In the following paragraphs I have collected and structured direct references from her book in in thematic contexts

 

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Fluidity

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• Virtuality brings a fluidity to identities which once had to be fixed;(Plant 1997, p.325)

• The new cyberotics engineered by the girls; the queer traits and tendencies of Generations XYZ; tie post-human experiments of dance music scenes. All New Gen and her allies are resolutely hostile to morality and do nothing but erode political power. They reprogram guilt, deny authority, confuse identity, and have no interest in the reform or redecoration of the ancient patriarchal code. (Plant 1997, p.326)

• Genders can be bent and blurred and the time-space coordinates tend to get lost (Plant 1997, p.328)

• This 'connectionist' machine is an indeterminate process, rather than a definite entity. (Plant 1997, p.329)

• Ada Lovelace wrote the software for the 1840s Analytical Engine which too was programmed by a woman, Grace Murray Hopper. (...) Unable to find the words for them (her daydreams), she programs a mathematics in which to communicate the abstraction and complexity of her thoughts. (Plant 1997, p.320/331)

• Irigaray's woman has never had a unified role: mirror, screen, commodity; means of communication and reproduction; carrier and weaver; carer and whore; machine assemblage in the service of the species; a general purpose system of simulation and self-stimulation. It may have been woman's 'fluid character which has deprived her of all possibility of identity with herself within such a logic' (lrigaray 1985b: 109), but if fluidity has been configured as a matter of deprivation and disadvantage in the past, it is a positive advantage in a feminized future for which identity is nothing more than a Iiability. Her very inability to concentrate now connects her with the parallel processings of machines which function without unified control. (Plant 1997, p.331)

• Weaving, however, is outside this narrative: there is continuity between the weaver, the weaving and the woven which gives them a connectivity which eludes all orthodox conceptions of technology. (Plant 1997, p.332)

• Queer culture converges with post-human sexualities which haven no regard for the moral code. Working patterns move from full-time, life-long, specialized careers to part time, temporary, and multi-functional formats, and the context shifts into one in which women have long had expertise. It is suddenly noticed that girls' achievements in school and higher education are far in excess of those of their male counterparts, and a new transferable intelligence begins to be valued above either the strength or single-mindedness which once gave the masculine its power and are now being downgraded and rendered obsolete. (Plant 1997, p.334)

• Instead there is a virtual reality, an emergent process for which identity is not the goal but the enemy, precisely what has kept at bay the matrix of potentialities from which women have always downloaded their roles.(Plant 1997, p.335)

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The new tactile environment

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• And multimedia provides a new tactile environment in which women artists can find their space. (Plant 1997, p.325)

• As media, tools and goods mutate, so the women begin to change, escaping their isolation and becoming increasingly interlinked. Modern feminism is marked by the emergence of networks and contacts which need no centralized organization and evade its structures of command and control. (Plant 1997, p.328)

• It also turns the computer into a complex thinking machine which converges with the operations of the human brain. Simultaneous with the Artificial Intelligence and computer science programmes which have led to such developments, research in the neuro-sciences moves towards materialist conceptions of the brain as a complex, connective, distributed machine. Neural nets are distributed systems which function as analogues of the brain and can learn, think, 'evolve' and 'live'. (Plant 1997, p.329)

• Unlike previous machines, which tend to have some single purpose, the computer functions as a general purpose system which can, in effect, do anything. (Plant 1997, p.320)

• As images migrate from canvas to film and finally on to the digital screen, what was once called art mutates into a matter of software engineering. Digital art takes the image beyond even its mechanical reproduction, eroding orthodox conceptions of originals and originality. And just as the image is reprocessed, so it finds itself embroiled in a new network of connections between words, music and architectures which diminishes the governing role it once played in the specular economy. (Plant 1997, p.332)

• Communication cannot be caught by the gaze, but is always a matter of getting in touch, a question of contact, contagion, transmission, reception and connectivity. (Plant 1997, p.332)

• Women are at the cutting edge of experimentation in these zones.(Plant 1997, p.333)

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Patriarchy

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• (Complex systems) undermine both the world-view and the material reality of two thousand years of patriarchal control.(Plant 1997, p.325)

• Patriarchy needs to contain and control what it understands as 'woman' and 'the" feminine', but it cannot do without them: indeed, as its media' means of communication, reproduction and exchange, women are the very fabric of its culture, the material precondition of the world it controls. (Plant 1997, p.327)

• Exclusively anthropomorphic perspective world-view revolves around the interests of man. Conceived as the products, of his genius and as means to his o'w'n ends, even complex machines are understood to be tools and mediations which allow a unified, discreet human agency to interact with an inferior natural world.

• As the activities which have been monopolized by male conceptions of creativity and artistic genius now extend into the new multimedia and interactive spaces of the digital arts, women are at the cutting edge of experimentation in these zones. (Plant 1997, p.333)

• What man has named as his history was supposed to function as the self narrating story of a drive for domination and escape from the earth; a passage from carnal passions to self-control; a journey from the strange fluidities of the material to the self-identification of the soul. Driven by dreams of taming nature and so escaping its constraints, technical development has always invested in unification, light and flight, the struggle for enlightenment, a dream of escaping from the meat. (Plant 1997, p.334)

• Those who still cherish the patriarchal dream see cyberspace as a new zone of hope for a humanity which wants to be freed from the natural trap, escaping the body and sliding into an infinite, transcendent and perfect other world. But the matrix is neither heaven, nor even a comforting return to the womb. (Plant 1997, p.335)

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Further research

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• Cyberfeminism / A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century

• Hypermedia / Hyperrealtactility 

• Beth Stryker's Cyberqueer, Faultlines from Ingrid Bachmann and Barbara Layne. In the UK, Orphan Drift ride a wave of writing, digital art, film and music. In Australia, Linda Dement's Typhoid Mary and Cyberfesh Girlmonster put blood, guts and visceral infections on to her tactile multimedia screens. The French artist Orlan slides her body into cyberspace. (Plant 1997, p.333)

 

The woman as a stereotyp

 

• And without this one (the man), as Irigaray writes, hysteria 'is all she has left'. This, or mimicry, or catatonic silence. Either way, woman is left without the senses of self and identity which accrue to the masculine. (Plant 1997, p.327)

• But always in relation to a sacrosanct conception of a male identity which women can either accept, adapt to, or refuse altogether. Only Irigaray and even then, only in some of her works - begins to suggest that there really is no point in pursuing the masculine dream of self-contiol, self-iclentification, self-knowledge and self determination.(Irigaray 1985, p.133/ Plant 1997, p.327)

• There is a long history of such intimate and influential connections between women and modernity´s machines. (Plant 1997, p.320)

• Neural nets function in intuitive leaps and cross-connections which characterize what has been pathologized as hysteria in women (by Freud). (Plant 1997, p.331)

• Weaving is the exemplary case of a denigrated female craft which now turns out to be intimately connected to the history of computing and the digital technologies. (Plant 1997, p.332)

• Digitization sets zero free to stand for nothing and make everything work. (...) It neither counts nor represents, but with digitization it proliferates, replicates and undermines the privilege of one. (Plant 1997, p.333)

• In Greek, the word for womb is hysteria; in Latin, it is matrix, or matter, both the mother and the material (Plant 1997, p.333).

• She is in the process, turned on with the machines (Plant 1997, p.335).

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