Anonymous Kumquat submits:

An Interview with Sadie Plant

Brett Stalbaum and Geri Wittig

(Sadie Plant is Research Fellow and Director of the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture and The Most Radical Gesture :
The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age.)

Brett Stalbaum/Geri Wittig: Your work tends to
challenge hierarchical orthodoxies in their varied
cultural manifestations, but your approach doesn't
challenge them with replacement hierarchies, but
rather with distributed models. How does this strategy
relate to emerging electronic activism?Sadie Plant: It seems to me that the old political
struggles -- largely between left and right -- were
waged between equally monolithic and hierarchical
structures, whereas the post-cold war battleground has
far more to do with the opposition between such
structures and more distributed and lateral systems.
Not that this is an easy line to draw: hierarchies can
-- and do -- easily emerge from more distributed
networks, as the phrase "bottom-up" implies. What
would really oppose hierarchical structures would be
something more akin to "bottom-sideways."
Nevertheless, I think it is an instructive and
important distinction, especially in the electronic
domain. If a wide range of centralised, corporate
and/or state organisations are encroaching on what
used to seem like the far more open and chaotic spaces
of the Net, there is the enduring possibility that the
distributed nature of electronic networks will always
mitigate against any complete enclosure.

BS/GW: In a 1995 interview with Matthew Fuller,
concerning the Criminal Justice Act, which had
recently been enacted in the UK, you suggested that
the power structures which intended to increase their
power and control would inadvertantly undermine that
control by stimulating the need for bottom-up
oppositional tendencies to emerge. This inadvertant
undermining of intention seems to have the potential
to affect either side of an oppositional power
struggle. Why do you think hierarchical activist
structures, that are working positively towards
change, are nevertheless so resistant to distributed
models and small cells of activists working
autonomously? Do you think some hybrid of these two
models, centralized and distributed, could develop?

SP: In practice, such hybrids do tend to develop: the
poles of top-down and bottom-up are rarely found as
pure forms -- some measure of informality always creeps
into the most hierarchical structures, and likewise
there is rarely a shortage of centralising tendencies
at work in even the most distributed networks. But I
think there are a surprising number of small
autonomous cells at work -- certainly the UK is alive
with such activities, and although they often do
become more organised, if they survive at all, the
very fact that such nodal points continually emerge
seems to provide much of the cultural energy here.

I guess it also depends on what one is trying to
achieve. In the last instance, pragmatism seems to be
far more important than matters of principle, even
principles about modes of organisation. And for all my
enthusiasm for decentralised networks, I always
remember the warnings made in an anarcho-feminist
pamphlet published some twenty years ago about "the
tyranny of structurelessness" -- the absence of formal
structures can allow dominant personalities etc. to
arise. So once again, it seems important to always
take account of the specifics of the particular
movement or event, the people and the elements
involved, the aims and purposes and so on.

BS/GW: A bottom-up, distributed model has been
developing for many years in the realm of activism and
what starts out as the outsider element often becomes
integrated into places of power, where change can
often continue to take place from within established
structures. For example, in the AIDs activist movement
in the late 80's and early 90's, individuals in groups
such as ACT-UP, who had no previous medical expertise,
by necessity became very knowledgeable in treatment
issues. Many of these people were invited into and
integrated into state medical advisory establishments.
Similar dynamics are taking place in the field of
technology art, with artists delving into study and
discourse in a multitude of scientific and
technological disciplines, not only from within the
academy, but from within industry. What do you think
are the implications for academia? the artworld?

SP: I used to be fascinated and very concerned by this
dilemma -- the situationist notion of recuperation is
still a very good way to think about it, and that's
how I came to be so interested. But I now think that
what is really important is the sense of momentum and
dynamism in the system -- the fact that small scale,
grass roots movements continue to emerge. Even if or
when they do become absorbed into the establishment,
political or artistic, there are always new tendencies
coming up behind them. If one looks at dance music,
for example, which moves very fast and continually
changes, it is probably a mistake to regret the fact
that, say, jungle or drum 'n' bass get absorbed or
recuperated into the mainstream -- what is vital is the
emergence of new music, new undergrounds in their
wake. Even if they are destined to become part of
standard culture, they can still stir things up in the
meantime. What I really fear, and what it is perhaps
most important to oppose, is the possibility that such
a dynamic would cease to operate: it's the movement,
the continual emergence of activity, that is really
important.

BS/GW: What do you see as the relationship between the
cultural discourse regarding the dangers and control
of drugs and the discourse regarding the dangers and
control of information technology?

SP: Well, this is a very interesting one. I've just
finished writing a book on drugs, which doesn't
address this question directly, but certainly made me
think about it in some depth. Perhaps the most
interesting direction to take such thoughts is that
the study of drug control -- particularly in terms of
the international surveillance and policing operations
-- can tell us a great deal about the potential for
controlling information of all kinds (and, of course,
the possibilities of evading such controls.) Drugs
change perceptions, modify behaviour, alter moods and
the very possibilities of thought, and this is widely
perceived as a threat by governments and international
bodies alike. One of the most fascinating things about
all psychoactive drugs is that they are
neurotransmitting chemicals, closely related to the
chemicals already at work in the brain. There are many
historical and functional parallels between drugs and
software -- both are difficult to detect and, just as
data is moved around the Net, these communicating
chemicals shuffle information through the neural
system. And they can also "change the operating
system" -- and this, it seems, is one of the underlying
rationales for attempts to control both drugs and
information. It might be said that a monopoly on
operating systems is what both the medical profession
and the information corporations would like to
achieve, and it is also this "street-level", that
informal transfers of drugs and information
continually contest. The drugs trade and the war on
drugs also present a perfect case of the dangers of
opposing one kind of centralised control with another:
Microsoft's battle with the US government, for
example, is a struggle between two hierarchies which
parallels the drugs cartels' battles with the agencies
of the US government, the medical profession etc. The
only real opposition to both these disputes is an
entirely different kind of small-scale activity which
resists or even ignores them all.

BS/GW: In differing ways both Donna Haraway and Manuel
De Landa explicate a cybernetic-materialist analysis
of the body, wherein the body is no longer solely a
container for consciousness, but becomes expanded and
integrated with emerging technologies. How do you
position the body within the discourse of comunication
technology?

SP: I very much agree with the broad terms of the
positions you describe. The Western notion that the
body is simply a holding bay for some other thing
called consciousness seems to me to be a literally
archaic and often reactionary idea, harking back to
notions of the soul, the spirit etc. Cyberspace seems
to have ushered in a new era of interest in
gnosticism, the mind/body split, and disembodied
notions of consciousness, but I see the implications
of cybernetics working in completely different
directions -- erasing the mind/body distinction rather
than reinforcing it. As the complexity and
intelligence of both organic and inorganic matter
becomes increasingly apparent, the notion that the
materiality of the body renders it passive and inert
becomes increasingly redundant. And much of the
current research on neurochemistry, neural networks,
and complex systems of many kinds seems to suggest
that many of what were once thought to be idealist,
immaterial, intangible constructs are in fact the
products of extremely complex material events. Add to
these more subtle developments the possibility of
prostheses blurring the boundaries of the supposedly
natural and individuated body, and the increasing
interconnectivities of neural and information
networks, and a very different notion of the body
begins to emerge. Change comes to both the reality and
our perceptions of both sides of the equation: the
mind seems more material, and the body acquires a
sense of its own intelligence.

Switch- 1999