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(German, Turkish)

(previous: Stitching Feminist Waves into the History of Technology)

Thesis. Read with Lacan, the famous waves of feminism aren’t only superstructural shifts in rights and discourse; they track substructural rewiring of the symbolic order—the rules, standards, and machines that sort speech, desire, and value. Lacan’s toolkit—knotting, the quilting point, ‘the letter always arrives at its destination’, ‘there is no big Other’, ‘the Woman does not exist’, and ‘there is no sexual relation’—models how each technical regime installs a stitching operation that sidelines feminine-coded mediation. His cybernetic turn foretells the present AI moment, where the university discourse (knowledge institutionalized as authority) collapses into automated S2, and the academy’s role as guarantor of sense is unstitched.

A minimal Lacanian primer for technics

• Knotting. In R.S.I. Lacan figures the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary as a Borromean knot: undo one ring and the others fall apart. Technics routinely re-knot these orders—standardizing signs (Symbolic), templating images (Imaginary), and biting into constraint (Real).
• Point de capiton (quilting point). A signifier that pins drifting meanings to a stable pattern. In technical modernity, the quilting point is a standard, metric, API, or policy that ‘cancels the human’ by fixing sense in advance of judgment.
• ‘The letter always arrives at its destination.’ Communication is structurally overdetermined: routing is a function of the code, not the messenger. Infrastructurally, this says ‘no secretary needed’ once addressability is formalized.
• ‘There is no big Other.’ No transcendent guarantor of meaning exists. In media terms: ‘no PR needed’ to conjure a mythical Public; dashboards will stand in.
• ‘The Woman does not exist.’ There is no universal Woman, only singular positions relative to lack. In informatics: categories of ‘woman’ are programmable profiles; segmentation replaces essence.
• ‘There is no sexual relation.’ No formula sutures desire to harmony. In culture: the cinematic climax is a narrative prosthesis, and positive psychology’s promise of frictionless compatibility is a fraud; optimization papers over irreducible mismatch.

How the jargon becomes a wiring diagram

Each wave of feminism rode a new technical quilting point that disciplined meaning so tightly that human mediators—often women—could be written out of the loop. The pattern isn’t moral; it’s operational. Stitch by stitch, a codebase replaces a caretaker.

Wave 1) Suffrage and industrial legality as the first mass quilting

Quilting point: time–measure–record. Rail time, gauges, censuses, registries, and the Jacquard logic of discretized pattern lock floating local meanings into comparable units. Human discretion is narrowed by calibration.

Letter arrives. With universal addressing (street numbers, timetables, postal norms), messages route without the parish matron; the ‘secretary’ function diffuses into the network.

No big Other. ‘The public’ becomes an aggregate in tables, not a will in salons. PR, as priesthood, has not yet arisen; the census is the master signifier.

The Woman does not exist. Statistical categories make ‘woman’ a column. Personhood is won precisely as programmability enters—eligibility, rolls, pay ledgers.

No sexual relation. Contract overtakes kin-morality; marriage becomes a legal interface with default terms. The cinematic reconciliation has not been invented; the factory already knows mismatch as a scheduling problem.

Net effect. Feminine-coded household mediation is honored, then translated into inspection and standard—kept as training data, not as the interface.

Wave 2) Corporate clericalization and tabulation as ‘the letter’ made literal

Quilting point: forms and tabulators. The switchboard, the memo form, the card catalog, the mainframe schema pin meaning to fields. The order of the Symbolic is pre-cut.

Letter arrives. Once routing trees are formalized, the system ‘knows’ where each message goes; ‘no secretary needed’ is the managerial dream—ideally one inbox, one clock, zero variance.

No big Other. Management prefers auditability over charisma. The figure who ‘knows everyone’ is a risk; the address book becomes system property.

The Woman does not exist. HR codifies positions: bands, grades, competencies. The singular woman’s discretion is universalized into a role description—hence programmable.

No sexual relation. The office romance is formalized as policy risk; the fantasy of seamless fit is acknowledged as hazard. Positive psychology appears as productivity grammar: a denial mechanism in a world of enforced mismatch.

Net effect. Feminine-coded discretion powers the office, then is written into SOPs. The keeper of exceptions is displaced by the author of schemas.

Wave 3) Broadcast, brands, and the manufacture of a public without a big Other

Quilting point: brand standards and ratings. The style guide and the panel metric anchor meaning. ‘Aura’ is templated.

Letter arrives. Ratings deliver the audience to advertisers; logistics delivers the spot to viewers. Distribution is the guarantee; the letter needs no concierge.

No big Other. The Public becomes a dashboard: segments, reach, lift. PR’s priestly access to ‘what people think’ yields to media procurement. ‘No PR needed’—only measurable outcomes.

The Woman does not exist. Markets replace essences with personas: youth-mom, aspirational-urban, etc. Representation politics meet the ad stack: programmable slots.

No sexual relation. The cinematic climax blooms—then reveals itself as a patch to bind affect to a sale. Positive psychology rebrands desire as alignment and gets bought by HR and marketing; structural conflict leaks through.

Net effect. Feminine-coded taste and crisis cooling are canonized as decks and playbooks; procurement judges them by lift. The stitch holds until ritual without signal looks absurd.

Wave 4) Platforms, GenAI, and the post-secretarial, post-PR regime

Quilting point: prompts, policies, APIs. The model card, safety spec, and evaluation set are today’s point de capiton: they pre-bind acceptability and output style.

Letter arrives. Retrieval and inference deliver the message as answer. ‘No secretary needed’ scales into ‘no helpdesk needed’: the system autocompletes intent.

No big Other. Platforms show only algorithmic Others. There is policy, not Person; sentiment is a curve. PR is recoded as risk and governance; the fantasy of a single Audience is dropped.

The Woman does not exist. ‘She’ can be synthesized; persona is a promptable vector. Consent wars move to the data layer; representation turns into dataset governance.

No sexual relation. Engagement ladders thrive on mis-match and deferral; the climax becomes a trigger. Positive psychology is recognized as an A/B-tested gloss: happiness as a KPI, not a truth.

Net effect. Feminine-coded parasocial finesse becomes training data, guardrails, and red-team rubrics. The human template persists as a spec; the interface is automated.

Knotting and un-knotting: why the feminist mediator is repeatedly written out

Lacan’s knot shows that cutting one ring imperils the others. Each technological quilting point tightens the Symbolic so the Imaginary (images, PR, charisma) and the Real (contingency, harm) can be machine-handled. The price of that tightening is the ‘cancellation of the human’ mediator: the secretary who once decided which letter truly belonged where, the PR maven who once spoke for the big Other, the taste-maker who once decided what figure belonged in the tapestry, the creator who once kept desire circulating without a template.

Cybernetics, the four discourses, and the university now

Lacan’s turn to cybernetics anticipates the present shift:

• ‘Letter arrives’ as code. The message is a function of the code; what matters is address space and error correction, not intention. AI radicalizes this by producing letters that arrive without ever being sent by a subject.
• Four discourses and the university. In the university discourse, knowledge (S2) speaks with the Master’s authority, and the subject is positioned as an object to be trained. AI automates S2—encyclopedic, tireless, indifferent. When S2 runs without a speaking subject, the university loses its aura as ‘subject-supposed-to-know’. What remains looks like master discourse (platform imperatives), or flips to hysteric discourse (users interrogating the system’s lack), or—more rarely—analyst discourse (structured encounters with the system’s failures). The academy’s performative guarantee frays.
• ‘There is no big Other’ as institutional crisis. The university can no longer pose as guarantor of truth when models outperform recall and synthesis at speed. Its PR—the fantasy of the Big Other that vouches—is punctured. The remaining justification must be clinical: situations where desire and harm, not just information, are at stake.

What this model explains about ‘stitching feminism out of the equation’

• Why female-coded mediation rises first. Before the quilting point hardens, systems need human knots—tact, discretion, taste, boundary-setting—to keep the fabric from tearing.
• Why it is later displaced. Once the quilting point is installed (standard, schema, style guide, policy, eval set), the same competencies are callable as functions. The human becomes template, not interface.
• Why the cycle repeats. The Real keeps leaking. Each automation eventually confronts its own limits (drift, mis-specification, adversarial edge cases). Feminine-coded craft returns as repair—only to be converted, in turn, into a sharper spec.

A compact concordance of slogans to substructures

Lacanian maxim	Operational gloss	Tech instantiation	Mediator displaced
Quilting point	Fix meaning upstream	Standard, schema, policy, prompt style	Human editor of sense
Letter arrives	Code routes, not people	Addressability, search, retrieval, inference	Secretary, helpdesk, concierge
No big Other	No meta-guarantor	Dashboards, A/B tests, governance metrics	PR as oracle of ‘the Public’
Woman does not exist	No essence, only positions	Segments, personas, synthetic agents	Essence-based appeals, identity as guarantee
No sexual relation	Irreducible mismatch	Engagement engines, anti-friction UX, wellness KPIs	Narrative reconciler, positive-psych fixer

Afterword: what survives the cancellation

If the quilting point ‘cancels the human’, it also preserves the human as a template. Lacan’s knots remind us: undo the stitch and the fabric falls apart. The secretarial, PR, taste, and boundary-setting crafts return wherever the system’s letter arrives in the wrong place, where no big Other can take responsibility, where the synthetic Woman fails to stand in for a singular person, and where the sexual non-relation erupts as conflict the dashboard cannot smooth. In those edges, analysis begins again—not to reinstall a priesthood, but to teach the next stitch to respect what cannot be coded without remainder.

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What I mean by clerical (across this whole thread)

By clerical I mean the infrastructural labor that captures, codifies, routes, reconciles, and preserves information so a system can act on it. It’s the human interface to the symbolic order: making messy signals legible to rules, and returning rule outputs in a tone people can accept. Historically it descends from clerks and clerics—the literate keepers of ledgers, registers, and correspondence.

Core functions

• Capture: take speech, events, or materials and render them as entries, tickets, forms, minutes.
• Codify: normalize into categories, fields, and schemas so they can be compared, counted, audited.
• Route: decide who must see what, in what order, with what escalation.
• Reconcile: match inconsistencies across lists, calendars, and versions; close loops.
• Preserve: archive, index, and retrieve so promises and decisions have memory.
• Tone-shape: write and speak in ways that lower friction while rules are applied.

Typical artifacts and tools

• Ledgers, registers, forms, checklists, filing systems, switchboards, calendars, memos.
• Later: card catalogs, tabulators, databases, CRMs, ticket queues, policy and SOP wikis.

What it is not (but often touches)

• Not executive fiat, though it constrains executives by memory and procedure.
• Not pure PR, though it shapes messages so rules land without revolt.
• Not engineering, though it specifies inputs and flags edge cases that design must solve.

How it shows up in each wave

• Wave 1): Household and parish clericality
  Household ledgers, apprenticeship lists, parish registers, order books, and delivery schedules. Women tracked credit, quality, and seasonality—turning tacit coordination into records that merchants and mills could trust.
• Wave 2): Office clericalization
  Switchboards, typing pools, stenography, filing, calendars, memo routing, and later tabulators and mainframes. Women triaged and sequenced decisions; their discretion was the glue between forms and facts.
• Wave 3): Broadcast–brand administration
  Media lists, press books, call sheets, embargo logs, crisis timelines, awards submissions, and tour schedules. Behind the ‘PR’ aura sits a clerical substrate that coordinates many parties and memorializes promises.
• Wave 4): Platform operations
  Moderation queues, policy wikis, escalation playbooks, incident tickets, dataset labels, evaluation sets, provenance logs. Community managers and Trust & Safety ops convert lived context into enforceable, auditable records.

Why clerical work matters in this argument

• It’s where feminine-coded mediation historically acquires leverage: discretion and tone are exercised at the choke points of flow.
• It’s the first layer to be automated when a new quilting point arrives (standard, schema, API), because captured form lets machines route without a person in the loop.
• It survives as specification: when the human interface is “cancelled,” its craft remains as data model, policy text, acceptance criteria, and audit trail.

In short, clerical = the disciplined practice of turning social life into legible, routable information and back again. It’s the stitch that lets each technological regime run—and the stitch that each new regime tries to subsume into code.

(next: Christian Atheism as the Loom: Why the Waves of Women Needed Žižek’s Background Condition)