Lesson 3, part 3

Laboria Cuboniks (a collective of six women) Xeno-Feminism: A Politics for Alienation (2015)

Laboria Cuboniks is the work of Diann Bauer, Katrina Burch, Helen Hester, Amy Ireland, Patricia Reed and Lucca Fraser.
The group’s website is http://laboriacuboniks.net/

The title of the group is an anagram of the mathematics collective, “Nicolas Bourbaki”, who presented the group’s work as if it were one individual. The connotations of the name emphasise the group’s ideas of Labor (feminised by -ia) and a techno-science approach emphasised by Cuboniks (as well as refuseniks). This document was written collectively as a shared file (on Google Doc), after the group met in Berlin and when they had returned to their different home countries.

Xenofeminist manifesto can also be found in several languages on the groups website and in English at: https://mapmagazine.co.uk/xenofeminist-ecologies. There are print editions with commentaries of the manifesto as well as the versions circulating online.

You can also read the Xeno-feminism manifesto online on the group’s website, section by section. The pictures and colored backgrounds add to its meaning. Take a look:-

Zero

Interrupt

Trap

Parity

Adjust

Carry

Overflow

Or download the full PDF, marked out in numbered paragraphs (as is a convention in philosophical treatises).

In this short talk in 2017, Helen Hester outlines the relationship between accelerationism and Xenofeminism and Nick Srnicek on the Left’s version of accelerationism.

Here are some critical reactions to the text:-

The manifesto itself is challenging to parse. Typical of its form, the text breaks down into subheadings that mostly use aggressive, active verbs like “INTERRUPT,” “TRAP,” “ADJUST” and “OVERFLOW.” Xenofeminism in part aligns itself with accelerationism, which imagines the end of capitalism through the deployment of its own means, here in the attempt to unify the political left. Similarly, xenofeminism calls for using existing technology to re-engineer the world, while remaining cautious that “technology isn’t inherently progressive.” The manifesto is “vehemently anti-naturalist,” upholding “the queer and trans among us, the differently-abled, as well as those who have suffered discrimination due to pregnancy or duties connected to child-rearing.” It declares, “If nature is unjust, change nature!”

Merray Gerges, Xenofeminism Canadian Art Vol. 33, Iss. 4,  (Winter 2017): 116-117.

The plurality of terms used to describe the manifesto: anti-naturalist, anti-capitalist, accelerationist, regarding alienation from and a questioning of currently envisaged technological futures speaks to the wide range of ideas and terms embraced in the manifesto itself.

The 2015 manifesto, Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, puts forward a vision of a global post-capitalist future ‘where gender justice and feminist emancipation contribute to a universalist politics’ which cuts across race, class and gender. We can read Ayesha Tan Jones’s Future skins from 2019 through the manifesto’s call to repurpose existing technologies to let ‘a hundred sexes bloom’.

Broome, Henry. Art Monthly (London) Iss. 424 (Mar 2019): 32-33. N.B. The reference to Mao’s 1957 quote appears to have been missed: ‘Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend!’

and

Xenofeminism culls the DNA of feminisms past and present, splicing them with Prometheanism to form a new monster, one whose feminism wields the discarded armaments of modernism against the insipid neoliberalism of recent identity politics and demands a collective resurgence of the alienated. Rather than forsaking the position of alienation as undesirable, the Xenofeminist manifesto embraces it as a frame for construction, wagering its protean ambition on the transversal and synthetic potential of a groundless universalism.

The Xenofeminist manifesto discards all forms of foundationalism as inherently theological, and so opposes both those who seek to secure feminism along ontological lines (essentializing identity and allying it with nature) and those who condemn reason based on its patriarchal genealogy. This is not to say that the history of science is not preceded by patriarchal domination, but that any science which continues under those auspices cannot be truly rational. Such chauvinism is at odds with the aspiration to speak the universal. Instead, the manifesto configures the voice of the universal as a “right [to] speak as no one”, (Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, 0x04).

Comments on Xenofeminism at Uberty.org. https://uberty.org/items/resource/laboria-cuboniks-xenofeminism-a-politics-for-alienation/

There is a proliferation of extensive commentary on this manifesto as well as some developing criticisms of it.

You can read Sophie Lewis’ analysis ‘Cyborg sentiments’ Red Pepper 27 March 2019.
or

Annie Goh ‘Appropriating the Alien: A Critique of Xenofeminism‘ in Mute (July 2019) identifies the group as a feminist response to the left-wing accelerationism in Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek and their #Accelerationist Manifesto (#AACM) (2013)

and Jules Joanne Gleeson’s reply ‘Breakthroughs & Bait: on Xenofeminism & Alienation’ (Mute, Oct 2019) which sees it as ‘cocktail of the outmoded and timely, the ill-advised and the prescient’ critical of its use of accelerationism (in the form of a right wing version of Accelerationism/Dark enlightenment attributed to Nick Land) as an endorsement of proto-fascism or alt-right thinking even though its arguments about supporting trans-feminism are novel and part of an emergent “gender-critical” tendency!

Let’s Consider the Text of the Manifesto

As the list of literature grows analysing precisely what Xenofeminisms represents, I thought, it might be good to return to analysing this manifesto as a comparative list of what the group seemed to be “for” and “against”.

The manifesto states it is not a programme, nor a recipe or single-purpose tool. It deals in and with contradictions and complexity and is attempting to move forward across all realms. Xenofeminism aspires to be “a platform for a new language of sexual politics”.

Here are my speculative notes on what their manifesto is for/against:

Navigate this lesson

Part 1, Part 2

Summary

Xenofeminism is for:-

a feminism adapted to technological mediation as a reality – a repurposing /re-engineering of technologies towards progressive gender political ends

a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale and vision – to generate new worlds – a wager on the “long game of history” requiring imagination, dexterity and persistence

alienation as an impetus and the labour of freedom’s construction

freedom as “neither a given….nor anything “natural”

emancipatory potential in technologies (currently unrealized) – structural, machinic and ideological correction

Xenofeminism must be a rationalism and rationalism must itself be a feminism.
Reason as an “engine of feminist emancipation”

Science is not an expression but a suspension of gender – ‘the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular’

transitioning to the Universal to address the complexities and challenges of capitalism, and to address cognitive and ethical demands on a Promethean scale.

a feminism at ease with computation – recognition of “synthetic” solutions, between description and prescription.

cultivate the exercise of positive freedom-to rather than freedom-from
(a libertarian version of freedom, rather than Universal Declaration of Human rights)

cyberspace’s promise of escaping strictures of essentialist identity categories

Anti-naturalism, anti-essentialist….open to the volatility and artificiality of the world…and escaping the “disciplinary grid of gender”.

Want “superior forms of corruption” in recognising oppression: neither clean hands, nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror.

Re-engineering of the memetic parasites on social platforms of “anonymity”, ethics, social justice and privilege-checking to foster debate, free will and desire…

Xenofeminism as gender-abolitionist – requiring a profound reworking of the Universal, generic and intersectional – as a political orientation.

The universal advocated across a coalitional politics, ‘a politics without the infection of purity.’

XF as a platform – negentropic, iterative and continually refashioning itself, a mutable architecture for an order that is equitable and just, a geometry of freedoms.

For embracing the potentials of technoscience : materially and digitally, virtual and material.
For considering the writing of space and the production of spaces with the idea of spatial transformation.
e.g. the re-writing of home, over-coming its idea as “un-remakeable given” and the structures of family and domestic life.

For a pro-actice politics of bio-technical interventions and hormone treatments, for endocrinological knowhow, for pharmeceutical 3D printing, for grassroots telemedical abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, a platform for free and open source medicine…(merging human wetware with pharma and software)

New institutions of techno-materialist and hegemonic proportions….pragmatic and scaleable solutions.

Seeping, directed subsumption, not rapid overthrow – as schemers and lispers. Seeking transformation from within….of deliberate re-construction.

For realising desire, not “an autophagic orgy of indignity and rage”

An emancipatory and egalitarian community, with “unselfish” solidarity and collective self-mastery.

“If nature is unjust, change nature”

Xenofeminism is against:-

Melancholic inertia/ petrification / a bid for revolution

“the muck of immediacy”

“the glorification of nature” through which trans- and queer have experienced injustice

all forms of essentialist naturalism (as a theology)

uses of technologies which foster imbalance, abuse and exploitation of the weak – technology isn’t inherently progressive – its commercial exploitation “offset by bloat”, decoration of a stagnant world.

there is no “feminine” rationality, nor is there a “masculine” one.

modest proscriptions for change – “admirable, but insufficient struggles, bound to fixed localities and fragment insurrections”.

the limitation of technological tools to benefit the few or their appropriation and restrictive use

the negative effects and impacts of Globalisation

illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors or declarations of desire for change as wishful thinking, provoking inertia, or petty moralizing…

the valorization of the local, as temporary and defensive gestures, whne without universal ambition or resolution

plural and static constellations of gender identities… where “unfreedom” is solace and tolerance is expanded (They name social media “prostrations to identity” as part of this, especially its “puritanical rituals of moral maintenance” in accusation, shaming and denounciation) – a ‘puritanical politics of shame – which fetishizes oppression as if it were a blessing’ and blocks value in connection, organization and skill-sharing through productive debate.

Arguments which promote nature as cause or explanation, including claims in queer/feminist politics of being “born” this way

Gender abolitionism where “gendered” sticks disproportionately to the feminine, and there is an asymmetic operation of power. And “Race abolitionism” / “Class abolitionism” on the same grounds.

Claims for a universal in which the “male mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on”…including Eurocentric universalism. And discrimination against “trans” as a consequence of this.

Against nature as an “un-remakable given”….

Against the stigmatisation of communes or single parenting in the face of the nuclear family…

Against a hormonal economy of the body as “aesthetic calibration” and institutional gatekeeping of established distributions of the sexual.

Against waiting in the face of systemic and interlocking problems

‘”Nature” shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever!’

To finish this lesson, let’s consider some of the criticisms:-

One of the few in-depth critiques of Xenofeminism is by Annie Goh, her critique of Xenofeminism hinges on three points:-

1. ‘Whilst the XFM brazenly affirms alienation as a generic condition, it painfully overlooks the large number of post-, decolonial and critical-race thinkers who have (in all their diversity) dealt with the central constitution of race in the idea of the human and the uneven distribution of subjecthood in relation to the non-white foreigner as alien’.

Overcoming alienation and objectification of others has been the primary ambition of many of these thinkers and so Goh concludes:

‘race and class remain analytical add-ons – afterthoughts bolted on to the category of gender – and the constant racialised and classed socio-political relations of humanness and non-humanness are neglected as central to the construction of subjectivity’

Goh’s second point is that:

The ‘xeno’ of xenofeminism uses alienness univocally and performs the marginalised position of ‘being alienated’ whilst it elides the differences implicated in the dynamics of marginalisation…..

Goh argues that although XF’s intersectional universalism is offered as a universalism from below (counter to the appropriation of the Universal by elite male subjects):

‘There is no proper account of difference in its push to reinvent universalism; there is no sufficient acknowledgement of the uneven stakes of humanness and subjecthood; and there is no convincing analysis of how global capitalist production enforces and reinforces existing dynamics of racialised, gendered, classed power. [Audre] Lorde’s essay on the master’s house serves, then, as a reminder of the sheer amount of work which would need to be done to assert non-European, non-Cartesian universalisms ‘from below’.’

Her third point is that accelerationism – as aesthetic or metaphor – does not provide a power-sensitive materialist analysis:

Noys pertinently articulates a key contradiction of accelerationism’s supposed overcoming of capitalism [by more alienation], which is also discernible in xenofeminism: ‘the accelerationist solution of speeding through labor is false’; it does not remove the problem of labour under capitalism, instead it violently glosses over it. To celebrate acceleration and the integration of ‘man’ and ‘machine’ is to be enamoured with the masochism and perverse enjoyment of (alienated) labour, represented in Land’s, #ACCM and the XFM’s sci-fi imagery. Crucially this leads to the conceptual conflation of widely divergent conditions of labour and distinct modalities of exploitation in late capitalism.

as a result

Given how the aforementioned CCRU inheritance dumped the messy complexities of meatspace for a more machinic futurism, and positioned cyberspace as offering the potential of ‘escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories’, but actually ended up fetishising oppression (0X0C), XF panders dangerously to a cyber-libertarianism which thinks it possible to escape identity categories entirely, merely ‘because of’ cyberspace, and which would rather denounce ‘woke’-cultures than attend to on- and offline racialising, gendered, and classed structures of power.

Goh’s criticisms of Xenofeminisms use of accelerationism and critique of 1990s cyberfeminists also remind me of how Valentine de Saint Point The Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti) (1912) and her ‘Futurist Manifesto of Lust’ (11 Jan 1913) were received. If you have not read this, you might be interested in taking a look at its ideas of a superwoman to meet the futurist superman.

Now that you’ve read and considered some of these points, maybe we can discuss these more in the forum.

Do you consider Goh’s criticisms to be fair?

Are there other aspects of this manifesto which interest you?