Text page
The Good, the Bad, and the Productive
"The Good, the Bad, and the Productive" 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 4
These are the abstract terms favored by, for example, Foucault's writing on power and resistance, and Deleuze and Guattari's vocabulary of energies and forces, stratification and destratification, territorialization and deterritorialization. These tendencies are neither good nor bad, but rather productive or obstructive.
Definition · paragraph 4
These tendencies are neither good nor bad, but rather productive or obstructive. They either tend to promote the possibility of some emergent activity not legislated in advance, or they work to containing all activity, regardless of whether it is defined as ethical or artistic, into the categories and boundaries of an old and stifling world.
Mechanism · paragraph 2
The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because... it wants to take power. And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be just." [3] It may well be tactically useful, and even crucial, to invoke some notion of justice or the good.
Stakes · paragraph 1
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/19990209060239/http://muu.lib.hel.fi:80/me/texts/plant.… The Good, the Bad, and the Productive Sadie Plant | abstract | text | links | program | index | home | Abstract: The proliferation of new technologies and media has been accompanied by many new ethical questions, and also an unprecedented sense of crisis about the very foundations of Western morality itself.
Stakes · paragraph 2
And because it will overthrow the power of the ruling class, it considers such a war to be just." [3] It may well be tactically useful, and even crucial, to invoke some notion of justice or the good. But these matters of principle are not the prerequisites of what Foucault here defined as social struggle. They are epiphenomena, side-effects, subroutines of far more immediate concerns and pragmatic demands.
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.