Passing: toward nomadic feminism
Sommary
di Anna Camaiti Hostert
On one side, the most frequent position of women towards technology has been that of the refusal to tolerate the male imagery of the continuation between Women and Nature and excluding from this type of relation the tekne problem which certainly pertains to philosophy, and partially even to that of some feminist thoughts among which idea of differences which opposingly sees technology like an intrusion of the single feminine body. Adriana Cavavero wrote in the latest edition of DWF: "Technology and the technological manipulation of all, to the infinite multiplication of bodies and to the unspeakable bios experience of each of us: that is what history wants to celebrate in a type of eternity or of catastrophism..... I believe in a type of transit: this technology, at present imperative, is not the latest horizon of humanity and of history: it can be crossed, not towards any direction, but by setting resistance points against its total victory. The single body is at a political point, a point of resistance. That is what I want to oppose in technological invasion. I consider my body as an inviolable limit(1). On the other hand the memory and origin problem is tied to that of feminine identity in relation to language. The female gender cannot claim memory because it has never been a protagonist, so it did not even learn the art of treasuring up in order to represent and in the lag always passing between perception and verbalisation it has lived in a double alienation, in an attempt to overcome that lag and to use a word in which it has always been excluded. In order to memorise there must be a past. But how can one have this if there has never been an authority in witnessing? Who has ever built subjectivity? This is the actual paradox: are women perhaps advantaged because of the lack of memory now, when the crisis of reason, the crisis of the subject, the powerful eruption of new technology, the acknowledged structures, the individual and collective learning and memorising procedures create a situation where the physical being in a spatial and temporal sense is subject to a "mutation"? Or are they perhaps condemned to repeat the errors of the former? What happens to that feminist thought that tried to build an identity on sexual difference in a world where nature does not exist anymore, where bodies multiply and one can play with the difference of "gender" and take sexual identity as one likes? Doesn't one risk in proposing solutions that arrive "late"? Precisely on this idea of lag I would like to pause to renegotiate it as central to the history of modernity, the position, or better still, the non- position of those who, like women, did not have the opportunity to create their own subjectivity and who try to understand who they are in the contemporaneous reality. The lag in fact represents the caesura of the narrative of modernity that as De Certeau says, describes the non space from which all the historiographical operations start, the "lag" that all the histories must meet to have a beginning. This idea of "time lag" is central in the book The Location of Culture by Hommi Bhabba. The author in particular refers to the problem of blacks and of the post-colonial space, but however his considerations are applicable even to women as subjects who appear on the scene in a story made by others. The conception of "time lag" presents a criticism of Foucault's spatial analytics of modernity. Bhabba writes: "The lag is the structure of difference and of division in the debate on modernity which changes it into a performing process. At that point, each repetition of the signal of modernity is different, specific to the historical and cultural conditions of the enunciation...(2). Bhabba believes that the issue of cultural differences cannot be eliminated easily as racism. The presence of those who were not there, remains the presence of an absence which must sign the time of modernity and which must represent in everyday life the existence of those who survived the nightmare of absence, which must renegotiate the cultural category, without sclerosis or traditional resistance. Today technology, as explained by Howard "heingold in his book The Virtual Community, encourages, in MUDs for example, to falsify sexual identity even more. The majority of members are men, some of whom love to describe themselves as women(3). The phenomenon is growing as are those episodes of sexual molestment against women who are a part of this virtual community. Does this way intend an equal technology for men and women? In a recent research in Newsweek magazine, they conclude that men tend to be more charmed and seduced by technology than women who, on the contrary, see it as a practical utility. Men see machinery like an extension of their own physical power, women like elements capable of satisfying their needs and desires. Even in games, (that in most cases are programmed by men, even if the first computer programmer was a woman by the name of Ada Lovelace in mid 1800) women, unlike men, prefer non linear games with more than one solution, they don't enjoy seeing characters dying on the screen and prefer to work in groups(4). Is it therefore perhaps true that in this era of reconstructing knowledge models, has women as protagonists who establish a new symbolical universe and create cultural structure with the help of machinery? What we are crossing is a mutation epoch and there are all the conditions to make it so. But this current painful transformation is accompanied by the destruction of much security and certainty which has lasted around a thousand years and parallelly by a reterritorialization of ethnic-racial-religious identity matrix as which mean serious danger. The need of identity, of common origins, of the mark that differentiates from the other, appear obsessively today. "All that recalls the pure will of pureness, whether sexual, ethnic, corporal, intellectual or racial "cleansing" is a new form of cultural fascism tied to a nostalgic defence of a pure reference that never existed and to a frantic fear of a dirty world. Of course it is this dirtiness that the "last sex" wants to watch over, as Arthur and Marylouise Crocker have explained in the article which opens the collective thoughts of their volume(5). In this book, whose cover depicts a very sexy woman, beside it written "men are stupid; I know because I was one of them", the bodies, mostly feminine, in their tales, want to be freed from their burden. Then there are reports of women with problems of obesity, terrorised by the fear of violence, bodies which have changed sex, bodies mediated by technology, reports on sado-masochistic practice etc. We certainly do not want to abandon the importance of the body and return to the platonic body-mind division. Rather the opposite. We simply want to embrace a concept of the body not as an element of resistance, but of ductility. To the last sex pertain all those that are not frightened by the possibility of crossing the closed world of purely lined sexuality. The idea of abandoning the cult of "gender" that criticises every masculine appropriation of the feminine body is the starting point from where both authors move towards a vision that puts aside the origin problem and faces the sex genders thanks to the technological acquisitions, producing a class of "outlaw bodies", which corresponds to a new subversive power of technological production. What the members of the last sex have in common are three things: the refusal of pre- constructed categories, a courageous insistence in political engagement, that which privileges ambivalence categories, irony and paradox, and a common refusal of each single position or reference to a fixed stop point. Rafts of inter-sexual states, state of inter- sexuality, such as virtual sex which has been freed from violence of sacrifice. Certainly we mustn't forget the bursting of feminine desires which have contributed in putting in a critical position strong masculine subjectivity, and its powerful identity, the idea of reason on which it found its basis from Plato on. This has produced uneasiness, and sufferance, it has generated dangerous aggregations of machismo and violence against women, but has also produced theories based on a traditionally feminine categories: weakness, tenderness and sweetness, notwithstanding this recognition never came from those who appropriated from these (read, for example, weak thought). With the increase of violence, there are women like Dianne Chisolm who answer by suggesting a symbolical revolution which would not even spare violence(6). A symbolical anti-violence action as Wittig suggests, a vanguard armed with a political semeiology, which would work at a language/manifest, language/action level that transforms and go down in history. A vanguard that would concretely investigate the possibility of biogenetics, of biotechniques and all fields of technology, and which would cease to be "phobic with respect to this field of knowledge because it is crucial that women are involved in investigating, exploring and giving form to future technological realities"(7). Acker proposes an Amazon guerrilla fighter model, a nomadic vanguard which would oppose attempts of extending authority and would surprisingly attack rapidly. Les Guerilleres by Monique Wittig(8), rather like the T.A.Z. group(9), ambush and abandon the ground with the same poetic deployment of violence which Fanon vindicates for the colonised people(10). But Wittig's guerrilla fighters do not use organised or "at random" violence like T.A.Z., but ritual fantasy, the theatre, ballet as a strong strategy for mobilising an aggressive front. For them it is not the violence of the oppressor but their own violence which they recover and incorporate in a physical and lyrical culture provoking a cultural crisis and a revolution. The recovery of the humorous ironic dimension of the revolution represents, as for T.A.Z., the new. The importance of the technological and artistic elements are central in the formulation in these two vanguards. Certainly we are not here to repropose any revolution which, as Hakim Bey wrote, from tocsin became toxin (that is from an alarm-bell it became toxin) and where it is difficult to escape the nightmare of the state. The idea is to use technology as a form of counter-power, not in the sense of a lasting organisation of groups, but, as proposed by Bey, as a means of counter Net or Web that the T.A.Z use in conformity with a disappearing tactic. To act immediately and quickly in computer "pirating" guarantees a democratic structure of the information by means of the counter Net and stretches the exchange of information through the Web which joins others with others and becomes a weapon of democracy. And immediately after disappears. "Why confront the power when in any case it has lost its meaning and becomes only a pure simulation?"(11).I like the idea that T.A.Z. should represent a possible alternative to the diffusion of a structured information and should contrast the trend of art as goods. The idea that they would represent the only possible time and place of the artistic happening as pure pleasure of creative play, where mediation disappears, is less convincing. This is not because I am a fanatic on mediation, but because I don't believe disappearance, invisibility, like Bey theorises, is the solution to the problem. I actually don't believe the answer to the problems of technological democracy to be only descriptive nor to come the Orwellian idea of Panopticon according to which the purpose is that of not being seen. Huxley got closer to this problem (Neil Postmann's book is recommended reading(12)), but even then I have my rights about the catastrophism and moralism which can be found. Although the evolution of the global village is "out of control" the solution, as explained by Brzezinski, is certainly not in the moral imperatives of the Kantian memoir, from which they start, but only in overcoming them. Certainly the idea of playing with technology makes me foresee the limits, not in function of the resistance aspects, but in out of position tactic. Laurie Anderson, the "American Multimediatrix", as Pamela McCorduck(13) defines her, has always played with technology by altering her voice through a Vocoder, and with a pad in her mouth producing unusual vibrations through connections from parts of her body to the microphone. "In identifying herself with the machine Anderson relieves the conventional anxiety of the automated robot which exhibits its electronic construction. The space in her music is not a metaphoric concept, but instead the place for many types of struggles. It insists on the body and is, at the same time, electronically saturated not on the neutral body which was erased in the theory of music, but the problematical female body that has traditionally been the place of the show"(14).To balance up these tensions Anderson takes on an androgynous role through playing with the stereotypes of sexuality. The body is no longer unbreakable and sacred and the technology apart from becoming those "15 million watts required to tone music" is - in Anderson's words - the fire where we gather to tell our tales. There is a type of attraction to light and to this type of power which is hot and destructive"(15). Anderson puts into practice two essential elements for post structuralist feminist critics: she deconstructs the tradition when necessary, but also tends to imagine new social realities, in accordance with the celebration of eroticism which does not necessarily restrict the woman as sexual object, but instead celebrates the unity of the mind and of the body, in developing new forms of pleasure and eroticism. Teresa De Lauretis writes: The "in and out" movement is a kind of ideological representation which I propose to characterise the subject of feminism, it is a back and forth movement between the representation of the type and that which representation leaves out or more precisely makes irrepresentable... therefore living in both types of space at the same time and living the contradiction which I suggested, is the condition of feminism here and now: the tension of something that tugs in two opposite directions - the critical negativity of its theory and the affirmative positivity of its politics - is the historical condition of the existence of feminism and its theoretical conditions of possibility"(16). The work of Laurie Anderson has continually put this solution into practice. The term "passing" is tightly tied to a racial context. It actually means, for a black, when his physical appearance allows him, to want to be passed as a white and this can be considered as something, at least from the 60's thereon, which is not part of the furnishing of Political Correctness. It was actually judged as a betrayal of their own origins and their own race. "Passing", published for the first time in 1929 and written by Nella Larsen, is the story of two black friends, of their diverse destinies and of their relationship(17). One of them, Clare, who without ever confessing of her origins, is married to a white racist who hates blacks, thus "she passes"; the other, Irene, marries a prosperous black doctor, passing from the ghettos of Chicago to that of Harlem. In this long story the interesting part is that notwithstanding Irene's happiness with her blackness, and her condemnation of those who deny their own origins, she is attracted to her friend who represents the other side of herself. What attracts her to this person whom she scorns profoundly, because she has distanced herself from her own origins? There is that curiosity to know what signifies that choice: since it represents "a moment of rupture with all that is familiar and friendly to risk entering another environment not wholly strange, may be, but certainly not entirely amiable. It is ridiculous concerns this problem of passing causes. We disapprove of it and at the same time we forgive it. It provokes our disdain but also our admiration. We reject it with a strange type of repulsion but we protect it"(18). There is an attraction towards a type of ambivalence which is a form of subjection, but even of counter-power which, as Irene's husband reminds her is only a one way road since it is only possible for blacks. Therefore it is a way to disguise, to infiltrate without being discovered. The choice of a secure place to which to return, the race, the marriage even if unsteady is that preferred by Irene who doesn't want to confront herself. Of course, for that age, Clare must die, and Irene remains a confused for the rest of her life, and is no longer the same after the death of her friend. I would like to start from the primitive context of the word "passing" and from "inputs" which come from this novel to transform the significance of her original reprobation into one not only acceptable, but auspicious in another context. The verb "to pass" in English has many meanings such as for example, pass by, pass through, pass for, pass on, pass out and so on. It contains, as in Italian, the root of the word past, but it is above all a verb related to a space and temporal dimension of movement. It is a verb that ignores immobility. It passes through, for, under and above reality, it ignores, it creates, it invents events, especially with the help of an accomplice technology. It is necessary to answer the coded behaviours of the dominant narrative by withdrawing from it. It is necessary to put into practice the behaviour of the post-Indian warriors. The post-Indian warriors are post-modern simulations, "trickster figures" that play to invent themselves, to narrate, seeing their survival in the prevailing culture which has forced them into the reserve, and their own history seeking to destroy each project of authenticity(19). In doing so, they cancel any myth of Indianity created by western culture to celebrate their innocence. The post Indian warriors who simulate in order to counterattack this tendency, this is in reality how they secure their tribal presence. "They pass" in the sense that they pass for something that no longer exists, and they simulate, they counterfeit the reality. The pass as those that are not and never have been and they narrate themselves inventing a reality that never existed. Because their past, cancelled at the moment of the invention of Indianity, is only present in the oral and written tradition in the language of the "pale faces". In a very interesting article in a number of Wired a journalist with a very significant name R.U. Serious (Are you serious?) groups the famous four post-modernists (Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze and Bataille) and asks if the fact that Pol Pot had frequented the French intellectuals could not be correlated with the fact that, once he returned to Cambodia, he ordered his red Khmer to kill every person with glasses(20). As underlined by the author the intellectuals offer the only "original prospective on the schizophrenic and cruel nature of the technoculture of the end of twentieth century, but nevertheless engage in sophisticated linguistics trying to save the insignificant theory of Marxism"(21). I deeply admire, in spite of the difficulties of the language, the French intellectuals would prefer that the Italian intelligentsia had, the same mental awareness and openness, especially towards the study of feminism. In Italy we find ourselves confronted by a chauvinism which is either negligent or unaware of the God theme group whose members pay the price for their choices being still at lower academic levels. There is also dissent between the French and I advise reading what American feminists say of Baudrillard (Suzanne Moore calls him "the father of post modernism"), above all with regard to the problem of seduction. What I would like to remind them is that they must never forget, and I refer mainly to Deleuze and Gauttari who for me write the most convincingly and poetically, that when the nomadic choice is made, European men and whites have always commenced at a secure place, where they can always return, although at the end of the day this security is seen as fragmented when codified by a secular culture. "Passing" therefore means to be "nomad", to drift away and to be what you want to be, and technology can help us, without having the possibility of any secure harbour. I think of the joking creation of one of the grand theories of technology like Donna Hareway. The cyborgs (cybernetic organisms that have organic and technological components) are monsters that, like monkeys and women co-habit between a destabilising place in the large technological evolutionary narrative and western biology(22). They can therefore prefigure and refigure possible worlds and demonstrate other forms of significance. This means, as for the post Indian warriors, "to pass" in respect to identify, telling ironic stories invented for spacing out and spaces out in respect to centricity of the codified representation. In this sense, us women do not have a secure place not even in the unconscious to vindicate any certainty, nor a place where to stay even at night and perhaps we can really change the structure of the narration and of representation. We weren't at the places where history was made and from those non places where our history starts that meeting with "time lag" we may speak of, and moving continually in and out, forth and backward, passing from one identity to another, from one place to another, not much and not only not to be seen, but not be forced to a role or fashion which enchains us for ever. Above all alleging new needs, new desires, new concession of pleasure and eroticism in everyday life crossing a friendly technology that, as Laurie Anderson teaches us, to consider a way in which to make a distance so as not to burn. That feminism is not a prison, but an object of desire where each individual becomes more interested in the journey than in the point of arrival. (1) DWF. Riconoscersi nei progetti Utopia, Roma trimestrale 1993 (2) Hommi K. Bhabha The locatio of Culture Routledge, London and New York, 1994 p. 247. (3) Howard Rheingold The Virtual Community. Homesteading on the Electronic frontier, Addison Wesley, 1993, cap. 5 pp. 145-175. (4) Cfr. Newsweek 16 maggio 1994 Men, Women & Computers di Barbara Kantrowitz, pp. 48-55 (5) Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (a cura di) The Last sex. Feminism and Outlaw Bodies St. Martin Press, New York, 1993 (6) Dianne Chislom Violence against Violence against Women: An Avant- Garde for the Times in The last sex. op. cit. pp. 30-66. (7) Avital Ronell Angry Women Re/Search Publication, San Francisco, 1991, p. 153 (8) Monique Wittig les Guerrilleres ed, Minuit Paris, 1969 (9) Hakim Bey T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic terrorism Atonomedia, New York, 1991 (10) Franz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth trad. Costance Farrington, Grove Press, New York 1963 (11) Hachim Bey T.A.Z. The Temporaey Autnomous Zone... op. cit. p. 128. (12) Neil Postmann Amusing Ourselves to Death. Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business Penguin Books, New York, 1986 (13) Pamela Mc Corduck America's Multimediatrix, intervista a Laurie Anderson in Wired, marzo, 1994, pp. 79 e seguenti. (14) Susan Mc Lary This Is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson in Feminist Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota- Oxford, 1991, p. 138 (15) Laurie Anderson in America's multimediatrix op. cit. p. 137 (16) Teresa de Lauretis Technology of Gender in Technologies of Gender: Essay on Theory, Film and Fiction Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987, p. 26 (17) Nella Larsen "Passing" Negro University Press, New York, 1969. (18) Ivi pp. 97-98. (19) Cfr. Gerald Vizenor Manifest manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance Wesleyan University Press, New England-Hanover and London 1994 (20) R.U. Serious Po-mo to go. A User's Guide to Trendy French Intellectuals in Wired giugno, 1994 (21) Ivi, p. 54 (22) Donna j. Haraway Simians, Cyborg and Women. The Reinvention of Nature Routledge, New York, 1991