Constance Penley and Andrew Ross
Editors of Technoculture
INTERVIEWS BY ROBIN MOORE

I talked with Constance Penley and Andrew Ross separately, in the
virtual space of the telephone. It was decidedly low-tech, recorded
with a $3 suction-cup microphone from Radio Shack; transcribed
longhand; Macintoshed; edited via transcontinental fax.

Penley was charming and soft-spoken. Read her with a southern
accent. Widely known for her many books on film and feminism,
including Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction, she
is an editor of Camera Obscura, the nation's snappiest film/feminism
journal.  Her favorite TV shows are Roseanne, and Northern Lights,
and she dreams of one day having a show about university cultural
critics, to be titled Ivory Towers. She currently teaches at UC Santa
Barbara.

Andrew Ross looks totally cute on his hip-pomo book covers (No
Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Universal Abandon?: The
Politics of Postmodernism). In virtue reality, though disembodied, he
was equally attractive. Read him with a slightly hoarse, sickly Scottish
accent (he had the flu). I had techno-difficulties (gotta move up to the
$20 suction mike) with Andrew. "I'm going back to bed now," he said
after our interview. He teaches at Princeton.

Being a bit skiddish about interviewing "cultural critics"," they both
assured me that Technoculture was aimed at a general audience
(sub-PhD slobs like me), and that they got interviewed by "all kinds
of people" (leaving me to wonder which kind I was.). To thank them
for the interviews, I sent them each one of my signature T-shirts:
"Postmodernism? Couldn't Care Less!"

-Robin Moore 

SCIENCE IS A PRIZE IN A CEREAL BOX Penley and I started by
discussed her visit to the Biosphere II project, the subject of a chapter
in her forthcoming book on how American culture and institutions
tend to turn into science fiction or use ideas and images from science
fiction to gain cultural legitimacy. 

CONSTANCE PENLEY: Canned cultures like Biosphere II are
interesting because they are just one place where the ideology is more
important than actual information. Real science projects have to be
project themselves like this to be popular. For example, NASA has
modelled itself on Star Trek. All along they're had a hard time getting
people to support the manned space program, because all the scientists
know you get so much more information from the unmanned flights.
So they've tried to change that by tapping into people's love of Star
Trek. They named the first shuttle the Enterprise, by popular acclaim.
They hired Nichelle Nichols - Lieutenant Uhuru - to run a recruiting
program for women and minorities in the astronaut program. The
Challenger crew was modelled on a kind of Star Trek crew: a mixed
race, mixed sex crew. It all kind of blew up in their faces - literally. 

But enough about me. Now, what do you think about me?

M2: What's your take on Mondo 2000 and the whole sexification, of
technological culture?  Do you think Mondo's made high tech ideas
more accessible? Or, do you think it goes too far in glamorizing
technology?

CP: I like projects that go too far. I think it's time to froth at the
mouth. I find myself liking things these days that I normally hate...
like Oliver Stone films - ugh, he just takes important American
political events and turns them into male myths. But I loved "JFK".
This time the insanity went the right way. Right when people are
feeling Iran-Contra is never going to move and no one's ever going to
take the rap for it, here comes someone making a film and putting
movement on conspiracy, coverup, etc. Now that kind of frothing at
the mouth and being a little too shrill - I love the way it breaks the
smug complacency of what's supposed to pass for political discourse
in this country. So I see some strategic and tactical advantages to
going a little too crazy, a little too far.

M2: Do you feel Mondo achieves some of what Donna Haraway
wants in terms of visualizing ourselves in a technological future,
especially with regard to women? Does Mondo help us to open up to
a playful, oblique, more real future? 

CP: Yes, although it's not for nothing that the chapters in
Technoculture are very case-study oriented - almost anthropological
analysis of each group - ACT UP, the slash fans, hackers,...  We do it
case by case, to try to understand and make arguments for how we
might make new imaginaries of technology, new imaginaries of body
and of social formation. Just because it's different doesn't mean it's
better. We also tried in these examples to give a sense of agency, not
to celebrate the movements in and of themselves.

M2: Yes, I think you achieved that: it's clear that each group is
affecting the technology that they are also reacting to. It's not a set of
passive relationships. It's about people changing their world of and
with technological tools and ideas. Creating rather than just absorbing
culture. 

"Hey guys, what's this button?" M2: I loved it that you included the
Processed World people in Technoculture. They really have such a
great spirit - the humor and graphics. They're really underappreciated
and under- known.

CP: Oh yes, and the context was perfect.  M2: Did you know that
they're doing a project on Sex and Work? It will be any and all
intersections of sex activity, labor issues, the workplace: people who
have sex for a living, people who use work time to have sex, etc. It will
involve video and other interviews of people all around the country. 

CP: We always find issues of sexuality and sexual difference around
technology.

M2: Is that because of traditional cultural positions, or is it a natural
opposition because technology is felt to be cold... a sort of fetishism
about machines?

CP: No, it's not at all a natural opposition. I teach a science fiction
film course where right from the beginning, all kinds of anxiety about
technology gets projected onto women's bodies.  In the class we go
from Melies' Trip to the Moon, Metropolis, Forbidden Planet,
Godard's Alphaville, and through Bladerunner. Just take Metropolis:
all these fears about emerging technology get projected onto the body
of the woman becoming a robot. And the number of exploding or
radioactive women in science fiction film is phenomenal! When I was
doing all this Challenger explosion and Christa MacAuliffe research,
one of the things I was doing was collecting all the kids' sick jokes
about it. What was the very first one I heard? "What were Christa
MacAuliffe's last words?....'Hey guys, what's this button?'"

M2: It's too consistent to just be a pattern of scapegoating women...

CP: Right when technology was very much on the rise, and when
women's political power was increasing, I think was fear of technology
being out of control and fear of women being out of control - the two
get conflated.

M2: It clearly fits into Christian ideas of sin - the apple as
techno-knowledge. There's this difficult body and it's the woman's
body: it's weird, it bleeds, it does all these illogical things.  And then
you can blame anything about a machine that turns out to be illogical
- or even unpredictable by someone's faulty calculations - on the
woman's intervention. I'm interested in what you say about women's
power increasing simultaneously, because a lot of the way technology
seems to have been conceived of is as an equalizer, physically. That
strength had been one of the things that had kept women down.

CP: Well, of course, that has been shown to be absolute nonsense.

M2: Yes, but it was what people's idea was - that people with weak
muscles would have the same abilities in society, and be able to do
work which was formerly back breaking. Therefore there was this idea
that industrialized labor offered humans more opportunity, and was
somehow morally better.

CP: Household technology was certainly developed for that reason.
But now all these studies have shown that it just makes it possible for
women to do more housework! 

M2: And jobs now too!

CP: And high-tech jobs, too! When women were given a chance to
compete in that arena - when women were tested in the early phases
of the astronaut program in the 60's, they were better in every single
skill! There was a famous article in MS. magazine in 1973 about this
study which was just suppressed for years. Women had more stamina,
more dexterity, more psychological stability... every single criterion for
being an astronaut, women did better.

M2: Well you know, that's funny because everything I remember
hearing about why women weren't astronauts - "although they helped
in every other way, on the ground, etc." - was some weird thing about
menstruation! They weren't sure what impelled the flow - if gravity
was necessary. And I thought - I was 12 years old - they can send a
man to the moon, but they don't understand tampons? Wouldn't it be
worth it, on the verge of a new age, to find OUT?? 

(Footnote: (Jude - I was unable to check up on the Ms. article. But...)
Aroused by this, I called OB/GYN at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
Dr. Richard Jennings was kind enough, and frank enough, to answer
my questions. (1) He said the reason women were excluded from the
early space program was that after the basic search and tests had been
conducted, President Eisenhower decided that 1500 hours of training
at the Test Pilot school would also be required - and the academy at
that time excluded women. Of course, no one forced the academy to
start accepting women in the name of science and opportunity -
although there were Congressional hearings in the early 60s on the
subject. (2) About menstruation in space, he said "Even if there were
a problem - and there isn't - there still wouldn't be a problem." Not
only can flow be arrested with pills or endometrial fibulation
(extraction), but the imagined problems of retrograde (backflowing)
menstruation has never been found to have any consequences. "So do
they just bring tampons along on the space flights?" I asked.
"Basically, yes," he said.  (He referred me to an article he wrote on the
reproductive functions of men and women in the space environment
in Obstetrical and Gynecological Survey, vol 45, #1, p. 7. (1989) Also,
for info about the hearings, Jeri Cobb's autobiography - Women into
Space, Prentice Hall , 1963) (3) He also gave me a very interesting
history of the prejudices in aviation against women - which doubtless
were inherited by NASA. There was a series of accidents in the 1920's
involving menstruating women pilots - things like the wings of the
plane coming off. Which obviously could not have been the pilot's
fault - nevertheless these events were exploited by journalists and led
to widespread negative feelings about women in flying machines - an
irrational fear of the hex.  (references: Journal of Aviation Medicine,
vol 5, June 1934; Also same journal, December 1941, vol 12, p. 300)
(Jude - I would be happy to check up on all these references but was
unable to for various stupid reasons yet - like that the Reader's guide
to periodical lit starts with Ms only after 1974! just say the word, I can
do it all Monday - after the women's march. Or would this subject be
a good sidebar for something in a later issue?)

CP: Men should think that they might have had to pee some time -
there are fluids in their bodies, too.

M2: But I remember thinking, well it's science, it must be true. Of
course, if the study was suppressed... that's amazing. We haven't come
that far after all.

---------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew Ross

Applicator Free - Environmentally Smart M2: What do you think
about Mondo?

AR: Well I have some comments that are more or less critical in
Strange Weather, and they're mostly around the question of
humanism - a tradition that is pretty corrupted at this point.  What
Mondo preaches about are unfettered limitless possibilites of the
species, and to me that's not what I call a very socialized idea. That
kind of radical humanism is more likely to benefit a small minority
rather than the majority of the species. But I am interested especially
in Mondo's contribution to the New Age of smartness - a New Age
which is signified by the displacement of smartness onto objects - not
just smart drugs, but smart buildings, smart bombs, smart bars, smart
yellow pages, smart highways, and so on. 

M2: What were your political goals in writing Technoculture?

AR: Well we were tired of hearing, especially from the left, that
technology is hard domination. It's important that we're not under the
illusion that that's the whole story. There's a need to tell other stories,
too. There's this one story about disempowerment, which tends to
perpetuate existing power relations. It gives the powerful more power,
because it leaves the powerless feeling helpless. And that story
becomes dominant very easily. But we also felt the need to avoid the
open celebratory tone that Mondo has. We imagined most peoples'
stories were somewhat in between, and would give it a balance.
Certainly another goal was breaking open access to technologies. That
was the basic idea, and to expand the definition of technology itself -
into social and cultural practices.

Is woman the measure of all things? M2: What kind of questions
would you like to see people asking themselves in regard to their place
in technoculture? I know for myself I always compare to human scale:
does this technology help me do something I want to do? What effect
does it have on human relationships? For example, how would you
evaluate VR? Would you use a standard measure or testing stone?

AR: Virtual Reality is a good example because at the moment it has
not been decided what it's going to be used for and so there's a lot of
flak and buzz around about it. The situation is not unlike the early
development of TV technology. No one knew exactly what TV was
going to be used for either. VR has already had something of a half
life in the world of research and military development and it's
currently feeding into the special effects boom in Hollywood
entertainment. The Lawnmover Man is a good example of how
humans who don't have access to smart technology are seen as
morons who can then be transformed into omnipotent deities by
having their intelligence boosted (special warning for Mondo 2000
readers!). 

AR: One other thing that seems interesting is that if machines are
getting smarter then it's also true that they look a lot dumber. All
smart machines these days come in dumb boxes- uncommunicative
containers that say nothing about their content or their function. The
golden age of industrial design, at least from a fine art perspective, is
long gone! 

M2: At least older machines, like typewriters or ovens, had "faces" in
a human sense. Look at the old radios! There was an attempt to base
the interface on visual human analogies. In architecture, much of it
now seems to be designed in flagrant disregard of human scale - either
for expedience or for the intimidation factor.

AR: Well I think both of those are very much at work. [a short series
of beeps] Oh, my phone's running out of energy. Could you call me
back in, say, 2 minutes? [I do] Military- industrial design has long
outstripped human scale - since most information technology now is
produced for the purpose of surveillance which takes place at the same
time that it's being used. So humanism or human scale is not always
the best response to that situation. So we have to give up the idea that
the human body is the measure of all things. In addition the scale
factor is further false because our intelligence bears little relation to
that artificial intelligence installed in that smart machine. What has
happened is that the smart machinery has coopted the function of the
intellegentsia or the knowledge class in the same way that industrial
technology once coopted the know-how of artisans and laborers.
Smart, after all, is not the same as intellectual. Smartness is
cost-effective intelligence. It is planner-responsive, user- friendly, and
unerringly obedient to its programmers' design. 

M2: Whereas I think what's useful about human intelligence is the
mistakes we make on the way to finding a "solution," and the ability
to use illogic or humor or offer other questions.  How will we remind
ourselves of what technology lacks if we abandon the criteria of
humanism?

AR: Let's put it this way -I'm not suggesting abandoning the human
scale entirely, because that way lies eco-fascism and the GAIA
hypothesis - a hypothesis under which humans are no more important
as a species, and a lot more worthy as objects of genocide, than fruit
flies. On the other hand, the new measure of appropriate technology
has to involve agents other than humans. If we're going to think about
a smart world, in ways other than the definitions offered by the
designers of smart technology, then it has to be along the lines of a
model of environmental coexistence.  And politically speaking that is
what the earth summit in Rio this summer is all about.