The notion of artificial general intelligence has taken on an almost mythic significance in accelerationist discourse, both left and right. I will try to analyse and plot this notion’s political coordinates, in a space that has, with somewhat different and sometimes conflicting ends, been mapped out by cyberfeminist research (by Alison Adam and Sarah Kember, for instance). The idea that artificial intelligence seems to crystallize, for many accelerationists, is something like an “emancipation of intelligence”, as Nick Land once put it. The forking of accelerationism into the left and right spectra can be seen as so many ways of articulating this idea and forging it into a programme: whether in the form of a neoreactionary demand for private exit (AGI as a line of flight), or the form of a cybersocialist push towards the rational social cognition (AGI as Geist).
The question for today, though, is: what should this idea – an emancipation of intelligence as crystallized in the notion of AGI – mean for feminism? How should feminism orient itself with respect to this idea? Cyberfeminism’s exploratory critiques of AI research and development (Alison Adam, Sarah Kember) are crucial in helping us get our bearings here, but the long game, the end we have in sight, is the one set in Shulamith Firestone’s searing manifesto of 1970, The Dialectic of Sex. There, she draws the skeleton of an uncompromisingly promethean feminism, which hinges on a strict normative antinaturalism: “Nature” shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever.
The emancipation of intelligence, for Xenofeminism, is continuous with the project of the enlightenment, understood as a thoroughgoing desacralization of nature, which itself is inseparable from a long-term project of gender abolitionism: the destruction of sexual difference’s political significance. This is the endgame xenofeminism has in sight, and the keystone joining cyberfeminist and transfeminist concerns with Firestone’s unrelenting radicalism. This presentation will try to lay some of the groundwork for these interconnected projects.