Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004)

Argument of the work

Parisi in conversation with Matthew Fuller, 2004, the same year Continuum publishes *Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire* ([Monoskop](https://monoskop.org/images/3/35/Parisi_Luciana_Abstract_Sex_Philosophy_Biotechnology_and_the_Mutations_of_Desire.pdf)). The interview sits at that hinge. It catches Parisi's vocabulary (event, technics, endosymbiosis, abstract sex) at the point where it leaves CCRU's cybergothic idiolect and enters the wider software-studies and biopolitics conversation Fuller was then assembling.

The move is translational without being a dilution. Fuller ([w6](https://www.urbanomic.com/contributor/matthew-fuller/)) asks the questions a reader outside Warwick would ask. Parisi answers in her own terms ([w5](https://www.urbanomic.com/contributor/luciana-parisi/)), keeping the cybernetic-evolutionary frame intact: sex as information trafficking across bacterial, viral and technical bodies, not as reproduction; bodies as relays in a machinic phylum; desire as mutation rather than lack. The interview format forces her to name her objects, and the naming is what travels.

What this does inside CCRU's problem-space is register a specific inheritance. Sadie Plant's *Zeros + Ones* is the precursor Parisi both extends and corrects. Plant routed femininity through weaving, telephony, and the loom-to-computer line. Parisi shifts the biology. Symbiogenesis, endosymbiosis, and Margulis-inflected evolutionary theory replace the cybernetic-feminist media archaeology. Sex gets pulled below the organism, into the traffic between cells and code. The interview is where that shift becomes legible as a programme rather than a polemic.

Positioning. Fuller's interview corpus from this period (Bifo, Parikka, Kate Rich, a photocopier) treats conversation as method ([w1](https://monoskop.org/Matthew_Fuller)), a way of catching thought before it hardens into monograph. Parisi fits that method because her writing is dense to the point of opacity; the interview is where the concepts get their operational definitions. It also marks her entry into the circuit Fuller was building between media theory, software studies and continental philosophy, the circuit that later carries her into Urbanomic's *#Accelerate* and *Unsound:Undead* volumes alongside Amy Ireland, Steve Goodman and Kodwo Eshun ([w4](https://www.urbanomic.com/book/unsoundundead/), [w7](https://www.urbanomic.com/chapter/accelerate-luciana-parisi-automated-architecture/)). The 2004 interview is the earliest point at which that later trajectory is already visible.

The stakes are narrow and real. Anyone reading *Abstract Sex* cold will struggle. The interview gives the book a reading key: which terms are technical, which are polemical, which are inherited from Deleuze-Guattari and which from molecular biology. It also documents the moment Parisi's work stops being a CCRU position paper and becomes a research programme with its own trajectory through computation, architecture and AI. Hyperstition, in Parisi's hands, moves from fiction-as-vector to biotechnics-as-vector. The interview is where that translation is on the record.

How to read this

For Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004), read for how event is made to precede stable identity. Once that shift is clear, the account of bodies and difference becomes much easier to follow.

For Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004), track where process is treated as both material and conceptual. That crossing is the core of the page's force.

Argument map

• Primary claim

  These pages are crucial because they show how the section's most demanding philosophical line works. Event and evolution are treated as processual relays through which bodies, sensation, and difference are continually composed.

• The work's mechanism

  The pages operate by refusing a simple split between matter and abstraction. Technical processes and lived embodiment are forced into the same frame, which changes how difference itself can be described.

• What this work claims

  That matters because this is where the section most clearly exceeds scene history and becomes a serious metaphysics of technical subjectivity. It is also where later xenofeminist arguments inherit some of their most difficult material.

Publication context

This work is surfaced here through the Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects section of the archive. The edition treats it as a text that circulated within a larger scene of lectures, web fragments, and later commentary rather than as a freestanding classic.

The public page keeps the interpretive layer, the supporting text page, and the original file paths distinct, so readers can orient themselves without mistaking the edition for a substitute full-text republication.

How this work reaches the archive

The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.

The supporting text page draws on texts-extracted/Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004).txt while preserving 1 source file path(s) as the archival source of record.

Key concepts and people

Key passage

Best entry extract · paragraph 1

Luciana Parisi Interview “Jungle laws, animals laws, seabed laws: what are you defending mate?” Lee Scratch Perry Matthew Fuller: Your use of the term ‘sex’ is used, in Lynn Margulis’ words, in the following way: ‘Sex in the biological sense has nothing to do with copulation; neither is it intrinsically related to reproduction or gender.

Related support pages

• Matthew Fuller - Luciana Parisi Interview (2004) (text page)