Manifesto for a Cyborg Feminist Aesthetics
(In progress)
Introduction
This text attempts a theory of cyborg feminist aesthetics by considering the concept of visual practices of irony. The use of the term irony is defined by Haraway as “contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes”. It encompasses “the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true” [1]. I want to make a case for a shift from thinking about art making as an object-oriented, material-based practice to understanding it predominantly in the cyborg feminist terms of “potent mediators and taboo fusions”(161). Under the cyborg methodology art making is an act that undertakes the “confusing task of making partial, real connection” (161). Analyzing the terms ‘aura’ [Benjamin] and ‘gaze’ [Mulvey], I propose the terms ‘glow’ and ‘trance’, respectively, as metaphors for visual art practices that accommodate today’s hybrid (physical-digital-virtual) subjectivity. I also propose that cyborg aesthetics produces ‘aesthetic estrangement’, co-opting the term cognitive estrangement from sci-fi literary studies.
About this Writing or Writing About This
I want to write for females, for feminists, but not just so. For all who desire an alternative or new way of thinking their art practice at a juncture in the evolution of humanity- the break from the traditional mode of being in and with our bodies, of information sharing, of relations to tech increasingly invisible, embedded, ubiquitous. Of writing about art, theory, philosophy in a manner that explores like a poem, a story, a diary - fast, intuitive, now. My method is a fusion of Rosi Braidotti’s call for “creative conceptual risk taking”, Haraway’s insistence on “writing as serious play”, Sarah Kember’s “doing” theory, and Helene Cixous’ “writing ourselves”. So that this writing itself embraces, practices and performs that which it describes, articulates, and seeks out. More exercise than opus- it’s goal is an entry point into a seriously entangled web of possibility.
Who are the cyborg artists of today and what is their story? How does writing an artistic statement act as an aesthetic itinerary - to flush out an ideology of personal makings. How can “making writing” contribute to makings more broadly speaking- makings of images, objects, assemblages of digital and physical material/s? Perhaps, following Cixous, I am coming to painting through writing.
This manifesto for a Cyborg Feminist Aesthetics is also a map for making, for personal makings. I want to know what my idea/l is when doing makings myself. Therefore it is a personal political statement: I AM HERE. My position is located some 25 years into my practice, some two or three occasions of having sworn it off entirely, some ten-thousand or so attempts to get it right.
Finally, this text is a a declaration of my love and commitment to the practice and pursuit of painting. I cannot think of myself without thinking-painting. I have always been fascinated with the material of paint, with the object of the brush, with the illusions of space and form and light and depth. I cannot take painting out of my personal history- at nearly every turn, painting lies deeply entangled in my own heterogeneous subjectivity. It is fascination and pleasure, yet somehow, it is also conquest, responsibility, longing, and desire. It can also be a burden: Why must I paint? Why must I continue? Quitting, which I have frequently committed to, never lasts. The longest period of non-painting was about four years long, between the age of 26 and 30 years. In this period, I did reading and writing, and discovered a line of flight that led me into the questioning of technologies and their relationship to desire, sexuality, and Being. It was during this period that I “found” philosophy and, in the end, it was the study of philosophy that brought me back to painting. Therefore, I am indebted to philosophy, to my studies and readings, to my supervisors and professors, for inadvertently turning painting back on to me. I no longer fight off painting’s uncanny hold. I’m “all in”, and I mean that in the sense that Otto Rank meant when he said that “an artist ’s calling is not a means of livelihood, but life itself ” (1932: p. 371). Painting cannot be undone in me. It is in my code. And so it is with “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” and with “responsibility in their construction” that I write this brief assemblage on what I think painting can, or might, do.
A Thing or Two About Painting
Painting is the plastic art of applying pigment to a surface, typically a woven fabric, such as canvas or linen. The fabric is stretched over a wooden frame and the resulting rectangle becomes a space for representation. The field of painting has significantly expanded from this origin. From the traditional canvas-on-wood-stretcher-object to virtual-digital painting practices (ie. digital collage, hybrid works, virtual exhibitions); to paintings that are free standing, removed from the stretcher; to paintings that blur the line between sculpture, performance and video; to paintings that are executed on the body, projected on the floor, or draped from the ceiling. Paintings have thus-so-far defied such categorical impulses and systems of classification, resisting history’s singular hold, and even resisting its own purported “death”. Painting is no fixed plot-point or stiff canon. Painting is a practice that maintains its historical integrity (evident through the continued nods to our genealogy- our heroes, teachers, mentors) while, at the same time- like a good cyborg, it has no loyalty to origin stories or makers. Painting as a field is as fluid as the stuff that makes it up. And, like good science fiction, painting can articulate agendas, situate histories and cover territories both emerging and fantastical. Painting keeps forging ahead and trudging through wild frontiers to, you know, see what else it just might do.
Haraway’s Cyborg Feminism
Haraway’s figure of the cyborg is situated in a post Cold War 1980’s American politics. Some terms that have gone beyond cyborg are posthuman (Hayles, Braidotti), technosubject (Stone) and post-cyborg (Kember). For the purposes of this study, I choose to use the term ‘cyborg’ as a ‘blasphemous, ironic, rebellious, and incomplete entity’ [SOURCE]. As there is at present no such aesthetic theory for cyborg feminists, I choose to begin with the cyborg figure as theorized by Haraway.
Cyborg feminism attempts to ‘remain attuned to specific historical and political positionings and permanent partialities without abandoning the search for potent connections’ [1].
If she is a whole, it's a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble, a cosmos tirelessly traversed by Eros, an immense astral space not organized around any one sun that's any more of a star than the others. -Helene Cixous
Feminist Aesthetics - Main Points
Aesthetic theory originates in 18th century Europe focusing on beauty and pleasure. It implies that personal interests are transcended during moments pure aesthetic attention and is related to the notion of a universal experience of beauty and pleasure. Feminist-aesthetic philosophy challenged these assumptions and implicated the specific subjectivity of a viewer into the experience of perception: “Gone is the idea that we can speak of ‘the’ act of appreciation and perception, and in its place is a complex model of readers and beholders whose particular genders, histories, and other ‘differences’ such as race and cultural situation frame interpretation and the ascription of value.” [SOURCE]
“An alternative, non dominative aesthetic congenial to feminism” [SOURCE]
“Where scientific theory illuminates by creating order, aesthetic theory, like art, augments confusion under cover of heightened experience.”
Cyborg Feminist Aesthetics is Not Cyborgism
Cyborgism is the term for cyborg art in which artists use cybernetic systems to enhance their bodies or to produce a particular feedback that can be recorded as a work of art. For example, Moon Ribas, Neil Harbisson, Stelarc all experiment with implanted sensors or bio-extensions that gather and process information, and subsequently use that information to create visualizations, dances, objects, etc. Cyborg painting, however, is when images and objects (material / immaterial or combinations thereof) embody or exemplify an ironic, contradictory and playful demeanor. Objects and materials that do not resolve, built from partial perspectives and XXX.
Cyborg ReVisioning
“The typography of subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision.’
“Reappropriations of metaphors of vision” [p.1]
‘Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints; there is no immediate vision from the standpoints of the subjugated.’ Haraway identifies ‘cyborg writing’ as the core tool for rewriting a feminist politics. If cyborg writing is about “retelling origin stories” in order to subvert Western origin myths, then cyborg painting is about revisioning XXX in order to XXX. Similarly, if cyborg writing’s main tools are stories (retold) then cyborg painting’s main tools are images (revisioned). Revision means ‘a change or a set of changes that corrects or improves something’. Moreover, the word vision is not simply about the act of seeing, but refers to the mystical, supernatural and imaginative: to have visions. Cyborg ReVisioning can then be defined as XXX.
Weaving is for Oppositional Cyborgs
Network culture = remix as dominant process, where nothing is invented but everything is reappropriated- mixed again into new combinations that produce contradictory, heterogenous assemblages of images, sounds, ideas, stories, etc. Kember and Zylinska write that “media is always hybrid”.
“Weaving is for oppositional cyborgs”
A weaving is a complex, entangled object
Trance
The idea of the gaze, which means ‘to look steadily, intensely, with fixed attention’ was theorized by Lacan to describe the anxiety that comes from realizing that one is an object capable of being viewed by others (whether human or not). This is an external, object oriented theory- objects witnessing, or gazing upon, the externality of other objects. In feminist aesthetics, the theory of the ‘male gaze’ was developed and made popular by Laura Mulvey in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in which she decries the male use of the camera objectifying the female in film, and offers instead the destruction of pleasure and narrative as ‘a radical weapon’.
In cyborg aesthetics, the ‘gaze’ becomes the TRANCE, where trance is a flow, a continuous movement that does not distinguish between inside/outside, subject/object. The TRANCE Is also a state of splitting that provokes objective witnessing and partial connection. Haraway writes:
The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate positions and be accountable, the one who can construct and join rational conversations with fantastic imaginings that change history. Splitting, not being, is the privileged image for feminist epistemologies of scientific knowledge. “Splitting” should be about heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously necessary and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists.
