Technē and Feminism Special Issue of Technophany

Feminism has a strong tradition of entrusting its prospects for the emancipation of
women to technological innovation and development. Ranging from women’s ‘access
to history’ as a means of liberation from ‘biological fate,’ as discussed by Simone de
Beauvoir, to Donna Haraway’s ‘cyborg’, which is considered as a figure of
emancipation. This stance toward technology has been shared by many, Shulamith
Firestone and Sylvia Wynter being two further examples. In the context of the more
recent trends in new feminist materialisms and realisms, technology and scientific
inquiry have taken on a prominent new role in expanding the epistemic horizon for
feminist thought, but without directly and explicitly tackling some of the pressing
philosophical and political issues such as reproductive rights or gender
subjectivation. On the one hand, the ‘affinity of nature and technology’ has been a
recurring theme in this specific feminist engagement with technology (Haraway,
Braidotti). On the other hand, identity politics related theories (in particular, within
the poststructuralist paradigm) have rarely explored the subject of technology except
as an appendage to the discourse on the politics of emancipation. These
conceptualizations need to be reviewed, especially if the post-nineties’ celebration of
cyber-theory and conceptions of reality as an occasion for self-reinvention and
redefinition are taken into account.

How should we respond to the new scopes of power that techno-scientific

developments have brought forth, when traditional domains of abstraction are
conquered by the application of information theory and quantum mechanics in the
cognitive and life sciences? How are we to establish a dialogue between the
humanities and the sciences without thereby repeating narratives of evolutionary
‘next steps’ in a progress-historical or naturalised manner?

Furthermore, this issue is interested in problematising the limits of poststructuralist

subject-centred approaches with respect to these new scopes of power. Is there not
implicated in mastering the ‘the technicalities’ at work in current technology another
kind of ‘objectivity’? Can we think of notions of objectivity that are not in a dualist
polarity with notions of subjectivity, notions that are more actively, more spectrally
and gradually, entangled with one another? How are we to approach the works of
feminist scholars like Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, R. Braidotti and K. Hayles along
the proposed line of critique or questioning? Does C. Wolf’s proposal, that the
posthumanism proposed by some of the above authors ends up as a transhumanism
even if only inadvertently, remain correct? Furthermore, how are we to think of the
‘rationalism’ brought forward by Xenofeminism with respect to these concerns?

How may it be possible to think of empowerment in a way that does not revolve
around an individual’s subject position, one which can be chosen through one’s own
free will – the liberal idea of ‘choice’ implied – and which can be declared as such
and such by virtue of a presumably fully sovereign selfhood. How are we to
acknowledge the limits of the so called ‘subjectively empowering reality’, which
sometimes if not most of the time is blind to its material reality? Especially: how to
think of the categorical status of ‘active materiality’ that is at work in technology
through a feminist optics? In the poststructuralist paradigm, technology has often
served the role of a superior tool, one able to assume a ‘life of its own’ or institute
itself as a quasi-subjectivity. In Haraway’s tradition it has been treated as prosthesis
always already hybridized with the human whose emancipatory role is not
contemplated beyond what Beauvoir or Firestone considered most relevant in the
emancipatory struggles – the clutches of nature.

This issue of Technophany would like to raise the question of whether and how
second wave feminism’s use of the notion of technology may have been premised on
a specific treatment of nature, and also whether and how poststructuralist feminism
may not still be perpetuating the somatophobia so present in Western rational
thought, as discussed in Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman? If we still find
nested, in the Xenofeminst celebration of ‘alienation ’and in their proposal of a
rationalist feminism, an overcoming of ‘biological fate’ – then is this not just the
same old Cartesian divide once again at work? Or to put it differently: what would be
a feminist-materialist engagement with nature and its rationality? Our interest
hereby concerns not so much the evaluative discussion of particular positions, but a
systematic blind spot that often seems to be at work in how feminism engages with
technology. Just how exactly are contemporary feminist materialisms actually
materialist, if they fall prey to the urge to subjectivize matter and technology mainly
in the registers of individualist emancipation, to perpetuate subjectivity-centred
thinking in their epistemological approaches, and thus continue involving
anthropocentrism even when claiming to do the exact opposite? Next to these
general questions, we would like to invite the authors to approach:

• Problem area 1: We would like to revisit the Marxian concept of ‘means of

production’ in an era of automated labour. If not by seizing the means of production
– by what other method could a supposed socialist feminist change of system be
possible at all? We are interested in asking the question of the categorical status of
the means of production, how and if they can be subjectivized; we are also interested
in the dialectics of object-subject relations with respect to this both as a question of
method and of ontology. With interests like these, it seems important to revisit
Marx’s original discussion of the concept, as well as the Marxist legacy, in order to
examine its possible reconceptualizations against the backdrop of 21st century
digital ecosystems and their ‘socio-ontological’ status today.

• Problem area 2: With the above outlined overall interest in technology not only in
terms of objective agents or formal actants, but also as endowed with subjective
agency or material activity, we would like to revisit also ancient philosophy and the
notion of technē as art and craft therein; how does the relation between technics and
women feature in classical philosophy or in thought at the origin of Western
rationalism? Is there perhaps a yet unheard-of voice to be sounded by rationalist
philosophy in mythical persona like Pythia, a voice that speaks in tongues countering
somatophobic articulations? If purging of the apparently inextricable link between
rationalism and somatophobia were possible, could we learn to recognize a new kind
of somatophilic rationality? Extending on these speculations and interests, we would
like to invite revisiting Irigaray’s Speculum, and its discussion of Plato’s hystera (cave);
let us revisit Irigaray here not only as a psychoanalyst but also as a Marxist feminist,
let us think about her proposed reversal of the subject-object dialectics through a
feminist take on metaphysics that attempts to come to terms with an optics of what
we could better call ‘diffractive screening’ rather than ‘authorship’; what would be at
stake here is coming to terms with an optics that strokes unheard of spectral
(information technological) scales that are yet to be sounded in new materialist keys.