diff --git a/content/intro.txt b/content/intro.txt index 9be2fec..c9e92eb 100644 --- a/content/intro.txt +++ b/content/intro.txt @@ -2,13 +2,16 @@ \vspace*{\fill} -Edited March 2015\\* +The first version of this book (0.0)\\* +was created in March 2015\\* during Fahrenheit 39, Ravenna Built with Markdown, Pandoc and TeX\\* Cover designed with Scribus -Typeface: Limousine, by OSP Foundry +Typefaces\\* +Cover: Limousine, by OSP Foundry\\* +Interior: Monoid, by Andreas Larsen Greyscale Press\\* ISBN-13: 978-2-940561-02-5 \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/content/manifestos/2015-07-xenofeminism.txt b/content/manifestos/2015-07-xenofeminism.txt index 390b42e..9b796dd 100644 --- a/content/manifestos/2015-07-xenofeminism.txt +++ b/content/manifestos/2015-07-xenofeminism.txt @@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ #### 0x00 -0x00 Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with +Ours is a world in vertigo. It is a world that swarms with technological mediation, interlacing our daily lives with abstraction, virtuality, and complexity. XF constructs a feminism adapted to these realities: a feminism of unprecedented cunning, scale, and vision; a future @@ -40,7 +40,9 @@ child-rearing. XF is vehemently anti-naturalist. Essentialist naturalism reeks of theology -- the sooner it is exorcised, the better. -0x02 Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose +#### 0x02 + +Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and @@ -53,7 +55,9 @@ must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role. -0x03 The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed +#### 0x03 + +The real emancipatory potential of technology remains unrealized. Fed by the market, its rapid growth is offset by bloat, and elegant innovation is surrendered to the buyer, whose stagnant world it decorates. Beyond the noisy clutter of commodified cruft, the ultimate task lies in engineering @@ -66,7 +70,9 @@ of the worst paid, monotonous and debilitating labour. Such injustice demands structural, machinic and ideological correction. -0x04 Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is +#### 0x04 + +Xenofeminism is a rationalism. To claim that reason or rationality is 'by nature' a patriarchal enterprise is to concede defeat. It is true that the canonical 'history of thought' is dominated by men, and it is male hands we see throttling existing institutions of science and technology. But this @@ -84,7 +90,9 @@ and declares the right of everyone to speak as no one in particular. ### INTERRUPT -0x05 The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not +#### 0x05 + +The excess of modesty in feminist agendas of recent decades is not proportionate to the monstrous complexity of our reality, a reality crosshatched with fibre-optic cables, radio and microwaves, oil and gas pipelines, aerial and shipping routes, and the unrelenting, simultaneous @@ -100,7 +108,9 @@ as absolute, generating a debilitating disjuncture between the thing we seek to depose and the strategies we advance to depose it. -0x06 Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. +#### 0x06 + +Global complexity opens us to urgent cognitive and ethical demands. These are Promethean responsibilities that cannot pass unaddressed. Much of twenty-first century feminism -- from the remnants of postmodern identity politics to large swathes of contemporary ecofeminism -- struggles to @@ -110,7 +120,9 @@ obligations as collective agents capable of transitioning between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization. -0x07 We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. XF urges +#### 0x07 + +We are adamantly synthetic, unsatisfied by analysis alone. XF urges constructive oscillation between description and prescription to mobilize the recursive potential of contemporary technologies upon gender, sexuality and disparities of power. Given that there are a range of gendered @@ -127,7 +139,9 @@ redeploy existing technologies and invent novel cognitive and material tools in the service of common ends. -0x08 The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms +#### 0x08 + +The radical opportunities afforded by developing (and alienating) forms of technological mediation should no longer be put to use in the exclusive interests of capital, which, by design, only benefits the few. There are incessantly proliferating tools to be annexed, and although no one can claim @@ -146,7 +160,9 @@ anticipate its systemic condition responsively. ### TRAP -0x09 XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. Illusion, +#### 0x09 + +XF rejects illusion and melancholy as political inhibitors. Illusion, as the blind presumption that the weak can prevail over the strong with no strategic coordination, leads to unfulfilled promises and unmarshalled drives. This is a politics that, in wanting so much, ends up building so @@ -163,7 +179,9 @@ hope of calibrating the world otherwise. It is against such maladies that XF innoculates. -0x0A We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of +#### 0x0A + +We take politics that exclusively valorize the local in the guise of subverting currents of global abstraction, to be insufficient. To secede from or disavow capitalist machinery will not make it disappear. Likewise, suggestions to pull the lever on the emergency brake of embedded velocities, @@ -177,7 +195,9 @@ creature on the offensive, fiercely insisting on the possibility of large-scale social change for all of our alien kin. -0x0B A sense of the world's volatility and artificiality seems to have faded +#### 0x0B + +A sense of the world's volatility and artificiality seems to have faded from contemporary queer and feminist politics, in favour of a plural but static constellation of gender identities, in whose bleak light equations of the good and the natural are stubbornly restored. While having (perhaps) @@ -201,7 +221,9 @@ come to tear down this shrine entirely, and not bow down before it in a piteous apology for what little autonomy has been won. -0x0C If 'cyberspace' once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of +#### 0x0C + +If 'cyberspace' once offered the promise of escaping the strictures of essentialist identity categories, the climate of contemporary social media has swung forcefully in the other direction, and has become a theatre where these prostrations to identity are performed. With these curatorial @@ -215,7 +237,9 @@ frenzies -- leave us cold. We want neither clean hands nor beautiful souls, neither virtue nor terror. We want superior forms of corruption. -0x0D What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social +#### 0x0D + +What this shows is that the task of engineering platforms for social emancipation and organization cannot ignore the cultural and semiotic mutations these platforms afford. What requires reengineering are the memetic parasites arousing and coordinating behaviours in ways occluded by @@ -232,7 +256,9 @@ this fact, and calibrating it in view of the ends it desires. ### PARITY -0x0E Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. 'Gender abolitionism' is not code +#### 0x0E + +Xenofeminism is gender-abolitionist. 'Gender abolitionism' is not code for the eradication of what are currently considered 'gendered' traits from the human population. Under patriarchy, such a project could only spell disaster -- the notion of what is 'gendered' sticks disproportionately to the @@ -251,7 +277,9 @@ you are a wage labourer or poor; you are a labourer or poor because you are exploited. -0x0F Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory +#### 0x0F + +Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects -- the abolition of class, gender, and race -- hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the @@ -272,7 +300,9 @@ spectacle of so many self-proclaimed 'gender abolitionists'' campaign against trans women is proof enough of this. ) -0x10 From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false +#### 0x10 + +From the postmoderns, we have learnt to burn the facades of the false universal and dispel such confusions; from the moderns, we have learnt to sift new universals from the ashes of the false. Xenofeminism seeks to construct a coalitional politics, a politics without the infection of @@ -298,7 +328,9 @@ platforms afford. ### ADJUST -0x11 Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it +#### 0x11 + +Our lot is cast with technoscience, where nothing is so sacred that it cannot be reengineered and transformed so as to widen our aperture of freedom, extending to gender and the human. To say that nothing is sacred, that nothing is transcendent or protected from the will to know, to tinker @@ -312,7 +344,9 @@ claim, that cannot be studied scientifically and manipulated technologically. -0x12 This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the +#### 0x12 + +This does not mean that the distinction between the ontological and the normative, between fact and value, is simply cut and dried. The vectors of normative anti-naturalism and ontological naturalism span many ambivalent battlefields. The project of untangling what ought to be from what is, of @@ -327,7 +361,9 @@ filaments instantly dim. ### CARRY -0x13 The potential of early, text-based internet culture for countering +#### 0x13 + +The potential of early, text-based internet culture for countering repressive gender regimes, generating solidarity among marginalised groups, and creating new spaces for experimentation that ignited cyberfeminism in the nineties has clearly waned in the twenty-first century. The dominance of @@ -345,7 +381,9 @@ grasps points of power and powerlessness in both, to unfold this knowledge as effective interventions in our jointly composed reality. -0x14 Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial +#### 0x14 + +Intervention in more obviously material hegemonies is just as crucial as intervention in digital and cultural ones. Changes to the built environment harbour some of the most significant possibilities in the reconfiguration of the horizons of women and queers. As the embodiment of @@ -357,7 +395,9 @@ become attuned to the language of architecture as a vocabulary for collective choreo-graphy -- the coordinated writing of space. -0x15 From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our +#### 0x15 + +From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying 'domestic realism' has no @@ -379,7 +419,9 @@ while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour. -0x16 From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for +#### 0x16 + +From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into gender systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution of @@ -401,7 +443,9 @@ clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble a platform for free and open source medicine? -0x17 From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, +#### 0x17 + +From the global to the local, from the cloud to our bodies, xenofeminism avows the responsibility in constructing new institutions of technomaterialist hegemonic proportions. Like engineers who must conceive of a total structure as well as the molecular parts from which it is @@ -417,7 +461,9 @@ invite contamination as a mutational driver between such frontiers. ### OVERFLOW -0x18 XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean +#### 0x18 + +XF asserts that adapting our behaviour for an era of Promethean complexity is a labour requiring patience, but a ferocious patience at odds with 'waiting'. Calibrating a political hegemony or insurgent memeplex not only implies the creation of material infra-structures to make the values it @@ -429,7 +475,9 @@ egalitarian community buttressed by new forms of unselfish solidarity and collective self-mastery? -0x19 Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a +#### 0x19 + +Is xenofeminism a programme? Not if this means anything so crude as a recipe, or a single-purpose tool by which a determinate problem is solved. We prefer to think like the schemer or lisper, who seeks to construct a new language in which the problem at hand is immersed, so that solutions for it, @@ -446,7 +494,9 @@ patriarchy in a sea of procedures that soften its shell and dismantle its defenses, so as to build a new world from the scraps. -0x1A Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a +#### 0x1A + +Xenofeminism indexes the desire to construct an alien future with a triumphant X on a mobile map. This X does not mark a destination. It is the insertion of a topological-keyframe for the formation of a new logic. In affirming a future untethered to the repetition of the present, we militate diff --git a/content/manifestos/9999-end.txt b/content/manifestos/9999-end.txt index e188c96..49242a6 100644 --- a/content/manifestos/9999-end.txt +++ b/content/manifestos/9999-end.txt @@ -8,8 +8,9 @@ Version 0.0 edited March 6-7 2015 at Fahrenheit39 Version 0.1 released March 11 2015 Version 0.2 released March 24 2015 Version 0.3 released May 2015 -Version 0.4 released June 2015 -Version 0.5 (current) released September 2015 +Version 0.4 released June 2015 +Version 0.5 released September 2015 +Version 0.6 (current) released February 2016 Greyscale Press diff --git a/output/output-1455231122.pdf b/output/output-1455231122.pdf new file mode 100644 index 0000000..35df199 Binary files /dev/null and b/output/output-1455231122.pdf differ