Sadie Plant (1964 - )
Related: British literature - philosophy
Topics: post-feminism - drugs in literature - situationism
The critic Sadie Plant argues that later theories of postmodernism, particularly those of Baudrillard and Lyotard, owe much to Debord's theory, and represent an apolitical appropriation of its criticism of the unreality of life under late capitalism. [Aug 2006]
A short bio
Sadie Plant was born in Birmingham, UK in 1964, and read Philosophy at Manchester University. She graduated with a First Class Honours degree in 1985, and completed her PhD in 1989. After working as Post-doctoral Research Assistant at Queen Mary and Westfield College, she was appointed Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1990. Her first book, The Most Radical Gesture, The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, was published by Routledge in 1992. In 1995, she was appointed Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she established the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit.
In 1997, she left the University of Warwick to write full-time. Zeros and Ones, Digital Women and the New Technoculture, was published by Fourth Estate in London, and Doubleday in New York, and her most recent book, Writing on Drugs, was published in 1999 by Faber and Faber in London, and in 2000 by Farrar Straus and Giroux in New York. Sadie Plant has published articles in publications as varied as the Financial Times, Wired, Blueprint, and Dazed and Confused. Her work has been discussed in much of the UK press and several overseas newspapers and journals. Most recently she was named as one of the "People to Watch" in the Winter 2000/2001 issue of Time.
Wikipedia
Dr. Sadie Plant (b. 1964) is a British author and philosopher, native of Birmingham, England. She graduated from the University of Manchester with her Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1989, then went on to found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, where she was a faculty member. She left academia in the early 1990s to pursue writing. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadie_Plant [May 2006]
Sadie Plant on women
"It is an interesting observation that a culture that seems so bent on standardisation, centralisation, hierarchies, etc. - the computer being the epitome of all that - should be developping into a culture which seems to demand quite the opposite. Suddenly, the skills which have been promoted so much in the past - that is a straightforward and very logical way of thinking , i.e. the classic male thinking - begins to become quite dysfunctional." -- Sadie Plant in Fringecore magazine Aug/Sept 98
Books
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Writing on Drugs (1999) - Sadie Plant [Amazon.com]
In this exhilarating literary exploration, Sadie Plant traces the history of drugs and drug use through the work of some of our most revered, and infamous, writers. Rather than exploring drug use as an avenue to spiritual transcendence, Plant focuses on the way that drugs themselves make precise, recognizable interventions in consciousness, in cultural life, in politics. She argues that the use, production, and trafficking of drugs--narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens--have shaped some of the era's most fundamental philosophies and provided much of its economic wealth. "The reasons for the laws and the motives for the wars, the nature of the pleasures and the trouble drugs can cause, the tangled webs of chemicals, the plants, the brains, machines: ambiguity surrounds them all. Drugs shape the laws and write the very rules they break, they scramble all the codes and raise the stakes of desire and necessity, euphoria and pain, normality, perversion, truth, and artifice again." [...] -
The Most Radical Gesture () - Sadie Plant [Amazon.com]
Here to help is a book which retraces the history of the radical fringe movements which sprung up in Europe from the horrid experience of WWI (and its antecedents) and continued through the century. The Most Radical Gesture starts with DADA, concerned with what we would call déconstruction* today. deconstruction of language, thought processes, images, art, literature, etc...Next, this book takes us on a magical history tour of surrealism, structuralism and finally the Situationist International which is the core of the book, both because of its roots in the preceding movements and its influences on postmodernism - Sadie Plant - Zeros and Ones [Amazon.com]
Not since The Female Eunuch has there been a book so radical in its scope, so persuasive in its detail, so exhilarating in its polemical energy. Beginning with Ada Lovelace and her unheralded contributions to Charles Babbage and his development of the Difference Engine, Sadie Plant traces the critical contributions women have made to the progress of computing. Shattering the myth that women are victims of technological change, Zeros + Ones shows how women and women's work in particular--weaving and typing, computing and telecommunicating--have been tending the machinery of the digital age for generations, the very technologies that are now revolutionizing the Western world.
In this bold manifesto on the relationship between women and machines, Sadie Plant explores the networks and connections implicit in nonlinear systems and digital machines. Steering a course beyond the old feminist dichotomies, Zeros + Ones is populated by a diverse chorus of voices--Anna Freud, Mary Shelley, Alan Turing--conceived as exploratory bundles of intelligent matter, emergent entities hacking through the constraints of their old programming and envisioning a postpatriarchal future.
Astonishing, inspiring, witty, and perverse, Zeros + Ones is a love song to Ada, a soundtrack for the next millennium, a radical revision of our technoculture that will forever change the way we perceive our digital world. -- blurb