Volume 098 min read
Sadie Plant
Module II · The Group
Objective
By the end of this volume you understand the thinker who gave the CCRU its first impulse. You know what her cyberfeminism claimed, why she read the digital upheaval as a female affair, and what independent thesis she developed about the kinship of woman, weaving, and machine. At the same time you grasp why her departure marks the decisive turn of the group. With that you hold the beginning of the CCRU before it tips, in Volume 10, into its darker continuation.
Exposition
Sadie Plant is the founding figure, and yet in the memory of the CCRU she is often overshadowed by Nick Land. That's an injustice you should correct, because without Plant there is no group, and her thinking has a tone of its own that differs markedly from what came later. She was the driving force of the first phase, the one who created the institutional frame and set the intellectual direction. Her work is brighter, more hopeful, more political than what followed. Where Land pulled towards the abyssal, Plant saw in the same technological upheaval a chance for liberation.
Her field was cyberfeminism. The term joins two movements of the early nineties, feminism and the euphoria over the emerging digital world. Cyberfeminism is the conviction that the digital revolution and the emancipation of women belong together internally, that the new technological age could break open the old orders between the sexes and clear women a path into the open. At a time when the internet was young and charged with utopian hope, this was an obvious and at once a bold connection. Plant gave it a theoretical depth going beyond mere optimism.
Her principal work is titled Zeros and Ones and appeared in 1997. The title points to binary code, the zeros and ones from which all digital information is made. Plant read those two digits at the same time as signs of gender. The one, upright and single, stands in inherited symbolism for the masculine, for the one, the whole, the self. The zero, open and empty, counted for the tradition as the feminine, as nothing, absence, mere lack. The Western order has always thought the woman as the other of the man, as lack, as what is missing from him. You recognise here the figure of lack that you met in Deleuze and Guattari, now applied to gender.
Plant's move consists in inverting that valuation. The zero is not mere nothing but the condition of the whole system. Without the zero there is no binary code, no digital world, no calculating machine. What tradition devalued as emptiness turns out to be the actual ground. The supposedly feminine, the open, the apparently absent, carries the new technological reality. Out of the position of lack comes the position of enabling. That revaluation is Plant's independent contribution, and it follows the same movement you have seen again and again in the foundation, the inversion of the sign that turns a supposed deficit into a productive force.
A second thought deepens that thesis and gives it historical substance. Plant connected woman with machine over a surprising bridge, weaving. She recalled that weaving had always counted as women's work and that the loom was the first programmable machine in history. The mechanical loom with its punched cards controlling the pattern is regarded as a forerunner of the computer. The punched card telling the loom which threads to lift is the ancestor of the punched card that later ran the calculating machine. In that line Plant saw a hidden history in which the feminine and the machinic are interwoven from the start. Woman doesn't stand outside the history of technology but at its origin.
Plant carried that connection further to a historical figure who became her key witness, Ada Lovelace. Lovelace, an English mathematician of the nineteenth century, worked on an early mechanical calculating machine and wrote instructions many regard as the first computer program in history. For Plant, Lovelace was the proof of her thesis. At the cradle of the computer stood a woman. Programming, that apparently masculine domain, had a female origin. From threads like these Plant wove a counter-history of technology in which the feminine is not the excluded but the repressed, now surfacing again with the digital age.
Hold on to the character of this thinking, because it differs essentially from what follows. Plant's cyberfeminism is at core a theory of liberation. It sees in technological upheaval an emancipatory force, a chance to dissolve old relations of domination. The underlying mood is affirmative, turned outward, oriented on an open future. At the same time Plant shares essential traits with the later CCRU, the interest in self-organisation and feedback, the fascination with the dissolution of fixed identities, the closeness to Deleuze and Guattari. She stands with one foot in the bright cyber-optimism of the nineties and with the other already in the darker, machinic thinking that will shape the group later. She is the hinge between the two.
Now to the turn, because here lies the biographical pivot of the whole story. Plant left the academic world and the CCRU towards the end of the nineties. The reasons were various and partly personal, partly they lay in the increasing friction with the institution and in her own development. With her departure the centre of gravity shifted to Nick Land. What had begun as a cyberfeminist, emancipatory project took on a different colour, grew more radical, darker, aimed less at liberation than at unbinding. The bright tone gave way to an abyssal one. That shift is not merely a change of personnel but a change in the whole sign of the group. The CCRU that entered the history of theory is predominantly the CCRU after Plant, the Land CCRU. But its foundation, its first language, its institutional existence, it owes to its founder.
One last thought does justice to Plant. Her work stands on its own even without the later CCRU. Zeros and Ones is an influential book of cyberfeminism that helped found an entire direction of thought. Plant later distanced herself from some of what became of the group and went her own way. It would be a mistake to read her only as a prelude to Land. She is a thinker with a thesis, a tone, a contribution of her own. That memory often places her in the shadow says more about the fascination of the abyssal than about the weight of her work.
Core Claim
Sadie Plant founded the CCRU and gave it its first impulse with cyberfeminism. In Zeros and Ones she read the digital revolution as a female affair, inverted the devaluation of the feminine as lack into a position of enabling, and joined woman, weaving, and machine into a counter-history of technology. Her thinking is a bright theory of liberation, and her departure marks the turn at which the group took on its darker shape.
The Critic
Reading the zero as a feminine sign is a symbolic reading and not an analysis. It works because Western symbolism is rich enough to support any desired assignment. You could with equal warrant read the one as feminine, as the upright, the bearing, the one from which everything comes, and the reading would be just as coherent and just as arbitrary. Where every assignment can be grounded, none grounds anything. Binary code moreover knows no zero and no one, it knows two distinguishable states, and their digit names are a convention of notation.
The Lovelace account is historically contested. How much of the notes in question goes back to her and how much to Babbage has been the subject of a decades-long argument in which both sides claim more than the sources give. The title of first programmer in history is an attribution of the twentieth century, not a fact of the nineteenth. Plant uses a figure that works as a symbol and not as evidence.
Heaviest of all is the verdict of time. Cyberfeminism bet on a technology that was supposed to dissolve the gender order, and the bet is lost. The network did not dissolve the order, it reinforced it, it produced new forms of harassment, and the industry that builds it is today more male than the economy's average. That disappointment doesn't devalue Plant's book, but it puts its founding assumption in question. And it throws a light on Land that one acknowledges reluctantly. The bright branch and the dark one share the same presupposition, that technology is the decisive subject of history. Plant hoped for it, Land bet on it. Both may have been mistaken about the same thing.
Bridge to the Next Volume
With Plant's departure the man took over whose name is today inseparable from the CCRU. Nick Land drove the group's thinking to its extreme, into a style and a radicality that fascinated and disturbed. Volume 10 turns to him, his turn, his style, and his radicalisation, and thereby exposes the centre around which the later theory volumes circle.