Text page
Scrap Metal and Fabric
"Scrap Metal and Fabric" 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 2
And it begins, like all good conspiracy theories, with a prophecy. [0] Prophecy In the enigmatic closing line of Zeros + Ones, Sadie Plant refers to Ada Lovelace's quiet development of the world's first working, fully implementable, computer program in Scrap Metal And Fabric ― 59 '
Definition · paragraph 16
That alone is urban flourishing, and understanding it is the key that unlocks the shape of any city’s future.23 One might therefore fairly conjecture that patchwork’s minimal ethical norm is one that selects against top-down, ‘patriarchal’, homogenous, regulated and controlled Scrap Metal And Fabric ― 73
Definition · paragraph 8
Patchwork is ‘literally a Riemannian space, or vice versa’.10 [4] Politics The best way to understand the difference between the political implications of these two polar descriptions of space is to understand them as an extensive multiplicity and an intensive multiplicity respectively. Striated space is an extensive multiplicity: a set predefined by a homogenous metric in which additions of new elements do not alter the quality or the definition of the set, but Scrap Metal And Fabric ― 65
Definition · paragraph 2
The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of worldwide organization, but also of a counter- attack combining the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant.
History · paragraph 18
Scrap Metal And Fabric ― 75 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987) 531. 2 Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1997) 256.
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.