1999

"Cyber-Jouissance: A Sketch for a Politics of Pleasure." Telepolis, 12.05.1999.

In this work I am attempting to outline a politics of pleasure for/as Russian (cyber)feminist(s). Mainly I base my approach on Foucaut’s "ethics of the self" and Irigaray’s "ethics of sexual difference", also influenced by works of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Lou Andreas-Salome and cyberfeminists. My main argument is that cyberspace can be explored and created as a source of pleasure for and among women, as a means to share female genealogy based on embodied subjectivity, and that would imply an invention of new forms of politicization.

Cyber-politics

Cyberspace is as much a web of power relations as other spaces, and it plays out existing gender politics. In his work on commucative action, Habermas applied democratic liberal principles to the realm of communication, suggesting that there can be a future with an "equal access to communication". Foucault is strongly against such utopian futures: "The idea that there could exist a state of communication that would allow games of truth to circulate freely, without any constrains or coercive effects, seems utopian to me. This is precisely a failure to see that power relations are not something that is bad in itself, that we have to break free of. I do not think that a society can exist without power relations, if by that one means strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others. The problem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication, but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible" (Foucault, 1996: 446-7).

I would like to stress a need for such new forms of feminist power games, and argue that cyberfeminism is in a special position here. Cyberspace as a political place which is new, still in the process of establishing itself and controlled differently from, say, Academia, is and can be effectively used for feminist politics. It is also necessary to stress here that politicization of cyberspace can benefit from already existing spaces of established relations by women and among women - arts and feminist political activity, for example. Now we must politicize cyberspace by creating possibilities for new relations of force, that change the face of power, "showing its potentialities no less than its dangers". To say that cyberspace is just a residue of the late capitalist economy, or that virtual reality is dangerous for feminism since it reproduces patriarchal imagery and full of male fantasies, would only mean that feminism is poorly conceived by such critics, and power is always evil for them. On the other hand, if we consider cyberspace as a flow of unrestrained desires or unconscious, where one can build a cyber-society without power and domination, we put ourselves into another trap: it implies that to "avoid reality of power" (which is bad and polluted) is to "get free" from it in virtual reality, which is good and innocent, that corresponds to libertarian utopia. Thus, sooner we understand that we cannot "avoid" power relations in cyberspace, sooner we start using it for our purposes. We must try and reduce the potential of domination implied in power relations, and employ it as a means for inventing new forms of female subjectivity, based on a politics of pleasure.
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