Age," Radical Philosophy 97 (September/October 1999) 6-17. Wendy Brown discusses the implications of the under theorization of class for identity politics in States of Injury (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

29. My thinking here is influenced by Arif Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," in Dangerous Liasons, eds.Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 501-528.

30. Mohanty, 30.

31. See the critique of this position by Sara Suleri "Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition," in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) 244-256.

32. For a discussion of publicity as information age ideology see my "Making (It) Public," Constellations 6, 2 (June 1999) 157-166.

33. Important exceptions here include Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1994) and Juiliet Flower MacCannell, The Hysteric's Guide to the Future Female Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

34. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, 341.

35. Donna Haraway points to a similar ideal in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991).

36. For a transnational perspective see Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, eds., Scattered Hegemonies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

37. Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Rosi Braidotti, "Cyberfeminism with a Difference," in Feminisms, eds. Sandra Kemp and Judith Squires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 520-529.