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RUSSIAN CYBER-JOUISSANCE:

A SKETCH FORA
POLITICS OF PLEASURE

In this work | am attempting to outline a politics of pleasure for/as Russian (cyber)feminist(s). Mainly | base my ap-
proach on Foucault's “ethics of the self" and Irigaray's “ethics of sexual difference", also influenced by works of
Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Lou Andreas-Salome and cyberfeminists. My main argument is that cyberspace can be
explored and created as a source of pleasure for and among women, as a means to share female genealogy based on
embodied subjectivity, and that would imply an invention of new forms of politicization. Cyber-politics

Cyberspace is as much a web of power relations as other spaces, and it plays out existing gender politics. In his work
on communicative action, Habermas applied democratic liberal principles to the realm of communication, suggesting
that there can be a future with an “equal access to communication”. Foucault is strongly against such utopian futures:
“The idea that there could exist a state of communication that would allow games of truth to circulate freely, without
any constrains or coercive effects, seems utopian to me. This is precisely a failure to see that power relations are not
something that is bad in itself, that we have to break free of. | do not think that a society can exist without power re-
lations, if by that one means strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others. The prob-
lem, then, is not to try to dissolve them in the utopia of completely transparent communication, but to acquire the
tules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us
to play these games of power with as little domination as possible" (Foucault, 1996: 446-7).

| would like to stress a need for such new forms of feminist power games, and argue that cyberfeminism is in a spe-
cial position here. Cyberspace as a political place which is new, still in the process of establishing itself and con-
trolled differently from, say, Academia, is and can be effectively used for feminist politics. It is also necessary to
stress here that politicization of cyberspace can benefit from already existing spaces of established relations by
women and among women - arts and feminist political activity, for example. Now we must politicise cyberspace by
creating possibilities for new relations of force, that change the face of power, “showing its potentialities no less
than its dangers". To say that cyberspace is just a residue of the late capitalist economy, or that virtual reality is
dangerous for feminism since it reproduces patriarchal imagery and full of male fantasies, would only mean that
feminism is poorly conceived by such critics, and power is always evil for them, On the other hand, if we consider
cyberspace as a flow of unrestrained desires or unconscious, where one can build a cyber-society without power
and domination, we put ourselves into another trap: it implies that to “avoid reality of power (which is bad and pol-
luted) is to “get free" from it in virtual reality, which is good and innocent, that corresponds to libertarian utopia.
Thus, sooner we understand that we cannot “avoid" power relations in cyberspace, sooner we start using it for our
purposes.

Why politics? For Foucault ‘the political’ is not something external to what underlies elementary relations, which are
“neutral” by nature. To say that “everything is political" is to acknowledge this presence of relations of force and
their immanence to the political field. | argue here that the ground for such new forms of politicization in cyber-
space most effectively can become an embodied female subjectivity. It has been suggested by many that the notion
of an embodied subject and female identity is ultimately essentialising and totalizing, especially for cyberspace. It
is, if we look for a solid ground and do not take into account sexual difference. However, we do not need definitions
in order to “become”, for these can restrict such inventions of ourselves. We need, rather, new practices to seek

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