Text page
Plant - Return to the Soft Machine (Review) (New Scientist 1996)
"Plant - Return to the Soft Machine (Review) (New Scientist 1996)" uses review form to turn cultural criticism into a compact diagnosis of cyberfeminist modernity, media systems, and gendered abstraction.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The page matters because cyberfeminism here is not an add-on to the archive's better-known themes. It is one of the places where circuitry, writing, labor, and gender are made to reorganize what counts as a subject or a system.
These texts work by making cultural criticism, theory, and technical description contaminate each other. The result is a model of subjectivity produced through networks, codes, and infrastructural mediation rather than grounded in stable identity.
That matters because the archive's human/machine problem changes once it is read through Plant, Parisi, and later xenofeminist debate. The future stops looking like a neutral technical horizon and becomes a struggle over who or what gets composed by it.
How to read this text
Read for where writing, labor, media, or embodiment are described as technical arrangements rather than background topics. That is where the page usually sharpens.
Keep an eye on how the page positions itself against humanist or moralizing accounts of technology. The section's strongest interventions are usually anti-essentialist and infrastructural at once.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Balsamo’s ambivalence about current technical developments is also a pleasing antidote to orthodox feminist tendencies to see technology as a male conspiracy expressly designed to victimise women. But the book does little to take the debate beyond Haraway’s opening position that cyborgs present a range of new possibilities and dangers for everyone, women in particular.
Definition · paragraph 1
Anne Balsamo pays some welcome attention to the clear contributions made by women to contemporary cyberculture: Pat Cadigan’s work is more influential here than William Gibson’s brilliant, but ubiquitous, trilogy. Balsamo’s ambivalence about current technical developments is also a pleasing antidote to orthodox feminist tendencies to see technology as a male conspiracy expressly designed to victimise women.
Definition · paragraph 1
Balsamo’s ambivalence about current technical developments is also a pleasing antidote to orthodox feminist tendencies to see technology as a male conspiracy expressly designed to victimise women.
History · paragraph 1
Thus, a relatively limited conception of technology is brought to bear on a female body that is less a feeling, bleeding organism, teeming with neurochemical activity and microbial life – itself a complex, soft machine – than a cultural construction to be read, like a book. Nevertheless, while there are better things to do with – and as – cyborg women, this is an excellent exercise in reading them. By Sadie Plant Magazine issue 2018 published 24 February 1996 0
History · paragraph 1
Nevertheless, while there are better things to do with – and as – cyborg women, this is an excellent exercise in reading them. By Sadie Plant Magazine issue 2018 published 24 February 1996 0
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.