Page 175 - Cyberculture and New Media

166 Cyborg Goddesses: The Mainframe Revisited
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This is a concealment on which man insists: this is the
denial of matter that has made his culture—and his
technologies possible. For Irigaray, this flight from the
material is also an escape from the mother. Looking back
on his origins, man sees only the flaw, the incompletion,
the wound, a void. This is the site of life, of reproduction,
of materiality, but it is also horrible and empty, the great
embarrassment, the unforgivable slash across an otherwise
perfect canvas. And so it must be covered, and woman put
on display as the veils that conceal her: she becomes the
cover girl, star of the screen. Like every good commodity,
she is packaged and wrapped to facilitate easy exchange
and consumption. But as her own veils she is already
hyperreal: her screens conceal only the flaw, the void, the
unnatural element already secreted within and as nature.
She has to be covered, not simply because she is too
natural, but because she would otherwise reveal the
terrifying virtuality of the natural. Covered up, she is
always already the epitome of artifice. Implicit in Irigaray’s
work is the suggestion that the matter denied by human
culture is a virtual system, which subtends its extension in
the form of nature. The virtual is the abstract machine from
which the actual emerges; nature is already the camouflage
of matter, the veils that conceal its operations. There is
indeed nothing there, underneath or behind this disguise, or
at least nothing actual, nothing formed. Perhaps this is
nature as the machinic phylum, the virtual synthesizer;
matter as a simulation machine, and nature as its
actualization. What man sees is nature as extension and
form, but this sense of nature is simply the camouflage, the
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veil again, which conceals its virtuality.

In addition, Plant recognizes and glorifies the feminine within the
scientific community, while being wary of her overall interactions with this
masculine culture. However, as the next quotation indicates, Plant recognizes
the “complexity” of the feminine, which distinguishes her from the
masculine:

Cybernetic systems are fatal to his culture; they invade as a
return of the repressed, but what returns is no longer the
same: cybernetics transforms woman and nature, but they
do not return from man’s past, as his origins. Instead, they
come around to face him, wheeling round from his future,