Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti
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and class relations. What is a critical feminist to make of a hegemonic model of equality that is ethnically indexed and biased in favour of white, professional heterosexual women? Can such a model be equated with emancipation? Or is it just a reconfiguration of a racialized and sexualized class division of labour that upholds capitalist inequalities and reasserts traditional gender roles? The neoliberal feminist rides this hyper-individualistic wave and is willing to accept that the price for her individual freedom is a new system of class-stratified and racialized labour relations that put other women in charge of domestic and caring tasks. The wages thus paid exonerate neoliberal feminists from further solidarity or social criticism.
Just how superficial the social transformations actually are and the shallowness of the cultural and political changes they enact was exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. During the long periods of lockdown at home, the female workforce and women in general reverted to traditional roles as caretakers of the young and the elderly and as primarily responsible for household tasks. The scholarly output of female academics collapsed, whereas that of male academics actually increased. In other words, the underlying patriarchal cultural infrastructure and the traditional divisions of labour were still in place and ready to be reactivated. Meanwhile, in the surrogacy clinics scattered on the margins of the Western world, carrying mothers were waiting for the purchasing parents to pick up their deliveries, which were delayed by the global lockdown (Grytsenko, 2020).
It is important to note that the cartography of advanced capitalism provided by posthuman feminism engages with exactly the same historical conditions that fuel neoliberalism. These are the productive as well as problematic aspects of ubiquitous technological mediation; the depth and scale of environmental devastation; the socio-economic inequalities; and the misogynist, sexist, homo- and trans-phobic character of populist rage. If some of the diagnosis matches, the political response could not be more different. Posthuman feminism pursues a radical critique not only of liberal individualism, but also, as I will show in the next section, the cruel delusions of cognitive capitalism.
Neo-socialist Feminism and the Mutations of Capitalism
Socialist feminism opposes step-by-step the aims and political agenda of neoliberal feminism and ends up being a reverse image of it. From a posthuman feminist perspective, socialist feminism relies on a slightly outdated reading of capitalism, or rather focuses on familiar negative aspects of this new economy. This is a limited and limiting approach, which still has the advantage of foregrounding issues of labour relations and economic disparities, but fails to understand the extent of the technological apparatus and how it reshapes the new economy. As Donna Haraway puts it: ‘the tendency of the political “left” … to collapse molecular genetics, biotechnology, profit, and exploitation into one undifferentiated mass is at least as much of a mistake as the mirror-image reduction by the “right” of biological – or informational – complexity to the gene and its avatars, including the dollar’ (1997: 62).
Neo-socialist feminists, not unlike LGBTQ+, Indigenous, decolonial and anti-racist scholars, have focused on the fractures and injustices of the capitalist system. They have argued forcefully that since the first industrial revolution, human lives have been organized according to sexualized, racialized and naturalized hierarchies that made many of them disposable, exploitable and dispensable. They were sacrificed at the altar of Western modernity. These injustices continue, and even get exacerbated, but in a system that has mutated into a non-linear, post-industrial, global circulation of often immaterial capital.
The fourth industrial revolution is driven by advanced technologies and automation. More specifically, it marks the convergence between previously distinct branches of technology, notably bio-genetics, neural sciences, information technologies and AI, nanotechnologies and the Internet of Things. It has come to indicate the relative marginalization of human intervention in this smart technological universe run by machine-to-machine communication. Previously inanimate objects, now technologically enhanced, become data-collecting and retrieving devices, or ‘smart’ things.
In a posthuman feminist perspective, the post-industrial economy of today is driven by cognitive capitalism and the neoliberal economic system that supports it. It continues to draw profits from raw materials and is thus ‘fossil capital’ (Malm, 2016). It also continues the inhumane exploitation of labour and perpetuates patterns of sexualized and racialized oppression. In addition, however, it also profits from the production of de-materialized items, such as information, data, bits and bytes of codes that transfer massive amounts of material across the global economy. It has therefore evolved into ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek, 2016). The financial system runs on advanced computational networks, alongside other marketable forms of information and ever-smarter platforms. It has therefore become ‘cognitive capitalism’ (Moulier-Boutang, 2012). Among the tradeable financial commodities there is credit, which engenders ever-growing debts (Lazzarato, 2012). This system also doubles as a massive, militarized ‘surveillance capitalism’ apparatus (Zuboff, 2019), notably in immigration and border control.
Capitalism proved far more flexible and adaptable towards the proliferation of differences than the Marxist Left expected. It has gone post-binary, schizoid and slightly delirious in its aspirations to break the boundaries of everything that lives (Cooper, 2008). The differences that used to be pitched as dualistic dialectical opposites – racialized, sexualized and naturalized – are now delinked from their oppositional attachment to a single unit or standard, like ‘Man’. They have become rhizomatic, multi-dimensional and scattered in an unpredictable and often imperceptible manner. When it comes to items of consumption, they have been inserted into a global flow of distributed, marketable and disposable commodities.
A significant proportion of capitalism today, however, is immaterial in that it rests on the flow of data and informational capital. Contemporary capital has perfected the capitalization of knowledge about living systems, also known as ‘cognitive’ capitalism (Moulier-Boutang, 2012). Years before this hype, Donna Haraway (1985) had already labelled it ‘the informatics of domination’. This type of knowledge is drawn from technoscientific practices extracting the informational power of living systems, both organic and inorganic. How to profit from the generational power and self-organizational vitality of matter is the name of the capitalist game today. This is the political economy of ‘biocapital’ (Rajan, 2006), that produces the ‘politics of Life itself’ (Rose, 2007), or ‘Life as surplus’ (Cooper, 2008). In her work on the Visible Human Project,9 Catherine Waldby (2000) introduced the related term ‘biovalue’ to designate the extraction of surplus value from biological matter by contemporary technoscience and its capitalist enablers.
As Bhattacharyya (2018) suggests, for an economy based on the politics of life, those who stand as targets of necro-politics do not qualify as labour reserves: they may not be mobile enough, not be qualified or – as the South Korean film maker Bong Joon-ho points out in the remarkable 2019 film Parasite – they may just not smell right. The suppression of human labour, that is to say of disposable bodies, is a qualitative change: ‘to be rendered surplus is not to be paid less, it is to be left dying or for dead’ (Bhattacharyya, 2018: 20). It operates by de-skilling, exploiting and eliminating various sources of waged labour. The dehumanizing tendency built into capitalism is accelerating in the posthuman convergence, as an ongoing form of dispossession.
From the posthuman perspective, therefore, the sacrificial logic is far from over because entire populations are handed over to risk analyses through genetic screening, used as clinical labour, exploited by the neoliberal austerity measures, and exposed to the ravages of climate change, the violence of forced migration, expulsion and dispossession (Sassen, 2014). The ‘wrath of capital’, as Parr rightly names it (2013) upholds discriminatory distinctions between valuable and disposable bodies and dehumanized and devalorized subjects. At the height of the second feminist wave, in 1971, D’Amico spoke up on behalf of these marginalized subjects (D’Amico 2000 [1971]: 52): ‘We are the invisible women, the faceless women, the nameless women … We are the poor and working class white women of America, and we are cruelly and systematically ignored. All our lives we have been told, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so subtly, that we are not worth very much.’ Nowadays as ever, women, LGBTQ+ people, undocumented migrants,