01 12 2000
Irina Aktuganova: re: Cyberfeminism, Feminism and real women (Translation from Russian)


As a supplement to Irina Aristarkhova's words I send a short text by Mitrofanova, adding it to the discussion on this occasion. At the moment she is not connected by modem, but soon she will be. So, for today, here is the extract of her views.
I also send a text about Neurointerfaces by Mitrofanova, although it is only refering to the discussion about biotechnologies and technologies in general.
I.Aktuganova

"...Talking a structured language, organized by value, we receive profit for the production of the meanings "high" and "sublime" - and this of course is flattering for our selfidentification. But at the same moment we marginalize and conceal the private, the personal experience, the personal initiative, all that what turns out to be our personal investment into life as a process. This makes art and life "sublime" and respectable, but also neurotic and banal.
A creative interest or artistical intrigue emerges when experience and incidence begin to develop a local discourse. By inevitably coming across the abortion of tradition, the intrigue takes a decisive turn. If we have enough initiative and intensity to cut the cultural stream into pieces and to insist in differences, we will inevitably come across statements that collect our sexual, generational, informational and other endless features. Hereby a condensation of the "facture" of live takes place, conflictional frictions with the smooth surface of the structurally relating indentifications. The female becomes possible in non-binary oppositions - not because the male exists, but on the contrary, the discovery of the female leads to forgetting that there is a male. This is similar to the fact that the orgasm heals from the infantile belief in "eternal love" or "family pairs" by returning the sexuality of the body to oneself. This way leads to the brutality of space itself, to a language that is not based on the affective negation of the oedipal complex, but on a esoterical trance of selfproduction.

In this perspective the cybermotherism of the St.Petersburg Cyberfeminclub emerged at a given time, when the cyberfeminists all of a sudden discovered that the experience of pregnancy, giving birth, and motherhood operates as a very special experience of initiation into a specific para-cultural space, para-cultural body, whose potential boundlessly exceeds and deforms Kantian subjectivity and postmodern nomadic subjectivity. This existential threshold could be an initiation into the female or also into something other. In any case this is worth describing and investigating.

Taking back the specific of a bodily and subjective level and celebrating it with the deformations and contortions of language, with the mutations of artistic and figurative "facture" and other consequences - this is the creative pleasure of a cyborg in the shape of a cyberfeminist."


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