Text page
Plant - Coming Across the Future (1998)
"Plant - Coming Across the Future (1998)" treats bodies, matter, and sensation as technical processes, refusing the split between lived embodiment and synthetic mediation.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages argue that subjectivity is composed through technical and material processes rather than being a self-identical human essence that technology later disturbs. Event, affect, and becoming are all understood as already engineered conditions.
The key mechanism is to treat bodies as processual assemblages. Biology, information, affect, and machinic form are made to communicate so that embodiment appears dynamic, distributed, and recursively produced.
That matters because the cyberfeminist line in this archive is strongest where it rewrites what a subject is. The question is not merely women and machines, but how technical matter rearranges agency and experience from the start.
How to read this text
Read for where bodily or sexual difference is recast as technical process rather than symbolic category. That is usually where the page becomes most distinctive.
Track how materiality is made active. The strongest passages are the ones where sensation, matter, and abstraction are allowed to co-produce each other.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
C h a p t e r 29 SADIE PLANT COMING ACROSS THE FUTURE IRTUAL SEX HAS BEEN DEFINED AS.SAfC AS WCII AS fiIthT" ANd Y "p as the epitome of disembodied pleasure, contact-free sex without secre u ,or-r" of total autonomy.
Definition · paragraph 1
C h a p t e r 29 SADIE PLANT COMING ACROSS THE FUTURE IRTUAL SEX HAS BEEN DEFINED AS.SAfC AS WCII AS fiIthT" ANd Y "p as the epitome of disembodied pleasure, contact-free sex without secre u ,or-r" of total autonomy. A safe environment free from the side-effects and cc tions of actual intercourse: transmittable diseases, conceptions and abortions. and sad obligations of emotional need.
Definition · paragraph 4
COMING ACROSS THE FUTURE 463 the time of the Grceks'. And it 'u,ould undoubtedly have a dilferent alphabet, a different language. Woman's desire w-ould not be expcctcd to speak the same languagc as man's' (lrigarav 1985: 25).
Definition · paragraph 8
COMING ACROSS THE FUTURE 467 of a discourse which admits nothing beyond subjection, a perspective which cannot accept any other relation (or, rather, can accept nothing but relations). Once you knou. it's a video game, it gets much harder to plav along. 0riginally published in J.
Definition · paragraph 6
COMING ACROSS THE FUTURE 465 It is Foucault's 'something unnameablc', 'useless', outside of all the Programmes of desire. It is the bodv made totally plastic bv pleasure: 'something that opens itself, that tightens, that throbs, that beats, that gapes' (Miller 1993: 274).lt is, writes Freud, 'as tho-ugh the rvatchman over our mental life u.ere put out of action by a drug' (Freud 1984: 413). 'l stripped the rvill and the person liom vou like collars and-chains' (Lingis 1994: 61).
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.