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Notes on Knowledge Economy from Cyberfeminsm
- 1. Notes on the Knowledge Economy from Cyberfeminism
Lecture at Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana.
City of Women International Festival for Contemporary Arts, 16th october 2008
Maria Ptqk
This lecture is an attempt to sum up some general ideas as regards to what a cyberfeminist position
might mean today in the socalled knowledge economy. It is inspired by the general disappointment and
confusion of digital activism movements after the social web and the need to reconstruct a framework
for tactical politics in the current informational economy from a feminist and gendered perspective.
Using the word cyberfeminism is problematic as it is usually identified with some very precise
experiences and approaches that took place in the nineties. Even though one of the main purposes at
that time was to avoid a clear definition of what cyberfeminism was and keep an open scenario for
further evolutions, in fact the word cyberfeminism ended up being a closed significant, historically and
conceptually linked to that context. For me, to keep on using the word is a tactical gesture whose
purpose is to claim for the necessity of a radical feminist position today as regards, not only to the
cyberspace, but to the information economy as a whole, with all the different and often paradoxical
levels it implies.
My purpose is to question the cyberfeminist slogan “Anyone missing?”1 and address, not only who, but
also what is missing in the hegemonic discourses on knowledge economy. This implies a wider
conception of feminism itself: not only a question of women, not even only a question of subjectivities
– as it is often argued from the socalled postfeminist approaches but mainly a question of
perspective. What is the perspective from which you look at reality? How you position yourself towards
hegemony. legitimacy, authority, History with big H and other languages of power? Claiming for a
relocation of cyberfeminism is assuming that the context from which were formulated the main ideas of
gendered digital critique have changed and thus, knowledge and radical actions need to be resituated.
1 Old Boys Network poster: OBN / 07_les_penelopes:
http://www.obn.org/obn_pro/postergallery/obn_poster_color/Seiten/07_les_penelopes.htm
- 2. From who is missing to what is missing: relocating cyberfeminism
Cyberfeminism became a trendy word in the late nineties, sharing a common scenario with the first
wave of media and digital activism. Keywords of the digital revolution were free circulation of
knowledge, DIY media, collaborative networking and selforganized labor, among others. From the
cyberfeminist perspective, the patriarchist shape of digital culture was identified as a cultural limit that
had to be overpassed through technical empowerment and a playful and selfconfident approach to
technology. Which we did, with a lot of enthusiasm. Although cyberfeminism radicalism was pretty
much confined to the art and cultural world, as many critics pointed out, it represented a rupture with
the technophobic attitude of the institutional eighties' feminism. From this point of view, it was
innovative and in some extend, also revolutionary.
Those were times of active experimentation for digital movements, both on a practical and theoretical
level. We had a lot of fun, we believed in the possibility of a technopolitical emancipation and we build
up a body of knowledge that helped us going through the dark night of cyberspace. Because in fact it
was very dark. And I think we can say today that we didn't stand the battle between critique and
fascination, between our enthusiastic ideas about selfempowerment and what was really going on in
and specially through cyberspace. Digital activism and cyberfeminism with it have been the perfect
laboratories to explore the social and technological potential of the network: a phase of experimentation
(with no costs and openly accessible) for what has later become the prod/user revolution. Whether we
like it or not, social web or web 2.0 is the hegemonic and commercial result of the digital activism
experiences.
For many, social web or web 2.0 is just a marketing strategy to pump up the financial investment on the
net after the dotcom crash in 2001. For others, it represents some kind of emancipatory collective
intelligence and a way for digital democracy. But what it represents for sure is an economical paradigm
for the new knowledge economy as a whole. The technological empowerment made possible by the
openness and accessibility of social software has lead to a paradoxical situation where the user is at the
same time an anxious and overcontrolled consumer and a free worker (and here the word free is not, as
in Richard Stalman's statement, free as in “free speech” but free as in “free beer”). In 2.0 model, big
technological companies more and more concentrated around the media, the entertainment and the
- 3. military industries complex put the software online (most of the time in beta versions) and the users do
the rest: improving the apps, reporting bugs, creating and distributing the content, building the network
and contributing to the economical value of the www.
Digital business has nothing to do with technology but with brand management: it is a form of
speculative economy based on the commercial exchange of abstractions. Let's take My Space, for
instance. It is a huge repository of personal data, movies, texts, images, audio files and social
relationships owned by one of the biggest media corporations in the world. Its economical value its
price in the market of internet business is calculated on two main elements: one is the number of users,
the number of visitors and the time of connection; the other one is the power of My Space as a brand,
as part of our shared cultural imaginary. We the users increase its value not only when we connect to it,
but specially when we consider it as being the biggest online social network. The Second Life
phenomenon illustrates this very well. When many companies rushed to SL they did it because
everybody was talking about that, even if at some point it became clear that in fact almost no one was
using it. It was just valuable as a media phenomenon and, from that perspective, it was worth the
investment.
Speculation, as the central element of immaterial economy, follows the pattern of financial capital,
based on creating, selling and buying the most perfect kind of abstraction: money. Whereas in the
industrial model, there was a direct relation between financial economy (money as an abstraction) and
real economy (the goods or services it standed for), in knowledge economy this equivalence is lost:
money and ideas are equivalent to nothing except themselves. Therefore, the reference with real
economy is lost. The production of goods and services, the effective exchange relationships on a global
level and the reality of labor conditions around the world are turned invisible.
Invisibility of real economy lies in some good slogans like the factories have disappeared , material
costs are insignificant and the like which aim is to spread and legitimize a discourse that hides the
deep historical and structural link between knowledge economy and free global market. Posfordism is
itself a result of the long process of decisionmaking initiated by transnational corporations, first world
countries and international institutions precisely at the time of the socalled decolonization in the
sixties and seventies. At that time, the mechanisms of free global market started to be set up as an
- 4. instrument to substitute the former political control by a new economical dependence. And, thus, a new
form of coloniality reflected in the open circulation of goods, services and capitals, the limited
circulation of people and a new global distribution of labor.
Of course factories have not disappeared but have just been moved away to countries where we don't
see them anymore so we can, from the firstworld countries, keep on telling ourselves that in deed we
have all turned up into immaterial and creative workers. But posfordism operates another strategic shift
which is more difficult to identify for those who are not familiar with economical theory. With the
sophisticated use of speculative patterns inspired by financial capital, it is argued that in terms of global
economic growth, material economy is insignificant compared to immaterial economy. But this is true
only if we accept to analyze it as regards to the price and not to the real value. Let's take for instance the
production costs of a computer: 10% of them are material production costs and 90% are management
costs. But this does not mean that real production costs are less valuable that management costs: they
are just cheaper because they have been delocalized to countries were labor and resources costs are not
as expensive as in firstworld countries. If computers were produced at 100% in first worldcountries,
material costs would be higher than immaterial costs. If production tasks were not delocalized,
immaterial economy would still be insignificant compared to material economy.
Because of its direct link with the festival's topic2, I would like to present briefly some information
regarding ewaste: the production and distribution of electronic components waste through the planet3.
United Nations estimates that between 20 and 50 tones of ewaste are produced annually in the world. It
represents 5% of global waste and is growing at a rate of 3%5% per year, 3 times faster than any other
kind of waste. Ewaste is mainly being sent to China, India and Nigeria because transporting it there is
10 times cheaper than stocking it at home (mainly lead by illegal associations with the complicity of
national governments and international institutions). Computers elements are rich in valuable metals
(such as gold, copper and aluminum) and very toxic materials (mercury, lead and cadmium). To get the
valuable metals back, computers are dismantled with no control or regulation. The toxic elements end
up in the rivers, the air and the soil, polluting water, food and populations. The work is mainly done by
2 See City of Women 2008 Curatorial Statement, “Raw Symbiosis: animalsnatureculture”: http://www.cityofwomen.org/
2008/festival/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=531&Itemid=272
3 See Greenpeace Reviews: quot;Toxic Tech. Not In Our Backyardquot;:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/notinourbackyard; quot;Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronicsquot;:
http://www.greenpeace.org/china/en/press/reports/greenpcguide; quot;Exporting Harm: The HighTech Trashing of Asiaquot;:
http://www.greenpeace.org/china/en/press/reports/exportingharmthehightech.
- 5. women, children and migrants (Indians in China, Bengals in India). In 1997 the average life of a
computer was 6 years. In 2005 it was already 2 years. A mobile phone's one is less than 2 years.
Moreover, ewaste is a good business: the commercial transactions derived from buying and selling e
waste are estimated to be up to 11 billion $ in 2009.
In fact, the more we look at the socalled immaterial economy, the less immaterial it appears to be.
Even though we think we are living in the era of intangibility, the truth is that we are surrounded by
hard industries, that we are deeply rooted to physical needs and material goods. And this to such extent
that we don't realize it anymore, as if all these commodities belonged to some kind of “natural
environment”. The emergence of speculative economy has an impact on a theoretical or conceptual
level, but also in our everyday experience. Aesthetically, power today is not represented anymore by
monumentality, as in the 20th century, but by invisibility. The current use of soft power as a political
ideology or a new management tool illustrates this tendency very well.
Either we call it “posfordism”, “knowledge capitalism”, “information economy”, we are using a
language (words, ideas, concepts, arguments) that has been precisely created not only to describe what's
happening, but to legitimate it and produce it historically. And I believe this can be confronted from a
feminist perspective because the ideological side of language has long been part of the feminist theory,
very aware of the political implications of using one word instead of another one, very conscious of the
fact that, by setting up a semantic universe rather than another one, we are in fact making up a certain
interpretation of the world. A cyberfeminist position today should therefore analyze posfordism as an
hegemonic theory and position itself clearly in a critical and strategic position connected with the
feminist genealogy.
Reality hacking: Beatriz Preciado's “Testo Yonki”.
Someone whose work illustrates very well this orientation in the sense of a critical approach to
knowledge economy from a radical feminist point of view is Spanish philosopher and queer activist
Beatriz Preciado, which last publication “Testo Yonki”4 is a brilliant exercise of situated knowledge. It
4 Preciado Beatriz, “Testo Yonki”, Espasa Calpe 2008.
- 6. is a philosophical essay on the rise of what she calls “pharmacopornographical regime” and a personal
diary of her illegal and doityourself testosterone treatment. One cannot be understood outside of the
other, theory and practice go hand by hand.
Preciado does not take testosterone to “become a man” but to test in her own body the production of
subjectivity connected with the porn and the pharmacological industries. The former is invisible,
partially illegal and socially marginal. However, it is the most lucrative entertainment industry and
digital business, as well as a productivity model for the knowledge economy as a whole: immediate
satisfaction through connection, extreme delocalisation of workers, feminizations of subjects (mainly
women and transsexuals technologically produced by plastic surgery or hormonal treatment and
consumed through the digital network), commodification of experiences (what is sold and bought being
the illusion of a sexual contact in all its possible forms, from dirtytalk chats to porn video streaming).
The latter the pharmacological industry is also a leading global market, connected with bioeconomy
(genetics, legal and illegal drugs, hormones) and the military business (drugs are often tested at war
before being industrially manufactured as western commodities). It also represents the most perfect
form of political control. Hormones, as drugs, are invisible and easily internalized, both physically and
mentally.
Very influenced by French philosopher Michel Foucault, Preciado explores the ideology behind bio
technology and medical protocols: how much testosterone makes you a man or a woman (biologically
only a matter of proportion) and what institutional frameworks are put to work over pharmacological
drugs to turn them into a form of biopolitical control. If you are a biowoman taking estrogen cocktails
through oral contraceptives, it's fine. Requirements and tests are relatively lowkey and a quick visit to
the doctor is usually enough. If you are a man cheering up his sexual life with Viagra, it is also fine:
even if medical surveillance is recommended, the drug is easy to found and falls under the frame of free
and often unregulated private market. But everything outside this pattern of bionormality is illegal and
morally perverse. And thus, institutionally managed. Men or women willing to undertake an hormonal
treatment that might reverse their gender attribution are subject to strict medical protocols:
psychological and clinical tests, treatment supervision, legal factors, etc. In the era of pharmaco
pornographical control there are private bodies the straights, those who are free to use the
commodified biotechnologies and there are public bodies the perverse, those whose biology and
- 7. subjectivity is institutionally managed in the name of Public Wealth.
However, private bodies are not as free as they might think they are. Preciado clearly addresses the
issue again in a very foucaultian manner that questions one of the bestestablished feminist struggles:
reproductive technologies. In her opinion oral contraceptives would be a form of contemporary bio
technological panopticon5 that institutionalizes the private control over female sexuality. By lowing the
testosterone levels, estrogene treatments might reduce sexual arousal, physical resistance and
aggressiveness. Considering that they also have proved beneficial effects on the softness of the skin and
the size of the breasts, they might be considered as a very efficient drug to buildup the perfect female:
voluptuous, passive and unfertile. Preciado does not argue that those capabilities sexual arousal,
aggressiveness, physical resistance are anyhow linked with biomales from an essentialist point of
view. But rather that they have been historically monopolized by them and that today, with the advance
of biological technologies, they can be also induced on biofemales. Of course such a conclusion is
very arguable from a feminist point of view and surprising coming from a queer activist. Nevertheless it
can also taken as a radical approach that questions the artificial production of feminine bodies and the
current reality of the biotechnological industry, opening the door to further experimental research on
gender and sexuality with inspiring possibilities.
Even if she does not consider herself as a cyberfeminist, Preciado takes us back to the dream of the
cyborg. Of course one of her main influences here is Donna Haraway6. She reads her cyborg theory in
an uptodated way that connects the real possibility of designing bodies through hormones, prosthesis
and biological modifications and the current development of biotechnology industries and global bio
economy networks. From that point of view, Preciado acts like a hacker: knowing very well the system
she is acting on, she subverts it in a creative and critical way. She addresses directly the basis of
posfordist discourse the possibility to design and trade commodified experiences: feeling and fucking
like a man or a woman questioning as well the entire frame where this discourse lies: the paradigmatic
position of pharmacopornographical industries and its connection with the global free market and the
political control over bodies (bioguinea pigs, perverse subjects or bioconsumers).
5 The panopticon is an arquitectural model for prisons designed in the 18th century as well as a social structure for control
and surveillance. See Foucault Michel, “Surveiller et punir”, Gallimard 1975.
6 Haraway Donna, quot;A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,quot; in
Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York; Routledge, 1991.
