Searching for Sadie Plant
Over at the blog for the upcoming nonhuman turn conference Rebekah Sheldon has a post on nonhuman thought entitled “Affect, Epistemology, and the Nonhuman Turn” which is interesting for several reasons. For one, it questions the issue of the status of human thinking in the nonhuman turn especially the assumption that thought is given access and power that it might not have. Sheldon critiques epistemology but in a way that seems to quickly redraw empiricism. Jussi Parikka has a fairly recent post which also notes Karen Barad and also discusses an interview with Grosz (available here) which discusses the importance of epistemological problems.
A related issue is a certain slide of ontological terms particularly between the terms agency and intentionality and whether these relate in any direct sense to access. To have access to something is traditionally an epistemological issue but, more and more, it seems that access denotes an exchange of experience, affect or is merely a different term for relation. To know something (in an epistemological frame) already seems too anthrocentric or too stuffy but this kind of methodology seems important for discussing the larger issue of relating to being and knowing.
What both these posts clear (and was highlighted for me by a facebook discussion with Michael O’Rourke) is that a lot of women thinkers had interesting pre-SR concerns but without the appropriate attention. One also has to take note of Sadie Plant (the central force behind the CCRU – the prehistorical reactor of Speculative Realism which I also discussed here and here) and her absence. Where are you Sadie Plant?
Filed under: Deleuze, feminism, gender, Speculative Realism | 3 Comments
Tags: ccru, epistemology, Grosz, Sadie Plant
Naught Thought 
Every book she has written is pure gold. I wish she was still writing.
Great blog post. I may be able to answer some of your questions. During my revival of the mid-90’s Cyberconference, Virtual Futures, I uncovered alot of Sadie’s work including this VHS:
The panel is, “Replicunts: The Future of Cyberfeminism” (recorded at the Virtual Futures Conference, University of Warwick – 1995).
It would be great to connect and talk about the current archival project Dan O’Hara and I are working on bringing together the history of Cyberculture. Understandably the CCRU is a sensitive topic – but drop me a line and I will see what I can send you.
Luke Robert Mason