Zeros and Ones, by Sadie Plant
This annotation is not a book review, but God, it must be said that Zeros + Ones is an incomparable text. One of my friends says that, while Spinoza and Suzanne Langer are her favourite philosophers, Sadie Plant is "something better than that." She's entirely right; there's a reason that, while the gender accelerationist tradition can be traced back before Plant, it really kicks off here. 0s+1s is an event, a phase-transfer. And as Spinoza-obsessed as I've been this year, Plant trumps him, not just in stature but as an indirect counterargument to the Ethics. Specifically, a counterargument to Spinozist cybernetics.
Spinoza's theory of essence is cybernetic centuries before cybernetics emerges. Every body is, in essence, a summoning ritual which produces a specific ratio between parts and movements. This is a ratio which must be maintained against damaging incursions from the outside or overflowing subsidiary processes, the central dilemma of a cybernetics of control. An essence is, essentially, a pattern which must be maintained through a body whose parts are its submissive carriers, albeit a pattern which is always something of an open question, one whose full extent "we do not yet know." Plant's cybernetics, however, throws a wrench in that, drawing off Irigaray's objection. Identity based on the neutral subordination of the body is fundamentally masculinist, based on a neutralized conception of matter mapped to a neutralized conception of woman. "She is dying to run away."
How do the prokaryotes of the primordial sea preserve themselves? "Subtly, subtly, they become invisible; wondrously, wondrously, they become soundless—they are thus able to be their enemies' Fates." Rather than inscribing their essence, which for Plant might better be called a pattern, onto the surface of their independent bodies, they allow themselves to be used, to become chloroplasts and mitochondria integrated into other living things, and so for their patterning to resurface on different plateaus. While for Spinoza, the fundamental principle of life is to preserve the essence of a body, for Plant the pattern and the body become unmoored, then paradoxically coincide. Plant's bodies are always haunted, containing runaway processes which echo out the patterns that they use as their material. They constantly threaten to spill over into the coincidence of product-process that the Ccru speaks about in a concept deeply indebted to Plant. 0s+1s is a book of ethics in the Spinozist sense, a method of intervening in the body, as well as a book of tactics. Orthodox Spinozism is fundamentally based upon ascription, taking a body and giving it a name. Plant's cybernetics, by contrast, function by ascryption, a name without a body, which has long since abandoned its body and fled into virtuality, which then folds a body out of itself. "It seemed she did everything in reverse, backward, upside down, contrary to any rational approach."
It is astonishing how many concepts from the later accelerationist repertoire are expressed with incredible lucidity by Plant. The temporality of ascryption, coincidence of product-process, cyberpositive loops which make themselves real, and also the concept of carriers: bodies which set themselves at the service of making something real, taking on a given pattern, but are not passive in the process. Each of these concepts is crucial in accelerationism, yet are often degendered, stripped of their feminine connotations. I have long suspected that gender accelerationism is the only truly coherent accelerationism, and this is a major part of the reason why. Accelerationists have conventially associated their conceptual repertoire specifically with capitalism, but they have stolen this repertoire from Plant's (anti)genealogy of non-gendered femininity. Practically every feature of polytics/hyperstition could justifiably be regrounded in this (anti)history and acquire a great deal more heft.
Zeros + Ones ends with "code for the numbers to come," yet most of the clearly numeric content is situated more toward the beginning. Plant's history of decimal numeracy, coming into Christiandom from cultural interchange with Arabic and Indian scholars, is of immense pertinence to numogrammatics. Plant's thesis is that, while Roman numerals served to instantiate the Western philosophical drive toward unity, decimal digits, and particularly zero, undermined this project. Decimal numeracy, then, enters as an alien into the West, indispensible because it must be used (for the mathematics required for nascent capitalism could not be done without them) and so numerologically overcoded with familiar essences, yet never really possessing these essences in fact. Zero is the highest case of this phenomenon: "Zero may mean nothing to the Western world, but this has nothing to do with the way it works." Zeros are things which are not quantities, holes which are not inert, but reconfigure the entire schematism of the West into a system of holes and non-holes, evoking punched cards. Culturally, zero comes to be associated both with aliens to the West and with women, that sex which is not one, which is yonic and not phallic. More than that, zeros really are aliens to the West, and Plant argues compellingly that the numeric function of 0 is not only incidentally connected with women.
I think that there is, here, one opening to move away from the often extremely white lineage of gender accelerationism. If the feminine function of zeros can be connected to actual living women, the non-Western origins of decimal numeracy should analogously chart a movement out of the West. There is here an obvious connection to blacceleration, with its claim that "accelerationism always already exists in the territory of blackness." If decimal numeracy operates as the virtual productive schematism through which capitalism kicks off, slavery, labour situated in a hole in Western humanism, provides the concrete means of that lift-off. But I think there are also several other potential vectors to take here too, by which to address what Annie Goh calls "appropriating the alien" and substantiate the "xeno" of accelerationism. While that isn't the primary focus of this project, nor is it something I feel like the right person to do, I also think that not looking for these vectors would be as much of a failing as masculinist accelerationism's degendering of its material.
Plant's discussion of senses, related to the "undifferentiated vesicle" Freud introduces in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ends up acquiring surprising numeric significance. Sense organs are the means by which cybernetic systems let the outside in in an orderly fashion; however, they become alien as a result. Sadie Plant joins with Steve Goodman in being suspicious of sight's role as a meta-sense, a sense through which other senses are configured, because more than any other sense, ocularization serves to keep an object as far away as possible. However, while Goodman in Sonic Warfare examines by contrast the role of sound in modernity, Plant is focused on touch—unsurprisingly, given her Irigarayan heritage. She is particularly concerned with the role of touch in terms of technology, looking to how the tactile nature of weaving manifests in computer and internet technologies. The horror of virtual reality from a masculinist perspective is, in Plant's view, that while it seems to be organized around sight (the pornographic splendour of a world in which mankind is God), in effect it centres around touch, bringing about new and unanticipated intimacies. Qwernomics is of obvious relevance here. The "matrix," both as "womb" and as a simultated world, was meant to be a neutral vehicle for male fantasy and yet ends up reshaping and hijacking their users.
Yet unlike in weaving (with the possible exception of the Jaquard loom), this virtual tactility is a tactility of the numbers. Digital sense is always configured by interpreting a sequence of bits, interpreting binary numbers. I think there's also an implication in Plant that numbers have always been a kind of sensorium, which would be backed up by Kant in how mathematics derives from the form of the inner and outer senses. Numeracy is a gateway into the schematism which makes sense possible. But unlike Kant (and very much like Greenspan, in Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine), numeracy is in direct contact with some kind of outsideness, and so becomes in Plant's view, like senses and especially touch, alien in the process. The convergence of numeric and tactile sense produces numbers which touch (us? themselves?), paralelling a kind of lesbianism (to be crass, "holes among themselves" seems an allusion to both zeros and women). I think Plant would also add that touch as a sense is uniquely qualified for this role, operating as it does through a matrix of holes distributed across the body.
One of the most pertinent topics of 0s+1s pertains to the construction of space by folding. In contrast to linear texts, the internet serves as an extremely elaborate folding-in of interlinked sections, taking marginal parts of literature (e.g. footnotes and appendices) to such an extreme that they become the text's organizing feature. Connections to tactility, as this process clearly mirrors Plant's description of weaving, should be fairly easy to come across. Plant discusses this at the beginning of the book, but there's an implicit connection to the book's end, in which she discusses the concept of "hypersea," in which life on land is conceptualized as an infolding of the ocean into the land through the proliferation of fluid channels. If a similar process is at play in the former case, what exactly is folding itself into the wired? I genuinely am not sure what the correct answer to this question is. But in any case, this problematic seems to me to be half of 0s+1s theory of space.
The other half is a theory of witchcraft. One of Plant's objects of discussion is flight, the possibility of making an instantaneous connection, elaorating a rhizome, and she associates this action with the witches persecuted in the witch hunts. Again, the method of a space which can be folded through instantaneous linkages gives this action substance. I find this focus notable because at first glance, the trajectory of flight, of direct cross-cutting to the desired point, seems at odds with Plant's broader geometric focus on loops and vicious circles, although in fact, as a kind of fold, it is quite consistent. A line of flight creates the opportunity for a previously inaccessible contact, for a touch. A Plantian witchcraft would involve anticipating and bringing about the conditions by which these contacts become possible—a witchcraft of paths, making themselves possible through resources illegible to masculinist sense.