ABSTRACT
A figuration is a performative image of the future; performative in as far as it embodies an epistemological and ontological shift which acts, albeit virtually2 in the present. Rosi Braidotti says that she believes in the empowering force of feminist figurations such as Luce Irigaray’s two lips ‘that suggest closeness while avoiding closure’ and Donna Haraway’s cyborg, ‘a high-tech imaginary, where electronic circuits evoke new patterns of interconnectedness and affinity’.3 I want to consider the cyborg alongside Braidotti’s own ‘nomadic subject’ as figurations which have been imagined from within a socialist-feminist framework of debates on science, technology and subjectivity. I want to concur with both Hebdige’s and Braidotti’s injunctions to consider the future in relation to the past, and in relation to the constraints of power and social division. When the future of nature is the future in question, then it seems to me to be important not to forget nature’s past-its origin(s). This act of remembering is, of course, constrained by evolutionary, biological, medical and psychoanalytic discourse and by a dualistic and essentialist western epistemology which structures knowledge of as a form of power over nature. But figuration can enact a transformative re-remembering of nature and origin which in Donna Haraway’s words ‘cracks the matrices of domination and opens geometric possibilities’.4
