Text page
Pre Face or How to Begin at the End
"Pre Face or How to Begin at the End" develops the cyberfeminist line by tying gender, media systems, writing, and synthetic culture into one technical field.
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
The page matters because cyberfeminism here is not an add-on to the archive's better-known themes. It is one of the places where circuitry, writing, labor, and gender are made to reorganize what counts as a subject or a system.
These texts work by making cultural criticism, theory, and technical description contaminate each other. The result is a model of subjectivity produced through networks, codes, and infrastructural mediation rather than grounded in stable identity.
That matters because the archive's human/machine problem changes once it is read through Plant, Parisi, and later xenofeminist debate. The future stops looking like a neutral technical horizon and becomes a struggle over who or what gets composed by it.
How to read this text
Read for where writing, labor, media, or embodiment are described as technical arrangements rather than background topics. That is where the page usually sharpens.
Keep an eye on how the page positions itself against humanist or moralizing accounts of technology. The section's strongest interventions are usually anti-essentialist and infrastructural at once.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
01 English Castellano PRE FACE: Or How to Begin at the End Amy Ireland Distinctions between the main bodies of texts and all their peripheral detail —indices, headings, prefaces, dedications, illustrations, references, notes, and diagrams—have long been integral to orthodox conceptions of nonfiction books and articles.
Definition · paragraph 3
Othered in advance, it is this corrupt, feminised, systematicity that patriarchal systems of control and identification are premised on, and yet it is always repressed and subordinated in its role as facilitator, lubricant, or medium for the masculine sociality and parameters of exchange that rely on it for infrastructure. Women and machines, Plant argues, have historically shared the ghostlike position of the intermediary.
Definition · paragraph 7
Heracles has encountered the form of the secret. The jungle is also, in its double temporality—at once ahead and behind, at the beginning and also the end—an image of the future itself: a shifting ‘X on a mobile map’, an index of a truly ‘alien future’.
Definition · paragraph 4
8 Lovelace too, for all her brilliance, was deemed by contemporary medicine to be a victim of hysteria, a so-called nervous disorder afflicting only women, and apparently due to perambulations of the womb or matrix, leading to an inability to concentrate and a lack of constancy.
History · paragraph 8
Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 18. ↩ 2. Sadie Plant, ‘The Future Looms’, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk (Los Angeles: Sage, 1996), 46. ↩ 3. Plant, Zeros + Ones, 27; Plant, ‘The Future Looms’, 46. ↩ 4.
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.