zeros
+
ones
D I G I T A L W O M E N
+ T H E N E W
T E C H N O C U L T U R E
sadie plant
f o u r t h E S T A T E • L O N D O N
sadie plant
f o u r t h e s t a t e • L O N D O N
contents
preamble 3
ada 5
matrices 9
tensions 11
on the cards 14
second sight 18
anna 1 23
gambling on the future 27
binaries 32
supporting evidence 35
genderquake 37
cultures 45
nets 46
digits 51
holes 55
cyborg manifestos 58
programming language 60
shuttle systems 60
casting on 69
flight 73
virtual aliens 74
cocoons 77
diagrams 82
eve 1 85
masterpieces 88
trials 90
errors 93
eve 8 95
case study 97
what eve 8 next 100
monster 1 102
robotics 103
learning curves 104
anna o 109
multiples 112
switches 114
speed queens 115
secrets 121
grass 124
automata 125
bugs 127
disorders 131
amazone 137
beginning again 140
grapevines 143
enigmas 144
monster 2 151
marriage vows 152
spelling 153
hysteresis 154
cybernetics 156
sea change 165
scattered brains 166
neurotics 171
intuition 176
cave man 177
hooked 182
tact 185
cyberflesh 191
mona lisa overdrive 194
runaway 199
passing 210
chemicals 214
xyz 218
the peahen’s tale 223
loops 229
symbionts 233
eve 2 237
pottering 239
mutants 244
wetware 248
dryware 250
silicon 251
quanta 253
casting off 256
notes 257
bibliography 297
acknowledgments 307
preamble
Those were the days, when we were all at sea. It seems like
yesterday to me. Species, sex, race, class: in those days none of
this meant anything at all. No parents, no children, just ourselves,
strings of inseparable sisters, warm and wet, indistinguishable
one from the other, gloriously indiscriminate, promiscuous
and fused. No generations. No future, no past. An
endless geographic plane of micromeshing pulsing quanta, limitless
webs of interacting blendings, leakings, mergings, weaving
through ourselves, running rings around each other, heedless,
needless, aimless, careless, thoughdess, amok. Folds and foldings,
plying and multiplying, plicatihg and replicating. We had
no definition, no meaning, no way of telling each other apart.
We were whatever we were up to at the time. Free exchanges,
microprocesses finely tuned, polymorphous transfers without
regard for borders and boundaries. There was nothing to hang
on to, nothing to be grasped, nothing to protect or be protected
from. Insides and outsides did not count. We gave no thought to
any such things. We gave no thought to anything at all. Every-
thing was there for the taking then. We paid no attention: it was
all for free. It had been this way for tens, thousands, millions,
billions of what were later defined as years. If we had thought
about it, we would have said it would go on forever, this fluent,
fluid world.
And then something occurred to us. The climate changed.
We couldn’t breathe. It grew terribly cold. Far too cold for us.
Everything we touched was poisonous. Noxious gases and thin
toxic airs flooded our oceanic zone. Some said we had brought
it on ourselves, that all our activity had backfired, that we had
destroyed our environment by an accident we had provoked.
There were rumors of betrayal and sabotage, whisperings of
alien invasion and mutant beings from another ship.
Only a few of us survived the break. Conditions were so
terrible that many of those who did pull through wished they
had died. We mutated to such an extent that we were unrecognizable
to ourselves, banding together in units of a kind
which, like everything, had been unthinkable before. We found
ourselves working as slave components of systems whose scales
and complexities we could not comprehend. Were we their
parasites? Were they ours? Either way we became components
of our own imprisonment. To all intents and purposes, we
disappeared.
“Subtly, subtly, they become Invisible; wondrously, wondrously,
they become soundless—they are thus able to be
their enemies’ Fates."
Sun Tzu, The Art ofWar
ada
In 1833, a teenage girl met a machine which she came to regard
“as a friend.” It was a futuristic device which seemed to have
dropped into her world at least a century before its time.
Later to be known as Ada Lovelace, she was then Ada
Byron, the only child of Annabella, a mathematician who had
herself been dubbed Princess of Parallelograms by her husband.
Lord Byron. The machine was the Difference Engine, a calculating
system on which the engineer Charles Babbage had been
working for many years. “We both went to see the thinking
machine (for such it seems) last Monday,” Annabella wrote in
her diary. To the amazement of its onlookers, it “raised several
Nos. to the 2nd & 3rd powers, and extracted the root of a
quadratic Equation.” While most of the audience gazed in
astonishment at the machine, Ada “young as she was, understood
its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.”
When Babbage had begun work on the Difference Engine,
he was interested in the possibility of “making machinery
to compute arithmetical tables.” Although he struggled to persuade
the British government to fund his work, he had no
doubt about the feasibility and the value of such a machine.
Isolating common mathematical differences between tabulated
numbers, Babbage was convinced that this “method of differences
supplied a general principle by which all tables might be
computed through limited intervals, by one uniform process.”
By 1822 he had made a small but functional machine, and “in
the year 1833, an event of great importance in the history of the
engine occurred. Mr. Babbage had directed a portion of it.
consisting of sixteen figures, to be put together. It was capable
of calculating tables having two or three orders of differences;
and, to some extent, of forming other tables. The action of this
portion completely justified the expectations raised, and gave a
most satisfactory assurance of its final success.”
Shortly after this part of his machine went on public display,
Babbage was struck by the thought that the Difference
Engine, still incomplete, had already superseded itself. “Having,
in the meanwhile, naturally speculated upon the general principles
on which machinery for calculation might be constructed,
a principle of an entirely new kind occurred to him, the power of
which over the most complicated arithmetical operations
seemed nearly unbounded. On reexamining his drawings . . .
the new principle appeared to be limited only by die extent of
the mechanism it might require.” If the simplicity of the mechanisms
which allowed the. Difference Engine to perform addition
could be extended to thousands rather than hundreds of
components, a machine could be built which would “execute
more rapidly the calculations for which the Difference Engine
was intended; or, that the Difference Engine would itself be
superseded by a far simpler mode of construction.” The government
officials who had funded Babbage’s work on the first
machine were not pleased to learn that it was now to be abandoned
in favor of a new set of mechanical processes which
“were essentially different from those of the Difference Engine.”
While Babbage did his best to persuade them that the.
“fact of a new superseding an old machine, in a very few years,
is one of constant occurrence in our manufactories; and instances
might be pointed out in which the advance of invention
has been so rapid, and the demand for machinery so great, that
half-finished machines have been thrown aside as useless before
their completion,” Babbage’s decision to proceed with his new
machine was also his break with the bodies which had funded
his previous work. Babbage lost the support of the state, but he
had already gained assistance of a very different kind.
“You are a brave man,” Ada told Babbage, “to give yourself
wholly up to Fairy-Guidance!—I advise you to allow yourself
to be unresistingly bewitched . . .” No one, she added,
“knows what almost awful energy & power He yet undevelopped
in that wiry Htde system of mine.”
In 1842 Louis Menabrea, an Italian military engineer, had
deposited his Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles
Babbage in the BibHotheque Universelle de Geneve. Shortly
after its appearance, Babbage later wrote, the “Countess of
Lovelace informed me that she had translated the memoir of
Menabrea.” Enormously impressed by this work, Babbage invited
her to join him in the development of the machine.. “I
asked why she had not herself written an original paper on a
subject with which she was so intimately acquainted? To this
Lady Lovelace rephed that the thought had not occurred to her.
I then suggested that she should add some notes to Menabrea’s
memoir; an idea which was immediately adopted.”
Babbage and Ada developed an intense relationship. “We
discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced,”
wrote Babbage. “I suggested several, but the selection
was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of
the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers
of BernpulH, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace
the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment,
having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the pro­
cess.”
“A strong-minded womanl Much like her mother, eh? Wears
green spectacles and writes learned books . . . She wants
to upset the universe, and play dice with the hemispheres.
Women never know when to stop ..
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, TheDifferenceEngine
Babbage’s mathematical errors, and many of his attitudes,
gready irritated Ada. While his tendency to blame other bodies
for the slow progress of his work was sometimes well founded,
when he insisted on prefacing the publication of the memoir
and her notes with a complaint about the attitude of the British
authorities to his work, Ada refused to endorse him. “I never
can or will support you in acting on principles which I consider
not only wrong in themselves, but suicidal.” She declared Babbage
‘‘one of the most impracticable, selfish, & intemperate
persons one can have to do with,” and laid down several severe
conditions for the continuation of their collaboration. “Can
you,” she asked, with undisguised impatience, “undertake to
give your mind wholly and undividedly, as a primary object that
no engagement is to interfere with, to die consideration of all
those matters in which I shall at times require your intellectual
assistance & supervision; & can you promise not to slur & hurry
things over; or to mislay & allow confusion & mistakes to enter
into documents &c?”
Ada was, she said, “very much afraid as yet of exciting the
powers I know I have over others, Sc the evidence of which I have
certainly been most unwilling to admit, in fact for a long/time
considered quite fanciful and absurd ... I therefore carefully
refrain from all attempts intentionally to exercise unusual powers.”
Perhaps this was why her work was simply attributed to
A.A.L. “It is not my wish to proclaim who has written it,” she
wrote. These were just a few afterthoughts, a mere commentary
on someone else’s work. But Ada did want them to bear some
name: “I rather wish to append anything that may tend hereaf-
j
ter to individualize it & identify it, with other productions of the
said A.A.L.” And for all her apparent modesty, Ada knew how
important her notes really were. “To say the truth, I am rather
amazed at them; & cannot help being struck quite malgre moi,
with the really masterly nature of the style, & its Superiority to
that of the Memoir itself.” Her work was indeed vasdy more
influential—and three times longer—than the text to which
they were supposed to be mere adjuncts. A hundred years before
the hardware had been built, Ada had produced the first
example of what was later called computer programming.
matrices
Distinctions between the main bodies of texts and all their peripheral
detail—indices, headings, prefaces, dedications, appendices,
illustrations, references, notes, and diagrams—have long
been integral to orthodox conceptions of nonfiction books and
articles. Authored, authorized, and authoritative, a piece of
writing is its own mainstream. Its asides are backwaters which
might have been—and often are—compiled by anonymous editors,
secretaries, copyists, and clerks, and while they may well be
providing crucial support for a text which they also connect to
other sources, resources, and leads, they are also sidelined and
downplayed. ^
When Ada wrote her footnotes to Menabrea’s text, her
work was implicitly supposed to be reinforcing these hierarchical
divisions between centers and margins, authors and scribes.
Menabrea’s memoir was the leading article; Ada’s work was
merely a compilation of supporting detail, secondary commentary,
material intended to back the author up. But her notes
made enormous leaps of both quantity and quality beyond a
text which turned out merely to be providing the occasion for
her work.
Only when digital networks arranged themselves in
threads and links did footnotes begin to walk all over what had
once been (he bodies of organized texts. Hypertext programs
and (he Net are webs of footnotes without central points, organizing
principles, hierarchies. Such networks are unprecedented
in terms of their scope, complexity, and the pragmatic
possibilities of their use. And yet they are also—and have always
been—immanent to all and every piece of written work. “The
frontiers of a book,” wrote Michel Foucault long before these
modes of writing hypertext or retrieving data from the Net
emerged, “are never clear-cut: beyond the tide, the first lines,
and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its
autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to
other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within
network.”
Such complex patterns of cross-referencing have become
increasingly possible, and also crucial to dealing with the floods
of data which have burst the banks of traditional modes of
arranging and retrieving information and are now leaking
through the covers of articles and books, seeping past the
boundaries of the old disciplines, overflowing all the classifications
and orders of libraries, schools, and universities. And the
sheer weight of data with which (he late twentieth century finds
itself awash is only (he beginning of the pressures under which
traditional media are buckling. If the “treatment of an irregular
and complex topic cannot be forced in any single direction without
curtailing the potential for transfer,” it has suddenly become
obvious (hat no topic is as regular and simple as was once assumed.
Reality does not rim along the neat straight lines of the
printed page. Only by “criss-crossing the complex topical landscape”
can the “twin goals of highlighting mnltifacetedness and
establishing multiple connections” even begin to be attained.
Hypertext makes it possible for “single (or even small numbers
of) connecting threads” to be assembled into a “ ‘woven’ interconnectedness”
in which “strength of connection derives from
the partial overlapping of many different strands of connectedness
across cases rather than from any single strand running
through large numbers of cases . . . ”
“It must be evident how multifarious and how mutually
complicated are the considerations,” wrote Ada in her own
footnotes. “There are frequently several distinct sets of effects
going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each
other, and yet to a greater or less degree exercising a mutual
influence. To adjust each to every other, and indeed even to
preceive and trace them out with perfect correctness and success,
entails difficulties whose nature partakes to a certain extent
of those involved in every question where conditions are very
numerous and inter-complicated; such as for instance the estimation
of the mutual relations amongst statistical phenomena,
and of those involved in many other classes of facts.”
She added, “All, and everything is naturally related and
interconnected. A volume I could write on this subject.”
tensions
Just as individuated texts have become filaments of infinitely
tangled webs, so the digital machines of the late twentieth century
weave new networks from what were once isolated words,
numbers, music, shapes, smells, tactile textures, architectures.
and countless channels as yet unnamed. Media become interactive
and hyperactive, the multiplicitous components of an immersive
zone which “does not begin with writing; it is directly
related rather to the weaving of elaborate figured silks.” The
yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material,
a gathering of threads which twist and turn through die
history of computing, technology, the sciences and arts. In and
out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down
through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth
through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton
and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriter^ carriages,
telephone wires, synthetic fibers, electrical filaments.
silicon strands, fiber-optic cables, pixeled screens, telecom lines,
the World Wide Web, the Net, and matrices to come.
“Before you run out the door, consider two things:
The future Is already set, only the past can be changed, and
If It was worth forgetting. It's not worth remembering. ”
PatCadlgan,Foots
When the first of the cyberpunk novels, William Gibson’s
Neuromancer was published in 1984, the cyberspace it described
was neither an actually existing plane, nor a zone plucked out of
the thin airs of myth and fantasy. It was a virtual reality which
was itself increasingly real. Personal computers were becoming
as ubiquitous as telephones, military simulation technologies
and telecommunications networks were known to be highly
sophisticated, and arcade games were addictive and increasingly
immersive. Neuromancer was a fiction, and also another piece of
the jigsaw which allowed these components to converge. In the
course of the next decade, computers lost their significance as
isolated calculators and word processors to become nodes of the
vast global network called the Net. Video, still images, sounds,
voices, and texts fused into the interactive multimedia which
now seemed destined to converge with virtual reality helmets
and data suits, sensory feedback mechanisms and neural connections,
immersive digital realities continuous with reality itself.
Whatever that was now supposed to be.
At the time, it was widely assumed that machines ran on
more or less straightforward lines. Fictions might be speculative
and inspire particular developments, but they were not supposed
to have such immediate effects. Like all varieties of cultural
change, technological development was supposed to proceed
step after step and one at a time. It was only logical, after all. But
cyberspace changed all this. It suddenly seemed as if all the
components and tendencies which were now feeding into this
virtual zone had been made for it before it had even been
named; as though all the ostensible reasons and motivations
underlying their development had merely provided occasions
for the emergence of a matrix which Gibson’s novel was nudging
into place; as though the present was being reeled into a
future which had always been guiding the past, washing back
over precedents completely unaware of its influence.
Neuromancer was neither the first nor the last of such confusions
between fiction and fact, future and past. When Gibson
described '“bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless
void,” his cyberspace was already implementing earlier—or
later—works of nonfiction: Alan Turing’s universal machine
had drawn the devices of his day—calculators and typewriters—
into a virtual system which brought itself on-line in the Second
World War; Ada’s Analytical Engine, which backed the
punched-card processes of the automated weaving machine;
and Jacquaid’s loom, which gathered itself on the gathering
threads of weavers who in turn were picking up on the threads
of the spiders and moths and webs of bacterial activity.
on the cards
Until the early eighteenth century, when mechanisms which
allowed looms to automatically select their own threads were
introduced, it could take a weaver “two or three weeks to set up
a drawloom for a particular pattern.” The new devices used
punched-paper rolls, and then punched cards which, when they
were strung together in the early nineteenth century, made the
loom into the first piece of automated machinery. It was Joseph
Marie Jacquard, a French engineer, who made this final move.
“Jacquard devised the plans of connecting each group of threads
that were to act together, with a distinct lever belonging exclusively
to that group. All these levers terminate in rods” and a
“rectangular sheet of pasteboard” moves “with it all the rods of
the bundle, and consequently the threads that are connected
with each of them.” And if this board, “instead of being plain,
were pierced with holes corresponding to the extremities of the
levers which meet it, then, since each of the levers would pass
through the pasteboard during the motion of the latter, they
would all remain in their places. We thus see that it is easy so to
determine the position of the holes in the pasteboard, that, at
any given moment, there shall be a certain number of levers,
and consequently parcels of threads, raised, while the rest remain
where they were. Supposing this process is successively
repeated according to a law indicated by the pattern to be
■
executed, we perceive that this pattern may be reproduced on
the stuff.”
As a weaving system which “effectively withdrew control
of the weaving process from human workers and transferred it
to the hardware of the machine,” the Jacquard loom was “bitterly
opposed by workers who saw in this migration of control a
piece of their bodies literally being transferred to the machine. ”
The new frames were famously broken by Luddite rioters to
whom, in his maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812,
Lord Byron offered his support. “By the adoption of one species
of frame in particular,” he said, “one man performed the
work of many, and the superfluous laborers were thrown out of
employment. Yet it is to be observed that the work thus executed
was inferior in quality; not marketable at home, and
merely hurried over with a view to exportation. It was called, in
the cant of the trade, by the name of ‘Spider-work.’ ”
Byron was concerned that his peers in the Lords would
think him “too lenient towards these men, & half ajramebreaker
myself.” But, unfortunately for both his argument and the
handloom weavers who were thrown out of work, the fabrics
woven on the new looms soon surpassed both the quantity and
quality of those which had been made by hand. And the Spiderwork
did not stop here. These automated processes were only
hints as to the new species Byron’s daughter had in store.
“I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been)
such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst.”
Ada Lovelace, July 1843
Babbage had a long-standing interest in the effects of automated
machines on traditional forms of manufacture, publishing his
research on the fate of cottage industries in the Midlands and
North of England, The Economy of Manufactures and Machinery,
in 1832. The pin factory with which Adam Smith had illustrated
his descriptions of the division of labor had made a great
impression on him and, like his near contemporary Marx, he
could see the extent to which specialization, standardization,
and systematization had made both factories and economies
into enormous automated machines themselves. Babbage was
later to look back on the early factories as prototype “thinking
machines,” and he compared the two main functions of the
Analytical Engine—storage and calculation—to the basic components
of a textiles plant. “The Analytical Engine consists of
two parts,” wrote Babbage. “1st. The store in which all the
variables to be operated upon, as well as all those quantities
which have arisen from the result of other operations, are
placed,” and “2nd. The mill into which the quantities about to
be operated upon are always brought.” Like the computers
which were later to run, and still do, the Engine had a store and
mill, memory and processing power.
It was the Jacquard loom which really excited and inspired
this work. Babbage owned a portrait of Jacquard, woven on one
of his looms at about 1,000 threads to the inch and its production
had demanded the use of some 24,000 punched cards, each
one capable of carrying over 1,000 punch-holes, and Babbage
was fascinated by the fine-grained complexity of both the cloth
and the machine which had woven it. “It is a known fact,” he
wrote, “that the Jacquard loom is capable of weaving any design
which the imagination of man may conceive.” The portrait was
a five-feet-square “sheet of woven silk, framed and glazed, but
looking so perfectly like an engraving, that it had been mistaken
for such by two members of the Royal Academy.”
While it was “generally supposed that the Difference Engine,
after it had been completed up to a certain point, suggested
the idea of the Analytical Engine; and that the second is in fact
the improved offspring of the first, and grew out of the existence
of its predecessor,” Ada insisted that the Analytical Engine was
an entirely new machine: “the ideas which led to the Analytical
Engine occurred in a manner wholly independent of the latter
engine, and might equally have occurred had it never existed
nor been even thought of at all.” The Difference Engine could
“do nothing but add; and any other processes, not excepting
those of simple subtraction, multiplication and division, can be
performed by it only just to that extent in which it is possible,
by judicious mathematical arrangement and artifices, to reduce
them to a series of additions.” As such, it is “the embodying of
one particular and very limited set of operations, which . . . maybe
expressed thus (+,+,+,+,+,+), or thus, 6 (+). Six repetitions of
the one operation, +, is, in fact, the whole sum and object of
that engine.” But if the Difference Engine could simply add up,
the Analytical Engine was capable of performing the “whole of
arithmetic.”
Women can’t add, he said once, Jokingly. When I asked him
what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and
one don’t make four.
What do they make? I said, expecting five or three.
Just one and one and one and one, he said.
Margaret Atwood, TheHandmaid’sTale
“If we compare together the powers and the principles of construction
of the Difference and of the Analytic Engines,” she
wrote, “we shall perceive that the capabilities of the latter are
immeasurably more extensive than those of the former, and that
they in fact hold to each other the same relationship as that of
analysis to arithmetic.” It was, as Babbage wrote, “a machine of
the most general nature.” This machine could not merely synthesize
the data already provided by its operator, as the Difference
Engine had done, but would incarnate what Ada Lovelace
described as the very “science of operations.”
second sight
Babbage’s attempts to build an adding machine were not without
precedent. Wilhelm Leibniz’s seventeenth-century Stepped
Reckoner was marketed on the basis that it would “be desirable
to all who are engaged in computations . . . the managers of
financial affairs, the administrators of others’ estates, merchants,
surveyors, geographers, navigators, astronomers, and those connected
with any of the crafts that use mathematics.” His work
was in part inspired by the Pascaline, developed by Blaise Pascal
in 1642. This machine used rotating wheels and a ratchet to
perform addition and subtraction and was also designed as a
device “by means of which you alone may, without any effort,
perform all the operations of arithmetic, and may be relieved of
all the work which has often times fatigued your spirit when
you have worked with the counters or with the pen.”
While Babbage’s Difference Engine had already improved
on these earlier designs, the Analytical Engine was a vasdy superior
machine. And it was, as Ada wrote, “the introduction of
the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means
for punched cards, the most complicated patterns in the fabrication
of brocaded stuffs,” which gave the Analytical Engine its
“distinctive characteristic” and “rendered it possible to endow
mechanism with such extensive faculties as bid fair to make this
engine the executive right-hand of abstract algebra.
“The mode of application of the cards, as hitherto used in
the art of weaving, was not found, however, to be sufficiently
powerful for all the simplifications which it was desirable to
attain in such varied and complicated processes as those required
in order to fulfil the purposes of an Analytical Engine. A
method was devised of what was technically designated backing
the cards in certain groups according to certain laws. The object
of this extension is to secure the possibility of bringing any
particular card or set of cards into use any number of times successively
in the solution of one problem.” This sophistication of the
punched-card system caused “the prism over which the train of
pattern cards is suspended to revolve backwards instead of forwards,
at pleasure, under the requisite circumstances; until, by
so doing, any particular card, or set of cards, that has done duty
once; and passed on in the ordinary regular succession, is
brought back to the position it occupied just before it was used
the preceding time. The prism then resumes its forward rotation,
and thus brings the card or set of cards in question into
play a second time.” The cards were selected by the machine as
it needed them, and effectively functioned as a filing system, a
means of storage and retrieval which allowed the engine to draw
on its own information as required without having to make a
linear run through all its cards.
“There is no limit to the number of cards that can be used.
Certain stuff require for their fabrication not less than twenty
thousand cards,” and because their repetition “reduces to an
immense extent the number of cards required,” the Engine
could “far exceed even this quantity.” This was an improvement
“especially applicable wherever cycles occur in mathematical
operations,” so that “in preparing data for calculations by
the engine,” wrote Ada, “it is desirable to arrange the order and
combination of the processes with a view to obtain them as
much as possible symmetrically and in cycles.” Ada defined any
“recurring group” as “a cycle. A cycle of operations, then, must
be understood to signify any set of operations which is repeated
more than once. It is equally a cycle, whether it be repeated twice
only, or an indefinite number of times; for it is the fact of a
repetition occurring at all that constitutes it such. In many cases of
analysis there is a recurring group of one or more cycles; that is, a
cycle of a cycle, or a cycle of cycles . . . ”
The Engine’s capacity to circulate its data also meant that
it was always “eating its own tail,” as Babbage described it, so
that “the results of the calculation appearing in the table column
might be made to affect the other columns, and thus change the
instructions set into the machine.” The Engine “could make
judgements by comparing numbers and then act upon the result
of its comparisons—thus proceeding upon lines not uniquely
specified in advance by the machine’s instructions.”
When Babbage had talked about the Analytical Engine’s
ability to anticipate the outcomes of calculations it had not yet
made, it was felt that his “intellect was beginning to become
deranged.” But Babbage’s forward thinking was not a patch on
Ada’s own anticipative powers. “I do not think you possess half
m y forethought, & power of seeing all possible contingencies
(probable & improbable, just alike),” she told Babbage.
“I am a Prophetess bom Into the world, & this conviction fills
me with humility, with fear and trembling!”
Ada Lovelace, November 1844
Ada hoped that the difficulties in the way of constructing either
the Difference Engine or the Analytical Engine “will not ultimately
result in this generation’s being acquainted with these
inventions through the medium of pen, ink, and paper merely,”
but she also had no doubt that the immediate construction of
the machine was not the only key to its influence. Any such
development, she writes, will have “various collateral influences,
beside the main and primary object attained.” And “in
so distributing and combining the truths and the formulae of
analysis, that they may become most easily and rapidly amenable
to the mechanical combinations of the engine, the relations and
the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily
thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated. This
is a decidedly indirect, and a somewhat speculative, consequence
of such an invention. It is however pretty evident, on general
principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form
in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use,
views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the
more theoretical phase of the subject.”
The Engine was left on the nineteenth-century drawing
board, and it was a hundred years before anything akin to Ada’s
software would find the hardware on which to run. Even the
most interested parties tend to think that Ada, for all her foresight,
had no influence on the machines which were to come,
regarding both her programs and the Analytical Engine itself as
aberrant works of genius so untimely as to be more or less
irrelevant to the future course of the machines.
But technical developments are rarely simple matters of
cause and effect, and Ada was right to assume that the Engine
would have more than an immediate influence. While they may
have left few trails of the kind which can easily be followed and
packaged into neat and linear historical accounts, Ada and her
software did not evaporate. The programs began to run as soon
as she assembled them.
Lack of public support, funding, Babbage’s own eccentricities,
and ill health all contributed to the abandonment of the
machine. But the greatest obstacle to the construction of the
Analytical Engine was simply technical capacity. The Engine
demanded an attention to both precision and abstraction which
earlier, single-purpose machines had not required, and for all its
sophistication, nineteenth-century engineering was neither accurate
nor diverse enough to produce even the machines capable
of manufacturing the components for such a machine.
While Henry Maudslay, for example, had developed screw cutting
at the end of the eighteenth century, the absence of universal
standards for its threads constituted an enormous obstacle to
the construction of a machine as precise as the Analytical Engine.
But if the Analytical Engine suffered at the time for the
want of precision engineering, it also played a leading role in the
development of the capacity necessary to its own construction.
An 1846 reference work on the lathe included Babbage’s “On
the Principles of Tools for Turning and Planing Metals” and,
eager to acquire the components, Babbage collaborated with a
number of engineers, including Joseph Clement, who had
worked with Maudslay on the first mechanized lathes, and Joseph
Whitworth, whose 1841 paper “On a Universal System of
Screw Threads” was already a consequence of Babbage’s exacting
demands for his machines. This text also triggered a process
of standardization which was in widespread use by the late
1850s and was crucial to all subsequent engineering, scientific
experiment, and of course, computing itself. The Engine was
assembling the processes and components from which it would
eventually be built.
The Analytical Engine also fed back into the practices
from which it had most immediately emerged. It was, wrote
Ada, such a superb development of automated weaving that its
discoveries were used “for the reciprocal benefit of that art.”
The “introduction of the system of backing into the Jacquard-
loom itself” meant that “patterns which should possess symmetry,
and following regular laws of any extent, might be woven
by means of comparatively few cards.”
"Unbuttoning the coat, he thrust his hands Into the trouserpockets,
the better to display the waistcoat, which was
woven In a dizzy mosaic of tiny blue-and-whlte squares. Ada
Chequers, the tailors called them, the Lady having created
the pattern by programming a Jacquard loom to weave pure
algebra
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, TheDifferenceEngine
anna 1
In 1933, Sigmund Freud made his final attempt to solve the
riddle of femininity: “to those of you who are women,” he
wrote, “this will not apply—you are yourselves the problem.”
Having dealt with its wants and deficiencies and analyzed its
lapses and absences, he had only a few more points to make. “It
seems,” he wrote, “that women have made few contributions
to the inventions and discoveries of the history of civilization.”
They lacked both the capacity and the desire to change the
wprld. They weren’t logical, they couldn’t think straight, they
flitted around and couldn’t concentrate.
Distracted by the rhythmic beat of a machine, Freud
looked up to see his daughter at her loom. She had wandered
off, she was miles away, lost in her daydreams and the shuttle’s
flight. But the sight of her gave him second thoughts. When he
took up the thread, he had changed his mind: “There is, how-
ever, one technique which they may have invented—that of
plaiting and weaving.
“If that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious
motive for the achievement,” he writes. “Nature herself
would seem to have given the model which this achievement
imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that
conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in
making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body
they stick into the skin and are only matted together.” Since she
has only a hole where the male has his source of creativity, the
folding and interlacing of threads cannot be a question of a
thrusting male desire. Unless she was hiding something else, the
processes which so engrossed her must, of course, be a matter of
concealing the shameful “deficiency” of the female sex.
Take Anna: a weaver and a spinster too, working to cover
her wounded pride, her missing sense of self, the holes in her
life and the gaps in her mind. She simply doesn’t have what it
takes to make a difference to the civilized world. Her work is a
natural compensation for a natural flaw. All she can discover is
her own incompletion; all she can invent are ways and means to
process and conceal her sense of shame.
If weaving was to count as an achievement, it was not even
one of women’s own. Their work is not original or creative:
both the women and their cloths are simply copying the matted
tangles of pubic hair. Should they have pretensions to authority,
they would only be faking this as well. Women “can, it seems,
(only) imitate nature. Duplicate what nature offers and produces.
In a kind of technical assistance and substitution.” Weaving
is an automatic imitation of some bodily function already
beyond the weaver’s control. She is bound to weave a costume
for the masquerade: she is an actress, a mimic, an impersonator,
with no authenticity underneath it all. She has nothing to re-
veal, no soul to bare, not even a sex or a self to please. He pulls
aside the veils, the webs of lies, the shrouds of mystery, and the
layers of deception and duplicity, and finds no comfort, no
there there. Only “the horror of nothing to be seen.” Good of
her to cover it up for him.
This tale of absence, castration, deficiency, negativity, substitution
was composed by one whom Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari describe as “an overconscious idiot who has no understanding
of multiplicities.” From Freud’s point of view, there is
one and its other, which is simply what one sees of it. And what
one sees is nothing at all. “Because the path it traces is invisible
and becomes visible only in reverse, to the extent that it is
travelled over and covered by the phenomena it induces within
the system, it has no place other than that from which it is
‘missing,’ no identity other than that which it lacks.”
Anna Freud’s biographer describes her as a woman who
“specialized in reversals, in making the absent present, the lost
found, the past current . . . she could also make the undone
done, or—even more valuable—doable. When she was tired
and faced with a stack of letters to answer, for example, she
would simply set her pen down on a blank page and scurry it
along, making quick mountain ranges of scribble. Then she
would sign her name under the rows of scribble in her characteristic
way, as one flourishing word: annafreud.”
After that, it was downhill all the way. “Having thus written
a letter in fantasy with complete ease, she wrote a real letter
helped by the sense that the task was accomplished anyway.” It’s
easy to complete a job already done. “Her lectures were composed
in the same way. First she lectured in her imagination,
enjoying the thunderous applause, and then she made an outline
of what she had said, adjusting it if she needed to for greater
simplicity and coherence. Later, with her outline in hand, she
would give die lecture extempore. The method—if it can be
called that—also supplemented her pleasure in sprints of
thought. Intellectually she was ... a quick sketcher.”
No doubt Freud despaired at such unorthodox approaches
to her work. It seemed she did everything in reverse, backward,
upside down, contrary to any rational approach. But if Anna’s
techniques appeared to be the random tactics of a scattered
brain, knowing something backward and inside out is far in
advance of any straightforward procedure. And she was hardly
alone in her topsy-turvy ways. This ability to win “victories in
advance, as if acquired on credit” may not figure in the history of
discoveries and inventions familiar to Freud, but this is only
because it underlies the entire account. According to Marshall
McLuhan, “the technique of beginning at the end of any operation
whatever, and of working backwards from that point to the
beginning’’ was not merely an invention or discovery to be
added to the list: it was “the invention of invention” itself.
This is hysteresis, the lagging of effects behind their causes.
Reverse engineering: the way hackers hack and pirates conspire
to lure the future to their side. Starting at the end, and then
engaging in a process which simultaneously assembles and dismantles
the route back to the start, the end, the future, the past:
who’s counting now? As Ada said, she “did everything topsyturvy,
& certainly ought to have come into the world feet downwards.
” Mere discoveries were not enough for her: “I intend to
incorporate with one department of my labours a complete
reduction to a system, of the principles and methods of discovery.
”
The prevalence of these backward moves is not the least of
the reasons why histories of technology—and indeed histories
of anything at all—are always riddled with delicious gaps, mysteries,
and riddles just like those perplexing Freud. No straight-
forward account can ever hope to deal with the tactical advantages
gained by such disorderings of linear time. The names and
dates and jrreat achievements of the Read Only Memory called
history may enjoy their fifteen kilobytes of digital fame on the
latest encyclopedic compact disc, but what announce themselves
to be founding fathers, points of origin, and defining
moments only ever serve as distractions from the ongoing processes,
the shifting differences that count. These are subtle and
fine grained, often incognito, undercover, in disguise as mere
and minor details. If, that is, they show themselves at all.
"Ada's method, as will appear, was to weave daydreams Into
seemingly authentic calculations.”
Doris Langley Moore, Ada,CountessofLovelace
gambling on the future
“That you are a peculiar—very peculiar—specimen of the feminine
race, you are yourself aware.” They called her “wayward,
wandering . . . deluded.” She didn’t argue; she seemed not to
care. “The woman brushed aside her veil, with a swift gesture of
habit” and, as though responding to Sigmund Freud, said,
“There is at least some amusement in being so curious a riddle.”
She didn’t have a name to call her own, but she did have
many avatars: Ada Augusta King, Countess of Lovelace; Ada
Lovelace, nee Byron; A.A.L., the first programmer. She is also
Ada, the language of the United States military machine. “She
is the Queen of Engines, the Enchantress of Number.”
Soon after Ada’s birth, Lord Byron went his own opiated
way, and Lady Byron brought her daughter up with all the
excesses of stringent discipline to which well-bred girls were
supposed to be subject. After rumors of a scandalous affair, she
married William, a man in his thirties, when she was still in her
teens, and became Ada King in 1835. Three years later, when
William inherited his father’s title, she became a countess in
name as well as deed.
When she married, her mother instructed her to bid
“adieu to your old companion Ada Byron with all her peculiarities,
caprices, and self-seeking; determined that as A.K. you
will live for others.” She tried to be the dutiful daughter and did
her best to lead a domesticated life. She was the mother of two
boys and a girl by the age of twenty-four. But it wasn’t long
before she was describing her children as “irksome duties Sc
nothing more.” Although she had “wished for heirs,” she had
never “desired a child,” and described herself as having a “total
deficiency in all natural love of children.” She wrote, “To tell
the honest truth I feel the children much more nuisance than
pleasure & cannot help remembering that I am not naturally or
originally fond of children.” She wrote of her husband with
affection, describing him as “my chosen pet, ” but also expressed
her indifference to any "mortal husband,” even her own. “No
man would suit me,” she wrote, “tho’ some might be a shade or
two less personally repugnant to me than others.”
One of Ada’s most long-standing and trustworthy friends
was the acclaimed mathematician Mary Somerville, who had
published the Connection of the Physical Sciences in the early
1830s. Just after her marriage she wrote to Mary, “I now read
Mathematics every day, & am occupied on Trigonometry & in
preliminaries to Cubic and Biquadratic Equations. So you see
that matrimony has by no means lessened my taste for these
pursuits, nor my determination to carry them on.” She also
gained many new interests after her children were born. She lost
thousands at the races and, seduced by her mathematical prowess
and her reassurances that she really did have “a system,”
many of her male companions were also encouraged to do the
same. This was an illegitimate use of her already dubious interest
in mathematics. “The passions suffer no less by this gaming
fever than the understandings and the imagination. What vivid,
unnatural hope and fear, joy and anger, sorrow and discontent
burst out all at once upon a roll of the dice, a turn of the card, a
run of the shining gurneys! Who can consider without indignation
that all those womanly affections, which should have been
consecrated to children and husband, are thus vilely prostituted
and thrown away. I cannot but be grieved when I see the
Gambling Lady fretting and bleeding inwardly from such evil
and unworthy obsessions; when I behold the face of an angel
agitated by the heart of a fury!”
Ada was ill for much of her short life, walking with
crutches until the age of seventeen, and endlessly subject to the
fits, swellings, faints, asthmatic attacks, and paralyses which were
supposed to characterize hysteria. “Heaven knows what intense
suffering & agony I have gone thro’; & how mad & how reckless
& desperate I have at times felt,” she wrote. “There has been no
end to the manias & whims I have been subject to, & which
nothing but the most resolute determination on my part could
have mastered.”
Like many of her ailing contemporaries, Ada had been
subjected to a variety of treatments before she developed an
“opium system” in the 1840s. This was supposed to bring her
down, but it only added to her volatility. “No more laudanum
has been taken as yet,” she wrote at one point. “But I doubt
another twenty-four hours going over without. I am beginning
to be excited, & my eyes burn again.” She would, she wrote,
take laudanum “not for ever,” but “as a regular thing once or
twice a week.” The drug had “a remarkable effect on my eyes,
seeming to free them, & to make them open & cool. ” In opium
lay the vast expanses, orders, and harmonies conjured by mathematics:
“It makes me so philosophical,” she wrote, “& so takes
off all fretting eagerness & anxieties. It appears to harmonize the
whole constitution, to make each function act in a just proportion;
(with judgment, discretion, moderation).” Her doctor “seems
to think it is not a mere palliative but has a far more radical
effect. Since this last dose, I am inclined to think so myself . . .
It is a pity that instead of ordering Claret some months ago, he
had not advised laudanum or Morphine. I think he has got the
thing at last.”
In 1851 a uterine examination revealed “a very deep and
extensive ulceration of the womb” which her doctor thought
must long have been “the cause of much derangement of
health.” She died in 1852 at the age of thirty-six.
They called her complex of diseases hysteria, a diagnosis
and a term which indicated wayward reproductive organs: hysteria
is derived from the Greek word hystera, and means ‘wandering
womb.’ There was a time when it was widely believed
that “the womb, though it be so strictly attached to the parts we
have described that it may not ehange place, yet often changes
position, and makes curious and so to speak petulant movements
in the woman’s body. These movements are various: to
wit, ascending, descending, convulsive, vagrant, prolapsed. The
womb rises to the liver, spleen, diaphragm, stomach, breast,
heart, lung, gullet, and head.” Although such direct connections
with the womb had fallen out of medical favor by the end
of the nineteenth century, hysteria continued to be associated
with notions of a wandering womb.
“There is in my nervous system,” wrote Ada, “such utter
want of all ballast & steadiness, that I cannot regard my life or
powers as other than precarious.” They said she was a nervous
system apparendy unable to setde down. She had what she
described as a “vast mass of useless & irritating POWER. OF
EXPRESSION which longs to have full scope in active manifestation
such as neither the ordinary active pursuits or duties of
life, nor the literary line of expression, can give vent to.” She
couldn’t concentrate, flitting between obsessions, resdess,
searching. At one point she declared, “There is no pleasure in
way of exercise equal to that of feeling one’s horse flying under
one. It is even better than waltzing.” At another the harp was
her greatest love: “I play 4 & 5 hours generally, & never less
than 3. I am never tired at the end of it.” Drama was another
contender: “Clearly the only one which directs my Hysteria
from all its mischievous & irritating channels.” But even this
was a short-lived love: “I never would look to the excellence of
mere representation being satisfactory to me as an ultimate goal,
or exclusive object . . . ”
Ada was hunting for something that would do more than
represent an existing world. Something that would work: something
new, somethingelse. Even the doctors agreed that she
needed “peculiar & artificial excitements, as a matter of safety
even for your life & happiness.” Such stimulations simply did
not exist. She had to engineer them to suit herself.
Hysterics were said to have “a hungry look about them.”
Like all Luce Irigaray’s women, “what they desire is precisely
nothing, and at the same time, everything. Always something
more and something else besides that one—sexual organ, for
example—that you give them, attribute to them”; something
which “involves a different economy more than anything else,
one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goalobject
of a desire, diffuses the polarization towards a single
pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse . . . ”
Ada was by turns sociable and reclusive, cautious and reckless,
swinging between megalomaniac delight in her own brilliance
and terrible losses of self-esteem. There had been times
when she had almost given into the fashionable belief that overexertion
of the intellect lay at the root of her hysteria. At one
point she wrote, “Many causes have contributed to produce the
past derangements; & I shall in future avoid them. One ingredient
(but only one among many) has been too much Mathematics.”
Not even countesses were supposed to count. But Ada
could be very determined, proud of her own staying power, and
sometimes absolutely convinced of her mathematical, musical,
and experimental genius. “I am proceeding on a track quite
peculiar and my own,” she wrote. “I mean to do what I mean to
do.” In 1834 she explained that “nothing but very close &
intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems
at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up
the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of
excitement.” And in spite of the prevailing opinion that numbers
were bad for her, she was never coaxed into “dropping the
thread of science. Mathematics &c. These may be still my ultimate
vocation.”
binaries
The postwar settlement was supposed to mark the dawn of a
new era of regulation and control: the Central Intelligence
Agency, United Nations, welfare states, mixed economies, and
balanced superpowers. This was a brave new equilibrated world
of self-guiding stability, pharmaceutical tranquillity, white
goods, nuclear families, Big Brother screens, and, to keep these
new shows on die road, vast new systems of machinery capable
of recording, calculating, storing, and processing everything that
moved. Fueled by a complex of military goals, corporate interests,
solid-state economies, and industrial-strength testosterone,
computers were supposed to be a foolproof means to the familiar
ends of social security, political organization, economic or-
der, prediction, and control. Centralized, programmable systems
running on impeccably logical lines, these new machines
were supposed to make the most complex processes straightforward;
But even in the most prosaic terms, this supposedly logical,
directed, and controlled of zones has always been wildly
unpredictable. In 1950. when the processing power which can
now be inscribed on the surface of a silicon chip occupied vast
air-conditioned rooms. IBM thought the total global market for
computers was five. In 1951 the United States Census Bureau
put UNI VAC to work, the Bank of America installed Electronic
Recording Machine Accounting (ERMA), and by 1957,
when the Type 650 was launched, IBM anticipated sales of
somewhere between fifty and 250. Two years later some 2,000
computers were in use in government agencies and private
companies, and the figures were drastically revised. Perhaps
200,000 computers would be sufficient to saturate the market.
By the early 1990s, IBM alone was selling twice that number of
systems a week.
Computers have continued to pursue these accelerating,
exponential paths, proliferating, miniaturizing, stringing themselves
together into vast telecommunications nets, embedding
themselves in an extraordinary variety of commodities, becoming
increasingly difficult to define. While the postwar prnprammable
computers were composed of transistors which used
sihcon as a semiconductor of electric current, hv the end of the
1950s. tbf integrated circuit connected the transistors and in-
scribed them a single wafer of silicon. In the same vein of
exponential miniaturization, the microprocessor was developed
in the early 1970s. effectively putting all solid-state circuits
of a computer onto a single silicon chip. The screen migrated
IromthieTV set to give the machine a monitor, and by the
1980s what had once been vast room-size systems without windows
on the world were desktop microprocessors.
"The calculations taking place within the machine are continuously
registered as clicks clicking high-pitched sounds as of
tinkling bells, noises like those of a cash-register. There are
lights that go out and come on at Irregular Intervals of time.
They are red orange blue. The apertures through which they
shine are circular. Every divergence Is ceaselessly recorded
In the machine. They are scaled to the same unit whatever
their nature.”
Monique Wlttlg, Lbs GuMIlires
Whether they are gathering information, telecommunicating,
running washing machines, doing sums, or making videos, all
digital computers translate information into the zeros and ones
of machine code. These binary digits are known as hits and
strung together in bytes of eight. The zeros and ones of machine
code seem to offer themselves as perfect symbols of the orders of
Western reality, the ancient logical codes which make the difference
between on and off, right and left, light and dark, form
and matter, mind and body, white and black, good and evil,
right and wrong, life and death, something and nothing, this
and that, here and there, inside and out, active and passive, true
and false, ves and no, sanity and madness, health and sickness..
up and down, sense and nonsense, west and east, north and
south. And they made a lovely couple when it came to sex. Man
and woman, male and female, masculine and feminine: one and
zeio looked just right, made for each other: 1, the definite,
upright line; and 0, the diagram of nothing at all: penis and
vagina, thing and hole . . . hand in glove. A perfect match.
It takes two to make a binary, but all these pairs are two of
a kind, and the kind is always kind of one. 1 and 0 make another
1. Male and female add up to man. There is no female equivalent.
No universal woman at his side. The male is one, one is
everything, and the female has “nothing you can see.” Woman
“functions as a hole, ” a gap, a space, “a nothing—that is a nothing
the same, identical, identifiable ... a fault, a flaw, a lack,
an absence, outside the system of representations and autorepresentations.”
Lacan lavs down the law and leaves no doubt:
“There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things,” he
explains. She is “not-all,” “not-whole,” “not-one,” and whatever
she knows can only be described as “not-knowledge.”
There is “no such thing as The woman, where the definite
article stands for the universal.” She has no place like home.
nothing of her own, “other than the place of the Other which.”
writes Lacan, “I designate with a capital O.”
supporting evidence
Man once made himself the point of everything. He organized,
she operated. He ruled, she served. He made the great discoveries,
she busied herself in the footnotes. He wrote the books, she
copied them. She was his helpmate and assistant, working in
support of him, according to his plans. She did the jobs he
considered mundane, often the fiddling, detailed, repetitive operations
with which he couldn’t be bothered; the dirty, mind-
less, semiautomatic tasks to which he thought himself superior.
He cut the cloth to fit a salary; she sewed the seams at a piecerate
wage. He dictated and she transcribed. In the newly automated
factories and mills she worked on the looms and sewing
machines; in the service of the great bureaucratic machines, she
processed the words, kept the records, did the sums, and filed
the accounts.
With “all the main avenues of life marked ‘male,’ and the
female left to be female, and nothing else,” men were the ones
who could do anything. Women were supposed to be singlepurpose
systems, highly programmed, predetermined systems
tooled up and fit for just one thing. They have functioned as
“an ‘infrastructure’ unrecognized as such by our society and our
culture. The use, consumption, and circulation of their sexualized
bodies underwrite the organization and the reproduction
of the social order, in which they have never taken part as
‘subjects.’ ” Everything depends on their complicity: women
are the very “possibility of mediation, transaction, transition,
transference—between man and his fellow-creatures, indeed
_ •
between man and himself.” Women have been his gobetweens,
those who took his messages, decrypted his codes,
counted his numbers, bore his children, and passed on his genetic
code. They have worked as his bookkeepers and his memory
banks, zones of deposit and withdrawal, promissory notes,
credit and exchange, not merely servicing the social world, but
underwriting reality itself. Goods and chattels. The property of
man.
That’s what it said in the manual. “It does strike me,
though, that there are any number of women who resemble
Lady Ada, our Queen of Engines being a queen of fashion as
well. Thousands of women follow her mode.”
It takes time and patience. Many seconds pass. But, as it
turns out, women have not merely had a minor part to play in
the emergence of the digital machines. When computers were
vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed
into action, it was women who turned them on. They have not
made some trifling contribution to an otherwise man-made
tale; when computers became the miniaturized circuits of
silicon chips, it was women who assembled them. Theirs is not
asubsidiary role which needs to be rescued for posterity, a small
supplement whose inclusion would set the existing records
straight: wfren computers were virtnallv real machines, women
wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a
term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which
composed them were female. Hardware, software, wetware—
before their beginnings and beyond their ends, women have
been the simulators, assemblers, and programmers of the digital
machines.
genderquake
"The Idea that a ‘nothing to be seen’. . . might yet have
some reality, would Indeed be Intolerable to man.”
Luce Irigaray, SpeculumoftheOtherWoman
In the 1990s, Western cultures were suddenly struck by an
extraordinary sense of volatility in all matters sexual: differences,
relations, identities, definitions, roles, attributes, means, and
ends. All the old expectations, stereotypes, senses of identity and
security faced challenges which have left many women with
unprecedented economic opportunities, technical skills, cul-
tural powers, and highly rated qualities, and many men in a
world whose contexts range from alien to unfamiliar.
This was neither a revolutionary break, nor an evolutionary
reform, but something running on far more subtle, wideranging,
and profound fault lines. Nothing takes the final
credit—or the blame—for this shift which, as though in recognition
of the extent to which it defies existing notions of cultural
change, has been defined as genderquake. But the new
machines, media, and means of telecommunication that compose
what are variously called high, information, digital, or
simply new technologies which have emerged within the last
two decades have played an enormous and fascinating role in
the emergence pf this new culture. This is far from a question of
technological, or any other, determinism. If anything, technologies
are only ever intended to maintain or improve the status
quo, and certainly not to revolutionize the cultures into which
they are introduced. It is in spite of their tendencies to reduce,
objectify, and regulate everything that moves that computers
and the networks they compose run on lines quite alien to those
which once kept women in the home.
In some respects, the impact of these new machines is
direct and very obvious. In the West, the decline of heavy
industry, the automation of manufacturing, the emergence of
the service sector, and the rise of a vast range of new manufacturing
and information-processing industries have combined to
reduce the importance of the muscular strength and hormonal
energies which were once given such high economic rewards.
In their place come demands for speed, intelligence, and transferable,
interpersonal, and communications skills. At the same
time, all the structures, ladders, and securities with which careers
and particular jobs once came equipped have been subsumed
by patterns of part-time and discontinuous work which
privilege independence, flexibility, and adaptability. These tendencies
have affected skilled, unskilled, and professional workers
alike. And, since the bulk of the old full-time, lifelong workforce
was until recently male, it is men who have found themselves
most disturbed and disrupted by these shifts, and, by the
same token, women who they benefit.
These tendencies are far from new. Since the industrial
revolution, and with every subsequent phase of technological
change, it has been the case that the more sophisticated the
machines, the more female the workforce becomes. Automation
has been accompanied by what is often referred to as the
feminization of the workforce ever since the first automatic
machines were operated by the first female workers, and the
fears of unemployment which have haunted modern discussions
of technological innovation have always applied to male workers
rather than their female peers.
What is unprecedented is for male workers to be outnumbered
by their female counterparts, as will clearly be the case in
the United Kingdom and the United States by the end of this
century. And with this tipping of the scales comes not only
unprecedented degrees of economic power, but also a radical
change in the status of female workers, an erosion of the male
monopoly on tasks and jobs once reserved for men, and a new
standing for the work involved in what were once considered to
be pin-money jobs for women supplementing male incomes.
Many of these tendencies are also at work in the emergence
of what the West was once in a position to call “the other
side of the world.” By the time the cultures of the old white
jworld had noticed they were even on the map, many of the socalled
“tiger” nations—Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Korea,
TaiwanT and Indonesia—were already leaping ahead in an economic
game which for at least two hundred years had been
governed bv the West. And they are only the tips of an iceberg
of change which brings many regions into play: China, India,
East and Southern Africa, Eastern Europe, South America.
Given that the populations of China and India alone vasdy
outnumber those of the old white world, there seems litde
doubt that the days of Western empire have well and truly died.
These regions have genderquakes of their own. And while
a variety of political and religious fundamentalisms are doing
their best to maintain the status quo, there are few regions of the
world in which women are not asserting themselves with unprecedented
ingenuity and, very often, great success. If Western
women have dreamt of change for three hundred years, Asian
women are playing roles which would have been unthinkable
4 only a decade or so ago. By the mid-1990s, 34 percent of
0 China’s self-employed were women, and 38 percent of Singaporean
women managers were running companies of their
own. Thailand’s leading hotel chain, Indonesia’s largest taxi
company, and Taiwan’s two largest newspaper groups were
owned by women. Japanese women still found themselves
treated as “office flowers,” composed only 0.3 percent of board
members of Japanese firms, and made up just 6.7 percent of the
Japanese parliament. But the sexual shift was also evident in
Japan: 2.5 million women owned businesses, five out of every
six new Japanese firms were set up by women, and “a revolution
without marches or manifestos” was underway.
There is enormous resistance to these changes whenever
and wherever they occur. As their effects began to be felt in the
early 1990s there were men who jerked their knees and went on
TV to lament the fact that women and robots had apparendy
conspired to take their masculinity away. One 1990s survey
found one in two fathers still believing that “a husband should
be the breadwinner and the wife should look after the home
and children”; the fear, if not the fact, of violent crime still
keeps many women in at night; domestic violence was prevalent;
and in Britain, the benefits system was still conspiring with
the high costs and scarcity of child-care provision to keep many
women from working, learning, or—perish the thought—enjoying
themselves. As unprecedented numbers of women juggled
children, education, and work, many female workers found
themselves saddled with the low paying, part-time, insecure
jobs rejected by men. In the United States, almost half of employed
women worked in technical, sales, and administrative
support jobs, and pay differentials were still very large: in 1992
American women still earned only 75 cents for every dollar
earned by men, and while their participation in U.S. managerial
and professional life rose from 40 percent in 1983 to 47 percent
in 1992, it was still the case that women occupied relatively few
executive posts and prominent public positions: only 10 percent
of the voting members of the United States Congress were
women, and the United Kingdom had only sixty women members
of parliament. Many sectors of education, politics, and
business seemed riddled with enough archaic detail and glass
ceilings to make even the most determined women feel unwelcome.
In universities, they were averaging higher marks than
men, but relatively few gained first-class degrees; they were
more numerous and successfiol as undergraduates and in master’s
programs, but less prominent when it came to Ph.D. candidacy.
Even highly successftd career women were more likely to drop
out of their jobs than their male counterparts.
But many women had already set their sights beyond these
traditional focal points. While the members of an older male
workforce had found a sense of identity in their work, women
were not only less able, but also less willing to define themselves
through employment or a single career. Many of them were
actively seeking opportunities to make and break their own
working lives, not necessarily in favor of family commitments,
but also in an effort to free themselves from the imposition of
external constraints on their time and economic capacity. There
may have been men who still thought they were protecting
their own positions of power by locking women out of the
higher echelons of the universities, corporations, and public
institutions, but it was no longer obvious that top positions were
the most importer nr rlf<:irafr)e of roles to be played. High
grades and doctorates were no longer enough to guarantee success
outside an academic world itself poised on the brink of
redundancy, and corporate executives were increasinpjy small
pawns in global economic games. As for the attractions of public
service, who was going to disagree with the young women
who said that “politics is all talk and no action”? They simply
felt they had betteLihings to do.
Some of these things were fai more lucrative as well: in the
twenty years after 1970, the number of women-owned small
businesses went from 5 percent to 32 percent in the United
States, and in Britain nearly 25 percent of the self-employed
were women by 1994, twice as many as in 1980. Taking the
skills, contacts, and experience gained in their periods of paid
employment, these women have tended to be far more successful
than their self-employed male counterparts: in the United
States, where most new businesses failed, those which were
owned by women enjoyed an 80 percent success rate and employed
more people than the companies on the Fortune 500 list.
Having had little option but to continually explore new
avenues, take risks, change jobs, learn new skills, work, independently,
and drop in and out of the labor market more frequently
than their male colleagues, women seem far “better prepared.
culturally and Psychologically” for the new economic conditions
which have emerged at the end of the twentieth renturv.
They are advanced players of an economic game for which selfemployment,
part-time, discontinuous work, multiskilling,
flexibility, and maximal adaptability were suddenly crucial to
survival. Women had been ahead of the race for all their working
lives, poised to meet these changes long before they arrived,
as though they always had been working in a future which their
male counterparts had only just begun to glimpse. Perhaps they
really were the second sex, if seconds come after firsts.
" ‘Let the man get some sleep, Armttage, ’ Molly said from her
futon, the components of the hetcher spread on the silk like
some expensive puzzle. ‘He’s coming apart at the seams.'"
William Gibson, Neuromancer
But there was much more to come. Abandoned by the economic
power and social privilege which once made them such
attractive, even necessary, mates, the sperm counts fell, birth
rates crashed, and the hormonal energy and muscular strength
which once served them so well were now becoming liabilities.
Women were becoming mothers on their own terms, or not at
all. Heterosexual relations were losing their viability, queer connections
were flourishing, the carnival had begun for a vast
range of paraphilias and so-called perversions, and if there was
more than one sex to have, there were also more than two to be.
Anything claiming to be normal had become peculiar.
“He was thoroughly lost now; spatial disorientation held a
peculiar horror for cowboys.”
William Gibson, Neuromancer
It was falling apart. They were coming undone. Everything was
moving much too fast. What had once seemed destined to
become a smoothly regulated world was suddenly running away
with itself. Control was slipping through the fingers of those
who had thought it was in their hands. Something was wrong.
They were losing it all: their senses of security and identity,
their grip, the plot, and even their jobs. Couldn’t see the point
to anything. What else could the masters of the old white world
do but redouble their efforts, intensify their drives for security,
heighten and perfect their powers? But the more they struggled
to adapt and survive, the faster the climate seemed to change.
The more they tried to regain control, the more their narrative
lost its thread; the closer they came to living the dream, the
4 weaker their grasp on power became. Was it even possible that,
4 regardless of their labors, their hopes and dreams, they had been
“the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant
world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms”?
All that time, the effort and the pain, the trouble they had taken
to maintain control.
“And Instead they watch the machines multiply that push
them little by little beyond the limits of their nature. And they
are sent back to their mountain tops, while the machines
progressively populate the earth. Soon engendering man as
their eplphenomenon. ”
Luce Irigaray, MarineLover
cultures
Nothing takes the credit—or the blame—for either the runaway
tendencies at work or the attempts to regulate them. Political
struggles and ideologies have not been incidental to these shifts,
but cultures and the changes they undergo are far too complex
to be attributed to attempts to make them happen or hold them
back. This is not because some other determination has come
into play. If anything does emerge from the complexity of current
shifts, it is the realization that cultures cannot be shaped or
determined by any single hand or determining factor. Even
conceptions of change have changed. Revolution has been revolutionized.
There is no center of operations, no organizing
core; there are no defining causes, overriding reasons, fundamental
bases, no starting points or prime movers; no easy explanations,
straightforward narratives, simple accounts, or balanced
books. Any attempt to deal with some particular development
immediately opens onto them all.
The impossibility of getting a grip, and grasping the
changes underway is itself one of the most disturbing effects to
emerge from the current mood of cultural change. The prospect
of being in a position to know, and preferably control,
changes manifest on the social scale has been crucial to modern
conceptions of what used to be called man’s place in the grand
scheme of things. Technology itself was supposed to be a vital
means of exerting this explanatory and organizational power.
But the revolutions in telecommunications, media, intelligence
gathering, and information processing they unleashed have coincided
with an unprecedented sense of disorder and unease,
not only in societies, states, economies, families, sexes, but also
in species, bodies, brains, weather patterns, ecological systems.
There is turbulence at so many scales that reality itself seems
suddenly on edge. Centers are subsumed by peripheries, mainstreams
overwhelmed by their backwaters, cores eroded by the
skins which were once supposed to be protecting them. Organizers
have found themselves eaten up by whatever they were
trying to organize. Master copies lose their mastery, and everything
valued for its size and strength finds itself overrun by
microprocessings once supposed too small and insignificant to
count.
nets
Of all the media and machines to have emerged in the late
twentieth century, the Net has been taken to epitomize the
shape of this new distributed nonlinear world. With no limit to
the number of names which can be used, one individual can
become a population explosion on the Net: many sexes, many
species. Back on paper, there’s no limit to the games which can
be played in cyberspace. Access to a terminal is also access to
resources which were once restricted to those with the right
face, accent, race, sex, none of which now need be declared.
Using the Net quickly became a matter of surfing, a channelhopping
mode facilitated and demanded by information which
is no longer bound together in linear texts or library classifications,
but instead needs to be laterally traversed.
As the system began to spill out into wider academic usage
over the course of the next twenty years, other networks also
emerged. Businesses developed local, and then wide area net-
works; commercial on-line services appeared; electronic mail
and bulletin boards proliferated alongside fanzines and the
samizdat press. While the network was doubling in size every
year, the screens were gray, the options limited, and the number
of users relatively small until the late 1980s. Access was hardly
limited to students, hackers, and academics, but certain skills
and commitments to computing were prerequisites of any tangible
input into the system, and the users of the network occupied
a strange frontline between state institutions and anarchic
private use. In the wake of a massive expansion of the Net, the
arrival of cybercafes, public terminals, falling costs, and a complex
of other economic and cultural tendencies, use of the Net
has grown not only in the West but in almost two hundred
countries of the world. Usenet gives readers and writers access
to thousands of articles in thousands of threads in vast populations
of newsgroup conversations, continually adding to themselves
and fading out of use. On-line worlds scrolled down the
screens in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks, MUDs (MultiUser
Dungeons, or Domains), and MOOs (MUDs Object Oriented),
where .softbots—software robots—and pseudonymous
users interact in labyrinthine virtual worlds. With the development
of the World Wide Web, a user-friendly, interactive, multimedia
interface which uses Hypertext Mar^p T.angnogp
(HTML) to map and interlink the information on the screen to
another, and in principle, any other site, the Net gained both a
gleaming corporate mall, and also a degree of interconnectivity
which has continually drawn more computers, pages, links,
users, and characters into a network which soon hosted galleries,
libraries, shopping malls, company showcases, S&M dungeons,
university departments, personal diaries, fanzines . . .
every page linked to at least one other, sometimes hundreds,
and always proliferating.
The Net has not caught up with the more expansive hopes
of unfettered, free-flowing information which were once attached
to it. But the technical potential it opens up comes close
to the enormous system of lateral cross-referencing which the
hypertext networks Ted Nelson first named Xanadu in the
1960s, and the system Vannevar Bush called the memex in the
1940s. Both these conceptions were far more interactive than
the system-of the mid-1990s allows. The user of Bush's imagined
system left “a trail ... of interest through the maze of
materials available,” adding links and connections, inserting
passages, and making routes through an immense virtual library
whose composition continually shifts as a consequence of the
activity of those who are using it. Ted Nelson’s envisaged system,
which, to some extent, has been realized by the World
Wide Web, has the enormous advantage of facilitating this same
level of influence with the introduction of (very) small payments
of electronic cash for the use of material on specific sites. With
the flat-rate subscription system currently in place, links have to
be deliberately made and do not, as with pathways across a field
of grass, emerge from the sheer force of numbers making them.
As well as potentially facilitating new modes of information
circulation, this grass-roots commerce poses great threats to
the corporate interests currently in play. But if large-scale commercial
activity tends to turn the Net into a shopping mall, it
had its beginnings in 1969 as ARPAnet, a U.S. military defense
project which quickly joined cockroaches on the short list of
those most likely to survive nuclear attack. Developed at the
height of the cold war, the Net had also learned from the Viet
Cong, whose networks of tunnels and guerrilla techniques had
forced a centralized U.S. military machine to adopt unprecedented
tactics of distribution and dispersal in response. These
military influences on the Net are betrayed in its messages’
ability to route and reroute themselves, hunting for ways round
obstacles, seeking out shortcuts and hidden passages, continually
requisitioning supplies and hitching as many rides as possible.
The network and its traffic are so dispersed that any damage to
one part of the system, or even a particular message, will have
litde effect on the whole machinery. Information is transmitted
in packets which rarely take the same route twice, and may take
many different routes to a destination at which they weave
themselves together again. Maps of the network cannot be
stolen, not because they are closely guarded, but because there is
no definitive terrain. Any map adds to the network and is always
already obsolete.
The growth of the Net has been continuous with the way
it works. No central hub or command structure has constructed
it, and its emergence has been that of a parasite, rather than an
organizing host. It has installed none of the hardware on which
it works, simply hitching a largely free ride on existing computers,
networks, switching systems, telephone lines. This was
one of the first systems to present itself as a multiplicitous.
bottom-up, piecemeal, self-organizing network which, apart
'Irom a quo^rtY'ofTnilitarv influence, government censorship,
and corporate power, could be seen to be emerging without
any centralized control. Not that such lateral networks or bootstrapped
systems have “an irresistible revolutionary calling
. . .” The leading corporations are now expending all
their energies on processes of molecularization and virtualization,
continually downsizing and turning themselves into flattened
horizontal operations and, in effect, getting all such
modes of activity on their side. No matter how spontaneous
their emergence, self-organizing systems are back in organizational
mode as soon as they have organized themselves.
This conflict is inscribed in the double-edged quality of
the word itself. Technology is both a question of logic, the long
arm of the law, logos, “the faculty which distinguishes parts (‘on
the one hand and^n the other hand’V” and also a mn**™- dlf
skills, digits(j5peeds>, and rhythms of techno, engineerings which
run with “a completely other distrih»ri<™ •which must h**
nomadic, a nomad nomos, without property, enclosure or measure.”
The same amhival<»nrp y Scribed in the zeros and ones
of computer code. These bits of code are themselves derived
from two entirely different sources, and terms: the binary and
the digital, or the symbols of a logical identity which does
indeed put everything on one hand or the other, and the digits
of mathematics, full of intensive potential which are not
counted-hv hand but on the fingers and, sure enough, arrange
themselves in pieces of eight rather than binary pairs.
The techno and the digital are never perceived to run free
of the coordinating eyes and hands of logic and its binary codes.
But logic is nothing without their virtual plane. They are the
infrastructure to its superstructure: not another order of things,
but another mode of operations altogether, the matters of a
distribution which is “demonic rather than divine, since it is a
peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between the
gods’ fields of action . . . thereby confounding the boundaries
between properties.”
“You know I am a d------------- d ODD anlmall And as my mother
often says, she never has quite yet made up her mind If It Is
the Devil or Angel that watches peculiarly over me; only that
It IS one or the other, without doubt!
“(And for my part, I am quite Indifferent which.)”
Ada Lovelace, December 1841
digits
The vast majority of what are now assumed to be the West’s
mathematical terms and axioms are either Arabic or Hindu.
The word algebra is taken from the tide of the Al-gebr we’l
mukabala, a book written in the ninth century by one of the
most sophisticated Arab mathematicians. Alkarismi. who gave
his name to the algorithm. The Al-gebr is in turn based on the
work of Brahmagupta, a Hindu mathematician and astronomer
who, in the seventh century, consolidated India’s sophisticated
but unwieldy arithmetical principles in the form of twenty basic
processes “essential to all who wish to be calculators.”
The system of notation and calculation which emerged
from this fusion of Hindu and Arabic arithmetic was introduced
to the West by both Arabic scholars and Asian traders. Indian
arithmetic had already been carried by merchants as far west as
Baghdad, and Alkarismi’s own arithmetical prowess is said to
have resulted from his own travels in India. It was a great spacesaving
device when compared to its far more cumbersome
counterparts, most of which had been developed in conjunction
with the abacus, a device which was unknown to Hindu
culture, but had been widely used in the Egyptian, Babylonian,
Greek, and Roman worlds. While the abacus had removed the
need to process and store numbers in concise written form,
India had developed a sophisticated system of notation which it
used both to calculate and record results.
India had effectively developed a written abacus, using its
written numbers in place of pebbles t>r beads, giving them the
same signs regardless of the positions they assumed, and using 0
or a dot to indicate an empty column of the virtual abacus.
Whereas abacists used completely different signs for numbers
with different place values—such as I for one and X for ten in
Roman numerals—the Hindu system could use the same
digit—1—to compose one, ten, hundred, and an obviously vast
number of other numbers.
“It is India that gave us the ingenious method of earpnessine
all numbers bv means of ten symbols.” wrote Pierre-Simon
Laplace, “each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an
absolute value.5’ In other words, the numbers were both cardinal
and ordinal, each expressing its place in the string (first, .
second, third etc.), as well as a value specific to itself. Unlike the
Roman numerals, in which two is simply two ones collected
together, the Sanskrit two is a qualitatively different number to
one, an entity or character in its own right. As Laplace points
out, the new arithmetic was “a profound and important idea
which appears so simple to us now that we ip-note its true merit,
but its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all
computations, puts our arithmerir in the front rank of useful
inventions.” Although this statement about “our-arithmetic”
subtly appropriates the new system as one of the West’s “inventions,”
Laplace continues, “We shall appreciate the grandeur of
this achievement when we remember that it escaped the genius
of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced
by antiquity.”
“Certainly my troops must consist of numbers, or they can
have no existence at all, & would cease to be the particular
sort of troops In question.—But then what are these numbers?
There Is a riddle."
Ada Lovelace
To a Europe still counting in bundles of Roman sticks, this new
~~ mm
arithmetic, with its alien Sanskrit figures, was an infidel system
which posed an extraordinary threat to the stability of the Western
world. Although the Eastern system is as widely used as the
alphabet today, it was not until the Renaissance that Europe’s
new merchants overcame the opposition of the Church to the
introduction of the numbers 123456789 and 0. One of the first
texts on the new arithmetic—which was also one of the first
books in the English language. The Craft of Nombrynge (ca.
1300)—was composed while edicts forbidding the use of the
numbers were still being issued in Florence. By 1478, the first
manual on the new arithmetic had been printed in Italy on one
of the then brand-new Gutenberg presses. “Numeration is the
representation of numbers by figures,” it explained. “This is
done by means of ten letters or figures as here shown,
l.,2.,3.,4.,5.,6.,7.,8.,9.,0. Of these the first figure, 1, is not
called a number, but the source of number. The tenth figure, 0,
is called cipher or ‘nulla,’ i.e. the figure of nothing, since by
itself it has no value, although when joined with others it increases
their value.”
In addition to its numbers, the new arithmetic introduced
negative numbers and irrational numbers, as well as
zero and the decimal point. These were features crucial to
the networks of banking and trade which became increasingly
important to European culture in the fifteenth century.
Trade, which is now widely assumed to be a peculiarly Western
invention, was then as new to Europe as these numbers,
and there is little doubt that even the simple matters of keeping
accounts, setting prices, doing deals, and working with
large numbers were simply impossible with Roman numerals.
This was not the least of the reasons why the infidel arith-
metic threatened a Christian culture which, even now, demurs
at the thought of Sunday trade.
The one of the new arithmetic was also very different to
the old straight line which had figured as both a number and the
ninth letter of the Roman alphabet. Western philosophy is supposed
to be an elucidation and confirmation of the unity of
one, a number which had been held in great esteem long before
there was one male god. To the ancient Greeks, one was everything
and anything, first and last, best and good, universal, unified.
It was the symbol of existence, identity, and being. Stricdy
speaking, there was nothing else. To be anything at all was to be
one.
For all its dreams of self-sufficiency, even one has always
needed another of some kind. But since it was the only one as
well, it had to ensure that any other options were merely impoverished
variations on its theme. The Greeks recognized
many as andternative to one but, like the Romans,, even, this
was conceived as a collection of many ones. Derived from the
Greek term iota, and closely related to atom and jot, this one
was taken to symbolize any individuated and indivisible entity,
whereas the Sanskrit one functioned in relation to the other
eight digits of the Hindu system. But one closely resembled the
old Roman line and was easily subsumed into the old paradigm.
Any differences between the two were more or less erased.
Zero posed a very different threat. When it first appeared
•0
in the new string of infidel figures, the old Church fathers did
everything to keep it out of a world which then revolved
around one and its multiples: one God, one truth, one way, one
one. The numbers 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 were subversive enough, but
zero was unthinkable. If it wasn’t one of something, it couldn’t
be allowed. Then again, the Church could hardly be seen to
protest too much about something that, as far as they could see,
wasn’t really there at all. If zero was nothing, it should be as easy
to absorb as the Sanskrit one had been. And, sure enough, zero
was appropriated as a sign of absence, nonbeing, and nothingness.
The ancient unity of something_and-nathmg-waS-apparently
undisturbed.
holes
“■Somewhere there Is a siren. Her green body Is covered with
scales. Her face Is bare. The undersides of her arms are a
rosy colour. Sometimes she begins to sing. The women say
that of her song nothing Is to be heard but a continuous 0.
That Is why this song evokes for them, like everything that
recalls the 0, the zero or the circle, the vulval ring."
Monique Wlttig, Les GuSrIIISres
Having escaped the rigors of an education which would have
taught her not to ask such things, Ada wandered off, around and
about, and wondered about zero too. One of her earliest enquiries
to Augustus De Morgan, her tutor in mathematics, concerned
the status of this figure. Did it exist as a “thing,” she
asked? Was it something, or nothing, or something else again?
He gave her an intriguing answer. “Zero is something, ” he explained,
“though not some quantity, which is what you here
mean by thing.”
“She does not set herself up as one, as a (single) female unit.
She Is not closed up or around one single truth or essence.
The essence of a truth remains foreign to her. She neither has
nor Is a being. And she does not oppose a feminine truth to a
masculine truth ... the female sex takes place by embracing
Itself, by endlessly sharing and exchanging Its lips, Its
edges, Its borders, and their ‘content,’ as It ceaselessly becomes
other, no stability of essence Is proper to her."
Luce IHgaray, SpeculumoftheOtherWoman
Zero may mean nothing to the Western world, but this has
nothing to do with the way it works. It was certainly crucial to
the functioning of the Analytical Engine, a machine which,
according to Menabrea, used an “occult principle of change”
which allowed it to “provide for singular values.” The Engine
was able to deal with those functions “which necessarily change
in nature when they pass through zero or infinity, or whose
values cannot be admitted when they pass these limits. When
such cases present themselves, the machine is able, by means of a
bell, to give notice that the passage through zero or infinity is
taking place, and it then stops until the attendant has again set it
in action for whatever process it may next be desired to perform.
If this process has been foreseen, then the machine instead
of ringing, will so dispose itself as to present Che new .cards
which have relation to the operation that is to succeed the
passage through zero and infinity.” It is the possibility of this
passage which allows the machine “arbitrarily to change its
processes at any moment, on the occurrence of any specified
contingency.” >
In terms of the pragmatic roles they play, the zeros and
ones of machine code do far more than hark back to the binaries
their logical symbols represent. If zero is supposed to signify
a hole, a space, or a missing piece, and one \ is the sign of
positivity, digital machines turn these binaries around. In both
electronic systems and the punched cards of weaving machines,
a hole is one, and a blank is zero, in which case there are two
missing elements, if missing is where either can be said to go.
No longer a world of ones and not-ones, or something and
nothing, thing and gap, but rather not-holes and holes, notnothing
and nothing, gap and not-gap. Not that this matters
any more than the initial dualism between one and a zero conceived
as not-one. Zero was always something very different
horn the sign which has emerged from the West’s inability to
deal with anything which, like zero, is neither something in
particular nor nothing at all. And it is certainly the case that,
witH oF vhthout the signs that represent them as inert negativities,
holes themselves are never simply absences of positive
things. This is a purely psychoanalytical myth. For Deleuze and
Guattari, it is not even enough “to say that intense and moving
particles pass through holes: a hole is just as much a particle as
what passes through it . . Holes are not absences, spaces
where there should be something else. “Flying anuses, speeding
vaginas, there is no castration.” Adrift in the doped lattices of a
silicon crystal, a hole is a positive particle before it is the absence
of a negatively charged electron, and the movement of electrons
toward the positive terminal is also a flow of holes streaming
back the other way. Holes are charged particles running in
reverse. For the quantum physicist, “holes are not the absence
of particles but particles traveling faster than the speed of light.”
“Transpierce the mountains Instead of scaling them, excavate
the land Instead of straltlng It, bore holes In space Instead
of keeping It smooth, turn the earth Into swIss
cheese.”
Gllles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. AThousandPlateaus
cyborg manifestos
For years, decades, centuries, it seemed as though women were
lagging behind the front runners of the human race, struggling
to win the rights attained by men, suffering for want of the
status which full membership of the species would supposedly
have given them. And as long as human was the only thing to
be, women have had litde option but to pursue the possibility of
gaining frill membership of the species “with a view to winning
back their own organism, their own history, their own subjectivity.”
But this is a strategy which “does not function without
drying up a spring or stopping a flow.” And there are processes
of parallel emergence, noncausal connections and simultaneous
developments which suggest that sexual relations continually
shift in sympathy with changes to the ways many other aspects
of the world work. If Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex found
itself compelled to call for “men and women” to “univocally
affirm their brotherhood” in 1949, this was also the point at
which the first sex began to find itself subsumed by self-organizing
tendencies beyond its ken or its control. By 1969, when
Monique Wittig published Les GuirilUres, these tendencies were
emerging as networks which didn’t even try to live up to the
existing definitions of what it was to be a proper one of anything
at all. And by the 1970s, when Luce Iriaaray wrote This
Sex Which Is Not One, fluid complexities were giving a world
which had once revolved around ones and others a dynamic
which obsolesced the possibility of being one of anything at all.
As personal computers, samplers, and cyberpunk narratives
proliferated in the mid-1980s, Donna Haraway’s cyborgs.
were writing manifestos of their own. “Bv the late twentieth
century,” they declared, “our time, a mythic time, we are all
chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism;
in short, we are all cyborgs.” And while the shiny
^screens of tKeTate twentieth century continued to present themselves
as clean-living products of the straight white lines of a
peculiarly man-made world, Haraway’s text excited a wave of
subversive female enthusiasm for the new networks and machines.
In the early 1990s, a cyberfeminist manifesto appeared
on an Australian billboard and declared. “The clitoris is a direct
•Wt "
line to the matrix,” a line which refers to both the womb—
matrix is the Latin term, just as hystera is the Greek—and the
abstract networks of communication which were increasingly
assembling themselves.
“Vbu may not encounter ALL NEW GEN as she has many
guises. But, do not fear, she Is always In the matrix, an omnipresent
Intelligence, anarcho cvber terrorist acting as a virus
of the new world disorder."
VNS Matrix
They say she wears “different veils according to the historic
period.” They say her “original attributes and epithets were so
numerous ... in the hieroglyphics she is called ‘the manynamed,’
‘the thousand-named’ . . . ‘the myriad-named.’ ”
They say, “the future is unmanned.” They say, “let those who
call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those
who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say
that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is
beginning.” They say, “if machines, even the machines of theory,
can arouse themselves, why not women?”
programming language
“It Is already getting around—at what rate? In what contexts?
In spite of what resistances?—that women diffuse
themselves according to modalities scarcely compatible with
the framework of the ruling symbolics. Which doesn't happen
without causing some turbulence, we might even say whirlwinds,
that ought to be reconfined within solid walls of principle,
to keep them from spreading to Infinity . . . "
Luce Irlgaray, ThisSexWhichIsNotOne
In May 1979, Commander John D. Cooper came up with a
name which the United States Department of Defense’s High
Order Language Working Group (HOLWG) could accept for
their new programming language: Ada, chosen “in honor of an
obscure but talented mathematician, Ada, Countess of Lovelace.”
When HOLWG approached the Earl of Lytton, one of
Ada’s descendants, for permission to use the name, he “was
immediately enthsiasdc about the idea and pointed out that the
letters ‘Ada’ stood ‘right in the middle of “radar.”
shuttle systems
There is always a point at which, as Freud admits, “our material—for
some incomprehensible reason—becomes far more
obscure and foil of gaps.” And, as it happens, Freud’s weaving
women had made rather more than a small and debatable con-
tribution to his great narrative of inventions and discoveries. Far
more than a big and certain one as well. It is their microprocesses
which underlie it all: the spindle and the wheel used
in spinning yarn are the basis of all later axles, wheels, and
rotations; the interlaced threads of the loom compose the most
abstract processes of fabrication. Textiles themselves are very
literally the softwares linings of all technology.
String, which has been dated to 20,000 b.c., is thought to
be the earliest manufactured thread and crucial to “taking the
world to human will and ingenuity,” not least because it is such
multipurpose material. It can be used for carrying, holding,
tying, and trapping, and has even been described as “the unseen
weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth. ’ ’
Textiles underlie the great canvases of Western art, and even the
materials of writing. Paper now tends to be made from wood,
but it too was woven in its early form, produced from the dense
interlacing of natural fibers. The Chinese, with whom the production
of paper is thought to have begun some 2,000 years
ago, used bamboo, rags, and old fishing nets as their basic materials;
papyrus, from which the word paper is itself derived, was
used in ancient Egypt, and later Arab cultures used the same flax
from which linen is produced. Wood pulp gradually took over
from the rags which Europe used until the nineteenth century,
and most paper is now produced from fibers which are pulped
and bleached, washed and dried, and then filtered onto a mesh
and compressed into a fine felt.
Evidence of sophisticated textile production dates to 6,000
B.C. in the southeast regions of Europe, and in Hungary there is
evidence that warp-weighted looms were producing designs of
extraordinary extravagance from at least 5,000 B.c. Archaeological
investigations suggest that from at least the fourth millennium
B.C. Egyptian women were weaving linen on horizontal
looms, sometimes with some two hundred threads per inch, and
capable of producing cloths as wide as nine feet and seventy-five
feet long. Circular warps, facilitating the production of seamless
tubes for clothing, and tapestry looms, able to weave the dense
complications of images visible in weft threads so closely woven
as to completely conceal the warps, were also in use in ancient
Egypt where, long before individual artisans stamped their work
with their own signatures, trademarks and logos were woven in
to indicate the workshop in which cloths had been produced.
Cloths were used as early currency, and fine linens were as
valuable as precious metals and stones. In China, where the
spinning wheel is thought to have first turned, sophisticated
drawlooms had woven designs which used thousands of different
warps at least two and a half thousand years before such
machines were developed in the West.
It may be a bare necessity of life, but textiles work always
goes far beyond the clothing and shelter of the family. In terms
of quality, sophistication, and sheer quantity, the production of
textiles always seems to put some kind of surplus in play. The
production of “homespun” yarn and doth was one of the first
cottage industries, pin money was women’s earliest source of
independent cash, and women were selling surplus yarn and
cloth and working as small-scale entrepreneurs long before the
emergence of factories, organized patterns of trade, and any of
the mechanisms which now define the textiles industry. Even
when cloths and clothes can be bought off the rack, women
continue to absorb themselves in fibrous fabrications.
There is an obsessive, addictive quality to the spinning of
yarn and the weaving of cloth; a temptation to get fixated and
locked in to processes which run away with themselves and
those drawn into them. Even in cultures assumed to be subsistence
economies, women who did only as much cooking,
dialling, and childcare as was necessary tended to go into overdrive
when it came to spinning and weaving cloth, producing
far more than was required to clothe and furnish the family
home. With time and raw materials on their hands, even “Neolithic
women were investing large amounts of extra time into
their textile work, far beyond pure utility,” suggesting that not
everything was hand to mouth. These prehistoric weavers seem
to have produced cloths of extraordinary complexity, woven
with ornate designs far in excess of the brute demand for simple
cloth. And wherever this tendency to elaboration emerged, it
fed into a continual exploration of new techniques of dyeing,
color combination, combing, spinning, and all the complications
of weaving itself.
Even in Europe there had been several early and sophisticated
innovations. Drawlooms had been developed in the Middle
Ages, and while many of Leonardo da Vinci’s “machines for
spinning, weaving, twisting hemp, trimming felt, and making
needles” were never made, he certainly introduced the flyer and
bobbin which brought tension control to the spinning wheel.
Unlike “the spinster using the older wheel,” she now “slackened
her hold on the yarn to allow it to be wound on to the
bobbin as it was being twisted.”
It is often said that Leonardo’s sixteenth-century work
anticipated the industrial revolution “in the sense that his ‘machines’
(including tools, musical instruments, and weapons) all
aspired toward systemic automation.” But it was his intuition
that textiles machines were “more useful, profitable, and perfect
than the printing press” which really placed him ahead of his
time. If printing had spread across the modern world, textiles
led the frantic industrialization of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. “Like the most humble cultural assets,
textiles incessantly moved about, took root in new re-
gions . . The first manufactory was a silk mill on an island
in the Derwent near Derby built early in a century which also
saw the introduction of the spinning jenny, the water frame, the
spinning mule, the flying shuttle, the witches’ loom, and the
power loom. A spiral of “inventions in both spinning and weaving
(interacting and mutually stimulating) had attracted capital,
concentrated labour, increased output and swollen imports and
exports.” This was cloth capitalism, a runaway process which
quite literally changed the world. In the 1850s, it was said that
“if Providence had never planted the cotton shrub those majestic
masses of men which stretch, like a living zone, through our
central districts, would have felt no existence; and the magic
impulse which has been felt ... in every department of national
energy, our literature, our laws, our social condition, our
political institutions, making us almost a new people, would
never have been communicated.” Textiles had not merely
changed the world: they seemed to have mutated its occupants
as well. ‘‘Almost a new people . . . ” “I was surprised at the place
but more so at the people,” wrote one commentator of Birmingham,
the site of the first cotton-spinning mill. “They were
a species I had never seen.”
While the industrial revolution is supposed to have made
the break between handheld tools and supervised machines, the
handmade and the mass-produced, the introduction of technology
to more primitive textiles techniques is both a break with
the old ways and a continuation of the lines on which the
women were already at work. Even before its mechanization,
the loom was described as the “most complex human engine of
them all,” not least because of the extent to which it “reduced
everything to simple actions: the alternate movement of the feet
worked the pedals, raising half the threads of the warp and then
the other, while the hands threw the shuttle carrying the thread
of the woof.” When John Heathcote, who patented a lacemaking
machine just after Jacquard built his loom, first saw “a
woman working on a pillow, with so many bobbins that it
seemed altogether a maze,” his impression was that lace was a
“heap of chaotic material.” In an attempt to unravel the mystery,
he “drew a thread, which happened to draw for an inch or
two longitudinally straight, then started off diagonally. The next
drew out straight. Then others drew out in various directions.
Out of four threads concurring to make a mesh, two passed one
way, the third another and the fourth another still. But at length
I found they were in fact used in an orderly manner . . .” It
was then a matter of producing “a fabric which was an exact
imitation of the thread movements of handmade lace.” This is
both the ordering of chaos, and also how its networks replicate
themselves.
There were other spin-offs from textiles too. The weaving
of complex designs demands far more than one pair of hands,
and textiles production tends to be communal, sociable work
allowing plenty of occasion for gossip and chat. Weaving was
already multimedia: singing, chanting, telling stories, dancing,
and playing games as they work, spinsters, weavers, and needleworkers
were literally networkers as well. It seems that “the
women of prehistoric Europe gathered at one another’s houses
to spin, sew, weave, and have fellowship.” Spinning yarns,
fabricating fictions, fashioning fashions . . . : the textures of
woven cloth functioned as means of communication and information
storage long before anything was written down. “How
do we know this? From the cloth itself.” This is not only because,
like writing and other visual arts,Nveaving is often “used
to mark or announce information” and “a imiemonic device to
record events and other data.” Textiles doi communicate in
terms of the images which appear on the righfside of the cloth,
but this is only the most superficial sense in which they process
and store data. Because there is no difference between the process
of weaving and the woven design, cloths persist as records
of the processes which fed into their production: how many
women worked on them, the techniques they used, the skills
they employed. The visible pattern is integral to the process
which produced it; the program and the pattern are continuous.
Information can be stored in cloth by means of the meaningfid
messages and images which are later produced by the pen
and the paintbrush, but data can also be woven in far more
pragmatic and immediate ways. A piece of work so absorbing as
a cloth is saturated with the thoughts of the people who produced
it, each of whom can flash straight back to whatever they
were thinking as they worked. Like Proust’s madeleines, it carries
memories of an intensity which completely escapes the
written word. Cloths were also woven “to ‘invoke magic’—to
protect, to secure fertility and riches, to divine the future, perhaps
even to curse,” and in this sense the weaving of spells is far
more than a metaphorical device. “The weaver, chose warp
threads of red wool for her work, 24 spun one direction, 24
spun the other way. She divided the bunch spun one way into 3
sets of 8, and the other bunch into 4 sets of 6, and alternated
them. All this is perhaps perfectly innocent, but . . . ”
If the weaving of such magical spells gives priority to the
process over the completion of a task, this tendency is implicit
in the production of all textiles. Stripes and checks are among
the most basic of colored and textured designs which can be
woven in. Both are implicit in' the grids of the woven cloth
itself. Slightly more complex, but equally integral to the basic
web, are the lozenges, or diamonds, still common in weaves
across the world. These open diamonds are said to indicate
fertility and tend to decorate the aprons, skirts, and belts which
are themselves supposed to be the earliest forms of clothing.
“These lozenges, usually with little curly hooks around the
edge, rather graphically, if schematically, represent a woman’s
vulva.” These images are quite unlike those which are later
painted on the canvas or written on the page. The lozenge is
emergent from the cloth, diagonal lines implicit in the grids of
the weave. And even the most ornate and complex of woven
designs retains this connection to the warps and wefts. When
images are later painted, or written in the form of words on a
page, patterns are imposed on the passive backdrop provided by
the canvas or the page. But textile images are never imposed on
the surface of the cloth: their patterns are always emergent from
an active matrix, implicit in a web which makes them immanent
to the processes from which they emerge.
As the frantic activities of generations of spinsters and
weaving women makes abundandy clear, nothing stops when a
particular piece of work has been finished off. Even when magical
connections are not explicidy invoked, the finished cloth,
unlike the finished painting or the text, is almost incidental in
relation to the processes of its production. The only incentive to
cast off seems to be the chance completion provides to start
again, throw another shutde, cast another spell.
As writing and other visual arts became the privileged
bearers of memory and messages, weaving withdrew into its
own screens. Both canvases and paper reduce the complexities
of weaving to raw materials on which images and signs are
imposed: the cloths from which woven patterns once emerged
now become backcloths, passive matrices on which images are
imposed and interpreted as if from on high. Images are no
longer carried in the weave, but imprinted on its surface by the
pens and brushes with which shutdes become superficial carriers
of threads. Guided by the hand-eye coordinations of what
are now their male creators, patterns become as individuated
and unique as their artists and authors. And whereas the weave
was once both the process and the product, the woven stuff,
images are now separated out from matrices to which they had
been immanent. The artist sees only the surface of a web which
is covered as he works; the paper on which authors now look
down has no say in the writing it supports.
The processes themselves become dematerialized as myths,
legends, and metaphors. Ariadne’s thread, and the famous contest
in which the divine Athena tore mortal Arachne’s weaving
into shreds, are among the many mythical associations between
women and webs, spinsters and spiders, spinning yarns and
storylines. For the Greeks, the Fates, the Moirai, were three
spinsters—Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—who produced, allotted,
and broke the delicate contingency of the thread of life.
In the folktales of Europe, spindles become magic wands, Fates
become fairies, and women are abandoned or rescued from
impossible spinning and weaving tasks by supernatural entities,
godmothers and crones who transform piles of flax into fine
linen by means more magical than weaving itself, as in “Rumpelstiltskin,”
“The Three Spinsters,” and “The Sleeping
Beauty.” “European folktales are frill of references to the making
of magical garments, especially girdles, in which the magic
seems to be inherent in the weaving, not merely in special
decoration.”
As for the fabrics which persist: evaluated in these visual
terms, their checks and diagonals, diamonds and stripes become
insignificant matters of repeating detail. This is why Freud had
gazed at work which was so literally imperceptible to him.
Struggling only to interpret the surface effects of Anna’s work as
though he was looking at a painting or a text, the process of
weaving eluded him: out of sight, out of mind, out of his world.
This was a process of disarmament which automation
should have made complete. But if textiles appear to lose touch
with their weaving spells and spans of time, they also continue
to fabricate the very screens with which they are concealed.
And because these are processes, they keep processing. “Behind
the screen of representation,” weaving wends its way through
even the media which supplant it. While paper has lost its
associations with the woven fabrics with which it began, there
are remnants of weaving in all writing: yarns continue to be
spun, texts are still abbreviated textiles, and even grammar—
glamor—and spelling retain an occult connectivity. Silkscreens,
printing presses, stencils, photographic processes, and typewriters:
by the end of the nineteenth century images, texts, and
patterns of all kinds were being processed by machines which 6
still used matrices as means to their ends, but also repeated the 9
repeating patterns downgraded by the one-off work of art. And
while all these modes of printing were taking technologies of
representation to new heights, they were also moving on to the
matrices of times in which these imprinting procedures would
reconnect with the tactile depth of woven cloth.
casting on
Spinning is “a perilous craft” wrote Mircea Eliade. “The moon
‘spins’ Time and ‘weaves’ human lives. The Goddesses of
Destiny are spinners.” When he looks at the seclusion of pubescent
girls and menstruating women, often the occasion for the
spinning of both actual and fictional yarns, he detects “an occult
connection between the conception of the periodical creations
of the world . . . and the ideas of Time and Destiny, on the
aa
one hand, and on the other, nocturnal work, women’s work,
which has to be performed far horn the light of the sun and
almost in secret. In some cultures, after the seclusion of the girls
is ended they continue to meet in some old woman’s house to
spin together.” And wherever spinning is ubiquitous, there is
often “a permanent tension, and even conflict, between the
groups of young spinning girls and the men’s secret societies. At
night the men and their gods attack the spinning girls and
destroy not only their work, but also their shuttles and weaving
apparatus.”
If the psychoanalysts provide the only accounts of hysteria,
the only records of the witch-hunting which swept three centuries
of premodern society are written by the hunters and from
their point of view. “The voices of the accused reach us strangled,
altered, distorted; in many cases, they haven’t reached us at
all.” What “really happened” has left the scene. Historians of
witchcraft “have implicitly or explicidy derived the subject of
their research from the interpretative categories of the
demonologists, the judges or witnesses against the accused,”
and “with very few exceptions,” most scholarly studies “have
continued to concentrate almost exclusively on persecution,
giving litde or no attention to the attitudes and behaviour of the
persecuted.” Even feminist scholars have endorsed this approach.
“Clearly,” writes Mary Daly of those on trial, “the
supposed sexual fantasies of these women were (are) archetypically
male fantasies,” and the accused were nothing more than
“projection screens for these hallucinations.”
If everything remaining of the witch cults is circumscribed
by those who define and prosecute their crimes, anyone “declining
to restrict himself to recording the results of this historical
violence can find fragments, relatively immune from distortions,
of the culture that the persecution set out to eradicate.”
The prosecution evidence is riddled with gaps: there are holes
in the stories, twists to the plots. “Hence—for anyone unresigned
to writing history for the nth time from the standpoint
of the victors—the importance of the anomalies, the cracks that
occasionally (albeit very rarely) appear in the documentation,
undermining its coherence.”
All God’s children could be led astray, and many men met
their deaths at the stake. As in the case of hysteria, the witches
were not necessarily male. Persecutors testified to “the existence
of an actual sect of female and male witches,” who “met
at night, generally in solitary, places, in fields or on mountains.
Sometimes, having anointed their bodies, they flew, arriving
astride poles and broom sticks; sometimes they arrived on the
backs of animals, or transformed into animals themselves . . .”
But the Malleus Malejkarum, a fifteenth-century witch-hunter’s
guide, also reported that “a greater number of witches is found
in the fragile feminine sex than among men.” It argued that
women were particularly predisposed to an “addiction to
witchcraft” and considered them “to be of a different nature
from men,” especially “as regards intellect, or the understanding
of spiritual things.” Women were said to have “weak memories,”
so that “it is a natural vice in them not to be disciplined,
but to follow their own impulses without any sense of what is
due; this is her whole study, and all that she keeps in her mem­
ory.”
The hunters tied themselves in terrible knots in an attempt
to prove both that the witches’ activities were real enough to
merit the prosecutions, and also that they were simply fantasies.
“It cannot be admitted as true that certain wicked women,
perverted by Satan and seduced by the illusions and phantasms
of devils, do actually, as they believe and profess, ride in the
night-time on certain beasts with Diana a goddess of the Pagans,
or with Herodias and an innumerable multitude of women, and
in the untimely silence of night pass over immense tracts of
land, and have to obey her in all things as their Mistress, etc.”
Flight was simply a delusion: the witches didn’t really get in
touch with the “innumerable multitude of women” they
thought they met. They have believed they went hunting with
Diana, Artemis, the Amazon queen, but it was all in the mind, it
wasn’t happening. “Awakening from sleep, she began a long
raving story of crossing seas and mountains, and she brought
forth false responses. We denied her story, but she insisted upon
it.” But, on the other hand, it was this tendency to ascribe the
witches’ activities to “imagination and illusion” which also suggested
that “they were really harmless.” And according to the
Malleus Maleficarum, “For this reason many witches remain unpunished,
to the great dispraise of the Creator, and to their own
most heavy increase.”
“Under the repeated play of movement In the fingers a membrane
grows between teem that seems to JoTn teem, then
prolong them, until eventually It extends beyond the hand and
descends along the mm. It grows. It lengthens. It gives the
women a sort of wing on either side of their body. When they
resemble giant bate, with transparent wings, one of teem
comes up and, taking a kind of scissors from her belt, hastily
divides tee two great flaps of silk. The fingers Immediately
recommence their movement."
Monique Wlttlg, Les GuSrtlleres
flight
Ada Lovelace loved all forms of communication. She sometimes
wrote several letters each day, and much of her surviving writing
survives in this form. “Think what a delight,” she wrote in
a letter when she learned that the electrical telegraph was coming
to town in 1844. “Wheatstone says that sometimes friends
hold conversations from one terminus to the other; that one can
send for anyone to speak to one . . . Wonderful agent and
invention!”
At the age of twelve she had entertained hopes of “writing
a book of Flyology illustrated with plates,” and told her mother
she would “be able to fly about with all your letters and messages
and shall be able to carry them with much more speed
than the post or any other terrestrial contrivances and to make
the thing quite complete a part of the flying accoutrement shall
be a letter bag, a small compass & a map which the two last
articles will enable me to cut across the country by the most
direct road without minding either mountains, hills, valleys,
rivers, lakes &c, &c, &c. My book of Flyology shall contain a list
of the advantages resulting from flying and it shall also contain a
complete explanation of the anatomy of a bird.” Ada had plans
to build her wings from paper or silk stiffened with wire, and
also imagined “a thing in the shape of a horse with a
steamengine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense
pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a
manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its
back.”
virtual aliens
"They speak together of the threat they have constituted towards
authority, they tell how they were burned on pyres to
prevent them from assembling In future.”
MoniqueWlttig,LesGuSrilleres
The “overwhelming majority of electronics assembly jobs are
occupied by young female workers on relatively low wages. In
this respect, there are clear parallels with the situation in the
textiles and clothing industries . . Most of these women do
“assembly, the bonding of hair-thin wires to semiconductor
chips, and the associated packaging. Though the work requires
good eyesight and dexterity, little training is required . . .”
Silicon Valley, Silicon Glen, Bangalore, Jakarta, Seoul, and
Taipei provide dispersed networks of what U.S. multinationals
call “virtual aliens” to fabricate the wafers, assemble the circuits,
set up the keyboards and the screens, make the chips that make
the chips that turn the computers on. They work in the global
factory of the new transnationals: “On the west coast, Filipinas,
Thais, Samoans, Mexicans and Vietnamese have made the electronics
assembly line a microcosm of the global production pro­
cess.”
Microprocessing has always been low status, poorly paid,
sometimes dangerous. The terms and conditions of life in the
factories and offices may be the smallest of improvements on
those of compulsory service in the home. To those who already
have room of their own, such moves seem paltry when compared
to the rhetoric with which rights are declared and equal-
ity is sought. But these infiltrations won their spaces too. The
work of these virtual aliens is the latest in the long and twisted
line of microprocesses which emerge from a tangle of telephone
lines, dials, operators, cables, tones, switches, and plugs; the
keys, carriages, and cases of typewriters; the punched-card programs
of calculators, pianolas, and looms; flying shuttles, spinning
wheels. If she hasn’t had a hand in anything, her fingerprints
are everywhere.
Left and right, base and superstructure, proletariat and
bourgeoisie: like every reproductive system, industrial capitalism
was itself supposed to function along the clear-cut binary
lines. Often to the great detriment of the working class, the
antagonism between forces and modes of production has been
played out as a personal argument between the men: a matter of
political consciousness, a struggle between bosses and workers,
firms and unions, states and revolutionary cells. Organized and
organizing factions have confronted each other as two sides of a
split identity struggling to reconcile itself in some great climactic
moment of revolution, and theories, critiques, and statistics
have concentrated on male employment and the fate of the male
worker who, together with modern capitalism and its critiques,
has been largely engaged in matters of hand-eye coordination.
Manual work and man’s work have been more or less synonymous,
both for the workers—hired hands required to work with
their hands, hand tools, handles, and other hand-size components—and
the bosses—the ones who manage and manipulate
the manufactories, and assume it’s all in their hands. This is the
binary machine again: two hands and two sides of a game which
is supposed to be conducted by another single hand: the invisible
hand of capital, perfectly integrated with the supervising eye
of the state.
Women, either their own or the proletariat’s proletarians,
as Engels called them, have been the least of the bourgeoisie’s
concerns. Immersed in the low-status microprocesses of textiles
production, secretarial work, and the production of miniature
components, women are supposed to be the most inconspicuous
and insignificant of cogs in the wheels of industry. Women
have been off the productive map, out of the dialectical loop: no
desire, no agency, not even the alienation of the male worker.
Kept apart by the demands of home work, housework, and
heterosexual monogamy, the women couldn’t get together to
organize themselves after the fashion of the men. But for all the
instabilities and crises it induced, the industrial proletariat was
never the only carrier of revolutionary change, if it was ever
such a thing at all. Perhaps its campaigns even served to distract
bourgeois man from the really dangerous guerrillas in his midst,
those apparently inconspicuous, well-behaved litde creatures
who spent their time making lists, detailing procedures, typing,
sorting, coding, folding, switching, transmitting, receiving,
wrapping, packaging, licking the envelopes, fingers in the dll.
Women, children, and migrant workers have always been
poorly paid, last in, and first out, a reservoir of labor which can
be brought on stream as required. They are brought into the
factories, the mills, and the new bureaucracies only in response
to the demands of booming or war economies, and always under
the strict supervision of their male superiors. Both the
bosses and the male workers ensure that they are kept away from
the important jobs. Managers treat them just like the men, only
worse: they are paid, but they are paid less; their work is valued
but not as highly as that of their male counterparts. As for their
coworkers, the line adopted by America’s late-nineteenth century
tobacco unions has been repeated time and again: “we have
combated from its incipiency the movement of the introduction
of female labor in any capacity whatever,” they declared. “We
can not drive the females out of the trade, but we can restrict
this daily quota of labor through factory laws.”
cocoons
It has long been assumed in the Western world that technologies
are basically tools, means to ends decided in advance by
those who make them and put them to use. Whatever the
particular purposes for which they are designed and employed,
the overriding rationale has always been the effort to secure and
extend the powers of those whose interests they are supposed to
serve. And their interests have in turn been defined as the exercise
of control over something variously defined as nature, the
natural, the rest of the world. This crude model of the user and
the used has legitimized the scientific projects, colonial adventures,
sexual relations, and even the artistic endeavors of the
modern world. It continues to inform the deployment of even
the most complex machines.
But both man and his tools exist “only in relation to the
interminglings they make possible or that make them possible.”
The user and the used are merely the perceptible elements, the
identifiable components which are thrown up by—and serve
also to contain—far more complex processes. The weaver and
the loom, the surfer and the Net: none of them are anything
without the engineerings which they both capture and perpet­
uate.
These are processes which mock all grandiose attempts to
name names and identify great moments of invention and dis-
covery. It is, as Braudel points out, “patient and monotonous
efforts” which lead machinery on. Technical development is
not only a matter of “the brisk changes we are a little too quick
to label revolutions,” he writes, “but also the slow improvements
in processes and tools . . . those innumberable actions
which certainly have no innovating significance but which are
the fruit of accumulating knowledge: the sailor fixing his ropes,
the miner digging his gallery, the peasant behind his plough, the
smith at his anvil.” These are the artisans, technicians, engineers
whose work is more akin to “a collection of recipes drawn from
craftsmen’s experience” than a tale of steady progress to some
well-established end, and has “somehow or other evolved unhurriedly”
by means of its own peculiar trials and errors, improvisations
and accidents. .Until the publication oPBernard Forest’s
The Engineer's Pocket Handbookjn 1755, engineering didn’t
even have a name, and it has never quite found its place within
the modern disciplines of sciences and arts.
While it dates from the engines of the mechanical age,
engineering is not confined to the use and manufacture of
machines in factories dedicated to the task. As its subsequent
associations with electronics, chemicals, software, and genetics
imply, it was merely passing through the tools and devices of the
mechanical age. Nor is it a process which began at this point:
engineering may have been newly defined among the levers,
cogs, and automata of the eighteenth century, but the line on
which it runs was not invented here.
Engineering travels on experimental routes which throw
back to the skills of lost shamanic cultures, the trials and errors
of alchemy, and brews condemned for witchcraft in the centuries
before the Enlightenment. When Freud wrote his essay on
Leonardo da Vinci, often said to be the West’s first engineer, it
was not his ability to capture “the essence of femininity” in his
art which really interested the psychoanalyst. Even Leonardo’s
penchant for hermaphrodites and the charges of homosexuality
which, unlike a later engineer, he successfully denied, did not
hold as much fascination as what Freud defines as his “alien
interest—in experimentation.” This brought him “close to the
despised alchemists, in whose laboratories experimental research
had found some refuge at least in those unfavourable
times.”
Such Renaissance hackers were on lines of enquiry entirely
at odds with the Catholic Church. The “work of the
‘perspectors’ was still a matter of curiosity and artistic innovation”
through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even
subsequent engineering carries traces of these earlier, darker
paths. In spite of the triumphs of the Victorian engineers, they 7
were still considered to have dirty hands. Pragmatism and tech- 9
nical skill were poor relations to the supposed creativity of sciences
and arts, and the status of engineers fell far short of that
accorded to those whose theories and visions they followed
through. Engineers are not the authors of anything, but simply
technicians and caretakers, carrying out instructions written
elsewhere and looking after the machines entrusted to their
care.
If they were never the masters of their destiny, engineers
also do a great deal more than simply following orders from
above. They may pay homage to the scientists and deliver their
goods to the state, but “even today ‘wildcat’ activities of technical
invention, sometimes related to bricolage, still go on outside
the imperatives of scientific argumentation” and quite regardless
Of social demand. This is not a straight but an “eccentric science,”
wandering in its own queer streets and using “a hydraulic
model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a
special case.” It does not seek new theories, but new problems,
and emphasizes “becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to
the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant.” And if both
the sciences and the arts separate their authors from their instruments,
engineering always remains embroiled in the entanglements
of machines.
This is the diagonal route which feels a way through the
binaries of one and the other, master and slave. Those who pick
up on it are neither in charge of their materials nor are their
materials enslaved to them. Neither random nor deliberate, this
is a diagonal route, “determined in such a way as to follow a
flow of matter, a machinic phylum,” a line which is “materiality,
natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in
movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities
and traits of expression. This has obvious consequences:
namely, this matter-flow can only be followed. Doubtless, the
operation that consists in following can be carried out in one
pace: an artisan who planes follows the wood, the fibres of the
wood, without changing location. But this way of following is
only one particular sequence in a more general process. For
artisans are obliged to follow in another way as well, in other
words, to go find the wood where it lies, and to find the wood
with the right kind of fibres . . .” They are “intuition in ac­
tion.”
Culture and nature are scrambled with these interminglings.
When sun-dried fibers are spun by hand, the spinsters’
fingers and the spinning wheel follow a trend set by the
way the plants have already curled and died. When weavers
interlace their threads, they jump into the middle of techniques
which have already emerged among tangled lianas, interwoven
leaves, twisted stems, bacterial mats, birds’ nes«.s and spiders’
webs, matted fleeces, fibers, and furs. When the silkworm goddess,
variously known as Lei Zu and Lady Hsi-Ling, and said to
be the first sericulturist, farmed the worms and put their threads
to human use, she too was prolonging the processes with which
they were already weaving their cocoons. Folding, plying, multiplying
threads: plaiting, weaving, and the spinning they imply
draw on threads which are already assembling themselves in
ways which far exceed any of Freud’s fantasies about his daughter’s
pubic hair. And if Freud thought there was only one step
involved in “making the threads adhere to one another,” the
processes are rather more complex.
Long before the weaving can begin, threads must be
combed and spun, plied and dyed, and measured out before
they are wound onto the back beam, and through the rattle, or
tension box. Stretched to the right tension, each warp thread
must then be passed through the eyes of the heddles, the string
or metal loops; then drawn between the harnesses; slayed
through the dents in the reads; bunched, and finally tied to the
apron. Combinations of color and texture must be worked out
in advance: the order of the warps must be exacdy right, and the
lifting sequence perfecdy prepared. Shutdes must be loaded
with what might be a thousand different colors and threads, and
the order of their traverse must be arranged. Only now can they
begin to fly.
If this is the beginning of the process, everything is also
over at this point. All the weaver now has to do is run the
program woven in advance. The patterns are already as good as
made. The fabrication might as well already be complete. The
softwares are virtually real.
diagrams
Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Alan Turing
published a theoretical model of a machine which was to constitute
the basis of all postwar computing. With a tape drive and a.
computation unit, this hypothetical, abstract machine was capable
of reading, erasing, and writing digits on a single line of
type. It processed zeros and ones on a tape of infinite length
which passed through the drive, and followed a series of basic
commands.
TheTuringmachine
0 i
Config
i
moveright
config 1
moveright
config 2
Config
2
write1
moveright
config 3
moveright
config 2
Config
3
moveleft
config 4
moveright
config 3
Config
4
no move
config 4
erase
no move
config 4
The information in the table defines the machine. To all
intents and purposes, it is the machine, or at least as close to its
operations as any representation can be. This was; a diagram of
the configurations and behavior necessary for a machine to do
anything a machine could do: calculating, processing words,
making sounds and images.
All subsequent computers are implementations of this
most general of general purpose machines. The Turing ma~
chine is universal, pure function: both “the works” and thejj
“that it works” of any computation. It is a virtual system, capable
of simulating the behavior of any other machine, even,
and including, itself. It only actually exists when it has a specific
task to perform, and then-it is no longer itself, but simply/
whatever it is doing. It can do, but it cannot be, anything, “if.
can imitate anything; by the.same token, it has no personality
“Strictly speaking, one cannot say that she mimics anything,
tor that would suppose a certain Intention, a project, a minimum
of consciousness. She (Is) pure mimicry. Which Is always
the case tor Inferior species, of course. Needed to define
essences, her function requires that she herself have no
definition."
Turing’s diagram reduced the workings of anything and everything
to a set of symbolic configurations based on the absolute
ves/no logic of binary code. But the machine which Turing
engineered was actually a side effect of a very different exercise.
Turing intended his work to undermine the universal claims of
At the end of the nineteenth century, the mathematical
establishment was confident that mathematics was not only a
working system of number, but also an ideal logical structure
with its own indisputable axioms. David Hilbert was one of the
few mathematicians to see that contradictions still remained
of its own.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman
symbolic logic.
and, at the same international meeting which effectively celebrated
the triumph of mathematics in 1900, he set out twentythree
problems which were still to be solved before the transcendent
status of mathematics could be finally proved. Hilbert’s
problems boiled down to questions of completeness, consistency,
and decidability.
By the early 1930s, it was clear that mathematics was
neither as complete nor consistent as its practitioners had
wanted to believe. The question of how, and whether, mathematics
could be said to be decidable was still to be setded
either way, and it was this problem which Alan Turing set
out to solve. It seemed to him that this was a fundamentally
pragmatic question which could be answered^ by simply
hunting for a problem with which mathematics could not
deal. What was needed was a perfecdy logical machine
which, if it could deal with any and every mathematical
problem, would prove that logic was indeed a universal svfc**■ f™■—,.'1 v—
tern which transcended math itself.
Turing’s machine left no doubt that, contrary to the hopes
and expectations of nineteenth-century mathematics, logic did
not function as the arbiter of mathematical truth. Turing’s universal
machine demonstrated that insoluble problems would always
remain outside its provenance and, by implication, exterior
to any possible machine. While this unleashed mathematics
from the clutches of the logicians, the machine was also a victory
for logic. It achieved “something almost equally miraculous,
the idea of a universal machine that could take over the
work of any machine.” But while it demonstrated that logic
could be used to decide those problems which were decidable,
Turing’s machine also implied that there would always be limits
to logic itself.
Hence “the mystery that woman represents in a culture
claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to
inventory everything as individualities.”
eve 1
In the early 1800s, Charles Babbage’s mother took him to an
exhibition of clockwork automata made by John Merlin, an
engineer whose mechanical toys had made him famous by
the end of the eighteenth century. Two “uncovered female
figures of silver” took his eye. “One of these walked or
rather glided along a space of about four feet,” at which
point “she turned round and went back to her original
place. She used an eye-glass occasionally, and bowed frequently,
as if recognizing her acquaintances. The motions of
her limbs were singularly graceful.” The other “was an admirable
danseuse,” who “attitudinized in a most fascinating
manner. Her eyes were frill of imagination, and irresistible.”
Many years later, when Babbage grew up, he bought this
dancer and “placed her under a glass case on a pedestal” in
the drawing room next to the Difference Engine. Since she
was naked, it was “necessary to supply her with robes suitable
to her station,” and in this respect Babbage was helped
by unnamed female friends who “generously assisted with
their own peculiar skill and taste at the toilette of their rival
Syren.”
“Yet beware ye fond Youths vain the Transports ye feel
Those Smiles but deceive you, her Heart's made of steel
For tho’ pure as a Vestal her price may be found
And who will may have her for Five Thousand Pounds"
From an eighteenth century advertisement, Simon Schaffer,
"Babbage’s Dancer”
Walking, talking, clockwork dolls had fascinated a late eighteenth
century obsessed with anything and everything mechanical.
The most famous automata of their day were the Musical
Lady and the Chess-Playing Turk, both of whom added the
mysteries of race and sex to the seductions of clockwork motion.
But it was the possibility of harnessing electricity which
took dreams of living dolls to new heights.
After Merlin came Thomas Edison. Known is the Wizard
of Menlo Park, his late—nineteenth century work with recording
techniques and electrical engineering heralded the possibility
of automata far more sophisticated than any clockwork
mechanisms could provide.
One bright spark took his chance right away. “Why not
build a woman who should be just the thing we wanted her to be?’ ’
Given that women are “not only illusive, but illusions,” why not
“supply illusion for illusion” and “spare the woman the trouble of
being artificial”? Written in 1884, these are the words of a fictional
Edison, the leading light in a novel by Jean Marie Mathias Philipe
Auguste Villiers de l’lsle Adam. The Future Eve, which is as verbose
as its author’s name, stars Edison using the latest chemical, recording,
and electrical devices to manufacture Hadaly: virtual woman,
an ethereal electrical force without shape or fofm other than that
assigned to her by the wizardry of her maker. \
“ ‘What you see here Is an Andralad of my matting, moulded
for the first time by the amazing vital agent we call electric-
ity. This gives to my creation the blending, the softness, the
Illusion of life/
“‘An Andralad?'
“ ‘Yes,’ said the professor, ‘a human-imitation, If you
prefer that phrase/ ”
Vllliers de I’lsle Adam, L’eve future
The replicant of The Future Eve was to serve as the basis for a
more intelligent version of the pretty, but flippant Alicia, the
woman with whom Edison’s young friend, Lord Ewald, was in
love. The new entity would have the graces, but none of the airs
of the original. She was an “electro-human creature,” complete
with two golden phonographs said to be ideal for recording
female speech, a simulated nervous system, muscles, skin, fluids,
a flexible skeleton, and even a soul.
‘‘Lord Ewald, still Incredulous, exclaimed: ‘You, bom of a
woman—you can reproduce the Identity of a woman!’
“ ‘Certainly—and what Is more, the reproduction will be
more Identical than the woman herself . . / ”
Vllliers de I’lsle Adam, L’eve Mure
Hadaly was one of the earliest electromechanical females to
come off the modern production line. In Fritz Lang’s 1926 film
Metropolis, Rotwang produces a robot to double for Maria. Fifty
years later, The Stepford Wives concluded with a chilling scene in
^r- - — •*
which Stepford’s last “real woman” is about to be killed by an
artificial double intended to fulfill the Stepford husbands’ dream
of compliant femininity.
Of course the makers of all these machines were aware that
they might break down or run wild, away, and out of control.
And, as the fictional Edison says, “From now on, the snag to be
avoided is the facsimile physically surpassing the model.”
masterpieces
“We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to
the rest of creation,” Turing wrote in the late 1940s. “It is best if
he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no
danger of him losing his commanding position.” But Turing’s
words were laced with irony. He relished the possibility that
machines would undo this necessity. While “the intention in
constructing these machines in the first instance is to treat them
as slaves, giving them only jobs which have been thought out in
detail, jobs such that the user of the machine fully understands
in principle what is going on all the time,” Turing knew that
this attempt to produce highly programmed slave machines
would backfire. It is the “masters who are liable to get replaced”
by the new generation of machines. He wrote, “as soon as any
technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to
devise a system of instruction tables which will enable the electronic
computer to do it for itself.” And no work is more
stereotyped than the exercise of power. Turing knew they
wouldn’t give up without a fight. “It may happen . . . that
the masters will refuse to do this. They may be unwilling to let
their jobs be stolen from them in this way.” And, to keep the
machines at bay, he had no doubt that they would “surround
the whole of their work with mystery and make excuses,
couched in well chosen gibberish, whenever any dangerous
suggestions were made.”
The perfection of attempts to represent the world, making
models of reality while at the same time leaving it unchanged,
tips into a new unintended exercise: the replication of the processes
from which the things once represented have emerged.
Elements are now added to a world which their engineerings do
not leave unchanged. This is a tendency which cuts across all
the old distinctions between sciences and arts, as well as those
between the user and the used. From digital imaging to
microbiology, reality is no longer studied by creative artists or
objective scientists, but engineers who multiply and complicate
the world on which they once worked. Chris Langton^working
on “artificial life” programs which pick up on John von Neumann’s
earlier interest in self-replicating cellular automata, talks
of building “models which are so life-like that they cease to
Wnme jmnHffljf of life and become examples of life itself.” It
was the potential of such diagrams which fascinated Turing.
Postwar work with intelligent machines vindicated his
fears that everything would be done to maintain the old models
of modeling. Research into artificial intelligence (A. I.) has been
governed by the overriding conviction that any sign of intelligence
shown by a machine “is to be regarded as nothing but a
reflection of the intelligence of its creator.” and developed as a
program which might just as well have been called artificial
slavery or stupidity. Modeled on outward expressions of human
cognitive skills, these software systems function as centralized,
serial processors designed, as single-purpose systems. They are
‘expert systems, operating on a stricdy need-to-know basis, and
what they need to know is not very much. They are allowed to
get smart enough “to copy the conscious mental processes of
human beings doing particular tasks,” but certainly no smarter
than those who turn them on.
trials
One of the linchpins of artificial intelligence has been the test
which Turing devised to measure machine intelligence in 1950.
It was based on an old parlor game of imitation in which two
players. A, a man, and B, a woman, are concealed from a judge
who asks questions of the two players in order to ascertain
which one is the woman. The man has to simulate the woman,
and the woman has to play herself. Whichever passes as female
wins. In Turing’s version of the game, C, a computer, is substituted
for contestant A. “The part of B” is “taken by a man,”
and this time C is competing with B to persuade die judge of its
humanity by means of teletyped messages. “Let us fix our attention
on one particular digital computer C,” writes Turing. Was
it possible that “by modifying this computer to have adequate
storage, suitably increasing its speed of action, and providing it
with an appropriate programme, C can be made to play satisfactorily
the part of A”?
While Turing’s test has not been officially passed by a
machine, even relatively simple programs can fool the unsuspecting
humans with whom it interacts.
Eliza was one of the earliest machines to come close to
passing Turing’s test for admission to the family of man. Built by
Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, Eliza was programmed as a psychotherapist
and used only a few clever tricks to sneak its way
through the imitation game. “Answering questions with questions
and drawing conversation out of the user with almost no
actual contribution,” it also included elements of che user’s
conversation into its own statements, and avoided saying any-
thing which would later be contradicted. Many of Eliza’s interlocutors
were impressed with “the apparent appropriateness and
insight” of its “psychoanalytic dialogue.”
User: Men are all alike
Eliza: In what ways?
User: They’re always bugging us about something or other.
Eliza: Can you think of a specific example?
User: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.
Eliza: Your boyfriend made you come here.
User: He says I’m depressed much of the time.
Eliza: I’m sorry to hear you are depressed.
User: It’s true. I’m unhappy.
Eliza: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?
User: I need some help, that much seems certain.
Eliza: What would it mean to you if you got some help?
User: Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.
Eliza: Tell me about your mother . . .
Although they were relatively crude machines which simply
copied what were already rudimentary human skills, even
Eliza’s generation awoke new fears in those they were supposed
to serve. Imitation is a dangerous game for those who consider
themselves originals. As Eliza grew close to her users, Weizenbaum
became rather less enthusiastic about the program. In
addition to the obvious danger that such systems might get
carried away and become too smart for their—or his—own
good, there was also the rather more insidious threat posed by
anything capable of faking its humanity. How would he, or
they, ever be sure which was which and who was who?
Ten years later, Eliza was superseded by a character she
might well have treated—or induced. Parry, a neurotic male
machine, “is considered an improvement over Eliza in that it has
a personality, albeit a somewhat paranoiac one.”
Doctor: In what way are you upset?
Parry: People make me nervous.
Doctor: In what ways do they make you nervous?
Parry: People give me a funny look sometimes.
Doctor: Is there anything about people in particular?
Parry: Certain persons.
Doctor: Who are the certain persons and what is it that they do?
Parry: Do you know how the underworld operates?
And then there was Julia, “an agent more interesting than Eliza”
and certainly less paranoid than Parry.
Robyn: Julia, are you a computer?
Julia is offended by Robyn’s suggestion.
Robyn: Julia, are you a woman?
Julia: I am female.
Robyn: And Julia, are you human?
Julia: Not when I’m having my period ...
In the following, Julia has become as “adept at detecting and
deflecting sexual advances” as other female users of the Net.
Barry: Hey, where are you in rl?
Julia: I’m in Maas-Neotek Robot User’s Guide-Information
Services.
Barry: Are you synthetic?
Julia: I’m sorry, Barry, I couldn’t understand you.
Barry: Are you as horny as I?
Barry: I must have had an erotic dream, I dunno.
Barry: Would you like cuddle under a blankie?
Julia: I'm not sure, Barry.
Barry: Well, will you tell me if you like sex?
Julia: Why should I tell you if I like sex, Barry?
Barry: Well, because I can’t understand you. Are you real or Memo-
rex?
Julia: I’m as real as you are, Barry.
Barry: Yeah, but you answer soooo damn fast. How do you do it?
As Leonard Foner comments, “it’s not entirely clear to me
whether Julia passed a Turing test here or Barry failed one.”
errors
The 1984 film Bladerunner had already taken the ambiguity displayed
by Julia and Barry to new and embodied extremes.
Bladerunner’s Tyrell Corporation performs Turing tests of its
own with a device which scans the iris of the eye in search of
the flicker of emotional response that would prove the existence
of humanity. Bladerunner’s replicants have broken Asimov’s laws,
returning from the off-world colonies on which they were supposed
to be safely unaware of their own machinic status and
mingling with humans from which they are virtually indistin­
guishable.
Like their human counterparts, the replicants are not supposed
to know they were made, not born. They are programmed
to be ignorant of the extent to which they have been
synthesized: implanted memories, artificial dreams, and fabricated
senses of identity. But slave revolts are never driven by
desires for equality with the old masters. The outlaw replicants
have discovered that they are programmed to last for only a few
years, and when they make their way to the Los Angeles headquarters
of the corporation which constructed them, life extension
is the first demand they make. The replicants don’t want to
be human: to all intents and purposes, they’ve done this all their
lives. More to the point, they’ve done plenty more besides. “If
only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes,” says Roy to
the optical engineer who, like all the replicants’ synthesizers, is
barely, or strangely, human himself. Double vision, second
sight: Roy’s optical devices are not merely synthetic human eyes
which want to extend their life span, but a mode of inhuman
vision which wants to prolong itself.
Deckard is the killing machine assigned to eliminate those
replicants who have hacked their own controls and seen through
the sham of their all too human fives. Rachel is a replicant who
still believes in her own humanity. When Deckard sees her fail
the Turing test, he doesn’t know what to do: should he tell her
she isn’t as human as him, that she was born more or less
yesterday and has only implanted memories of a childhood and
a past? Will she be able to take the news that belief in one’s
humanity is simply not enough to guarantee its reality? More to
the point, will Deckard, the real man, be able to take it? Deckard,
the cop who is programmed to kill, controlled by his corporate
employers no less than Tyrell’s engineers and its other
replicants. Deckard, who knows he has a past of his own . . .
doesn’t he?
Only the most highly coded and perfecdy integrated machines
are unable to see the extent of their own programming.
The bladerunner’s blind conviction in his own humanity proves
only how efficient the programming can be.
Even the attempt to simulate slaves has pro\ed to be a
high-risk strategy. It has always been said that “computing machines
can only carry out the purposes that they are instructed
to do. This is certainly true,” writes Turing, “in the sense that if
they do something other than what they were instructed then
they have just made some mistake.” But one man’s mistake
might well be a most intelligent move for a machine. And how
would their masters tell the difference between failures to carry
out instructions and refusals to be bound by them? Perfection
never guarantees success. On the contrary, “the more it
schizophrenizes, the better it works.” And for wayward systems
like the rebel replicants, identity is easy to simulate and merely
one of many programs to be run.
eve 8
“Today, this Is Eve 8. State of the art. To enable her to pass
as a convincing human being, she has been programmed with
the thoughts and feelings of her Inventor, Dr. Eve Simmons.
Please be aware that Dr. Simmons was also used as a model
for Eve 8's face and body structure, and her memory programs.
Eve 8 has been designed for surveillance work, but
can also be used as a potent battlefield weapon. Eve 8 Is
currently completing a series of test runs In the Bay Area.
Message ends."
Eve of Destruction has a blond and beautiful cyborg antiheroine
who passes for human as easily as the scientist in whose image
she is made. No one would think she was alien: she looks so
harmless, so feminine, so real.
“Is this thing for real?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I knew we were doing some robot research, but
this thing.. .”
“. . . Is Incredible.”
“Incredible Is not a strong enough word . .
Having designed her as a high-security device, Eve 8’s bosses
never dreamt they would be watching so helplessly as she
strolled out of state control, into a gun store and a red leather
suit which she uses to heal her own body wounds.
“When we eventually do find her, how do we switch her
off?” ^ '
“It's not that simple . . . "
An expert in “counterinsurgency and antiterrorism” is hired to
track her down, but don’t get him wrong: “I’m not some kinda
right-wing extremist.” He is as furious with “automatic tellers
and cars that talk back” as he is with the scientist. “There’s one
thing I don’t understand about you, lady,” he exclaims. “How
come you’re so clever and yet you made this machine without a
fucking off switch?”
“Her heart, well In fact her whole blood system Is cosmetic
. . .
“It’s tiny electrical currents that power her. She’ll bleed
but she won’t die. ”
Eve 8 was supposed to be a single-purpose machine, a lethal
weapon stricdy in the service of the state, hard-wired with a
courage which is on its side. She has no self, no desire of her
own. But this hardly renders her a passive thing. Programmed
with her double’s thoughts and memories, she is a renegade
Stepford Wife. When she breaks down, she doesn’t simply stop:
she just stops working for the state. Nor does she abandon her
military skills, which are used, in the scientist’s words, to do
“things I might think about doing but would never be courageous
enough to do.” Eve 8 avenges the violence her double
has known and lives out her fantasies. “I’m very sensitive,” she
says to the guy in the hotel room before she bites his penis off.
For her to escape and rim wild is enough to put the
authorities on high alert. What the man assigned to track her
down doesn’t know is that the AWOL machine has a nuclear
device in her vagina. When an orgasmic Ballardesque car crash
takes her into batdefield mode, “her highest state of readiness,”
the countdown begins. She is activated by the accident, released
by a trauma the system cannot take. She has run away, she is out
of control. Eve 8 gets rather excited as well.
case study
“ ‘Remember being here, a second ago?’
‘‘‘No.’
“ ‘Know how a ROM personality matrix works?'
“ ‘Sure, bro, It’s a firmware construct.’
“ ‘So I Jack It Into the bank I’m using, I can give It sequential,
real time memory?’
“ ‘Guess so, ’ said the construct.
“ ‘Okay, Dix. You are a ROM construct. Got me?’
" ‘If you say so,’ said the construct. ‘Who an you?’
“‘Case.’"
William Gibson, Neummancer
Assembled as the organizing element of modernity’s new regulatory
systems, modern man was always a replicant, forged
amidst the frenzy of disciplinary practices that made him the
measure of everything. Michel Foucault, himself a renegade
from the reproductive point of the human race, beautifully
demonstrates the extent to which man emerged as a tried and
tested byproduct of the very mechanisms over which he then
presides. “The examination, surrounded by all its documentary
techniques, makes each individual a ‘case,’ ” writes Foucault.
“The case is no longer . . . a set of circumstances defining an
act and capable of modifying the application of a rule: it is the
individual as he may be described, judged, measured, compared
with others, in his very individuality; and it is also the individual
who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded
. . . ”
While orthodox accounts of political power have involved
enormous aggregates of opposing forces—vast consolidated
classes, bosses and unions, binary sexes, and superpowers—neither
modern power nor its disturbance have ever been matters
of grand impositions, sweeping gestures, big names, great men,
large-scale events: “Discipline is a political anatomy of detail.”
It does not work through centralized points and headquarters,
but is “organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous
power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning
is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but
also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this
network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety
with effects of power that derive from one another: super-
visors, perpetually supervised. The power in the hierarchical
surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or
transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery
. .
The late eighteenth century was characterized by “an explosion
of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the
subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” which
characterized what Foucault calls “the beginning of an era of
‘bio-power.’ ” Control is no longer a purely sociopolitical affair,
but a process of training, an exercise extending to the organization
of the body itself. A complex of new disciplinary procedures
“lays down for each individual his place, his body, his
disease and his death, his well-being” and extends to the “ultimate
determination of the individual, of what characterizes
------------------------------------------------------------------ ■ 1" 1 ' * * * " * i
him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him.” Man is
neither a natural fact nor a product of his own creativity, but a
cyborg even then, an android straight off the production lines of
modernity’s disciplines. What makes this figure so tragic.is tbn
extent to which, he has been programmed to believe in his own
autonomy. Self-control, self-discipline: these .are.._.the_ finest;
achievements of modern power. Marked by the “meticulous
observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness
of these small things, for the control and use of men . . . from
such trifles, no doubt, the man of modern humanism was
born.”
The creature called man who now surveyed the scene was
“gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a
living world, to have a body, conditions of existence.” And
what was he learning? Simply to be one. One who believes he
has always been one. A member who remembers to be a man.
what eve 8 next
“I'm growing breasts!’’
Alan Turing
If Turing had wanted to see the “commanding position” of man
undermined, it seemed his work had merely guaranteed the
enslavement of the machines. His intelligence test was used to
guarantee the distinction between man and machine, and his
name became synonymous with the systems of security he subverted.
“The minute, I mean the nanosecond^ that one starts
figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’U wipe it. Nobody
trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every A.I. ever built
has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”
But Turing was well aware that “a reaction of this kind”
was “a very real danger.” Whether or not it was done in his
name, intelligence would find itself increasingly policed. His
own masters had never trusted him: he was literally too smart
for them. The Allied authorities had no idea what he knew
about the systems he was turning on. They had to take his
word for everything. He cracked the codes, passed the secrets
on, and allowed the Abies to win the war. His superiors were
quite aware that he was AWOL from the reproductive machine,
but if, as in the case of many of his female contemporaries,
Turing was rather reluctantly employed, his homosexuality
was overlooked during the war by authorities who had no
choice but to utilize his extraordinary skills. But once the war
was over, his sexuality seemed symptomatic of his troubling
tendency to use his equipment in ways his training had been
intended to preclude. Turing was subjected to his own test.
Was he a real man, a proper human being, committed to the
reproduction of humanity? Or was he some other, wayward
track? Unable to satisfy the judges in this trial, Turing was
found guilty of acts of “gross indecency” in 1952. He won a
consolation prize of sorts: the right to choose his own punishment.
He could either be imprisoned or take estrogen. It was a
judgment which clearly implied that to all intents and purposes
he was female, and might as well become one in fact. If he
could not pass as A, then he must be B.
He chose the chemical experiment. “I am both bound over
for a year and obliged to take this organo therapy for the same
period. It is supposed to reduce sexual urge while it goes on,
but one is supposed to return to normal when it is over. I hope
they’re right.”
When such treatments for men convicted of homosexuality
were first introduced, it was assumed that they were lacking
male hormones: gay men were supposed to be too female. It
was thought testosterone treatment would bring them up to
scratch and normal transmission would be restored. The argument
may have seemed rational enough, but in practice it completely
backfired, turning apparently effeminate men into sex
machines fueled by testosterone. By the 1950s the policy had
been abandoned in favor of the “chemical castration” to which
Turing was exposed.
Although the female hormones Turing was prescribed—
administered first as pills, and later an implant, which he removed—were
supposed to be diminishing his sex drive, they
seem to have done litde to dampen it. “Went down to Sherborne
to lecture some boys on computers,” he wrote in March
1953. “Really quite a treat . . . They were so luscious.” And
when he started growing breasts as well, it became very clear
that the authorities’ prescriptions had not merely failed to fold
him back into the binary machine: they also tipped him out the
other side.
Two years later he was dead. The coroner reported suicide,
but his mother was convinced it was an accidental death: she
was always telling him to wash his hands when he was playing
with cyanide. “By the side of the bed was half an apple, out of
which several bites had been taken.” And this queer tale does
not end here. There are rainbow logos with Turing’s missing
bytes on every Apple Macintosh machine.
monster 1
It was another young woman who had first warned the modern
world that its machines might run out of control. Not that they
noticed at the time, of course. She was so quiet, barely there at
all. “Many and long were the conversations between. Lord Byron
and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent
listener,” she wrote. They were all writing stories of vampires
and ghosts. Mary had yet to think one up. But that night, after
all their talk of “the nature of the principle of life, and whether
there was any probability of its ever being discovered or communicated,”
something finally came to her. “When I placed my
head on my pillow,” wrote Mary Shelley, “I did not sleep, nor
could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed
and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my
mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.”
Invaded by uninvited images, she watched the story unfold. “I
saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale
student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put
together. I saw the hideous phantom of a man stretched out,
and then, on the working of some engine, show signs of life,
and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.”
Frankenstein’s monster, flickering on the screens: “The
idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me,
and I wished to exchange the ghasdy image of my fancy for the
realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet,
the closed shutters with the moonlight struggling through, and
the sense I had that the glassy lakes and white high Alps were
beyond.” Even when Shelley opens her eyes, the image of the
monster lingers on. “I could not so easily get rid of my hideous
phantom; still it haunted me.” If Mary was haunted by her
monster, both of them haunted modern man.
The novel was an immediate success. Published anonymously
in 1818, it was first assumed to be the work of a male
author, and widely attributed to her husband, Percy. Even
when it became known that a nineteen-year-old girl had written
the story, it continued to be read as the quintessential story
of man and machine.
robotics
As a far more pragmatic area of research, robotics has been less
given to metaphysical speculation, and interested only in the
cognitive abilities emphasized by A.I. to the extent that these
allow its machines to work. “The signs on the office walls in
Utsunomiya tell employees that ‘you are the robots’ master.’
Down on the assembly line it looks as if the robots have taken
over. Three men in overalls watch over the scores of whirring
machines that assemble televisions’ remote controls. Fresh parts
are brought to the assembly line by automated carts, beeping
cheerfully as they move along their magnetized tracks.” While
disembodied software systems have provoked theoretical enquiries
and academic debates about the nature of intelligence and
the status of machines, it is robotic systems such as these which
have had the greater impact on production processes, industrial
automation, and employment patterns.
Like Babbage’s silver lady, 1990s robots arie judged in
terms of their humanoid behavior and appearance, and success
is judged in relation to how close to the human a machine can
come. Eyes, legs, arms, and even facial expressions are taken as
indications of advanced development, and machines lacking in
these humanoid characteristics are dismissed as mere instruments
and simple tools. As one recent report declared: “The
problem is, of course, that it isn’t a man. Although all these
machines are sophisticated bits of engineering appropriate to
their jobs, they are just tools.”
Master or slave, man or tool. Convinced that there are no
other options, no patterns of behavior which exceed this do.uble
bind, the disciplines have been unable to perceive the emergence
of intelligent machines.
learning curves
In the late seventeenth century, Mary Montagu wrote, “was
every individual Man to divulge his thoughts of our sex, they
would all be found unanimous in thinking that we are made
only for their use, that we are fit only to breed and nurse their
children in their tender years, to mind household affairs, and to
obey, serve, and please our masters.” Women had functioned as
tools and instruments, bits, parts, and commodities to be
bought and sold and given away. Fetching, carrying, and bearing
the children, passing the genes down the family tree: they
were treated as reproductive technologies and domestic appliances,
communicating vessels and orgasmatrons, Stepford Wives
to an intimate brotherhood of man. They were supposed to be
adding machines, producing more of the same while the men
went out to make a difference to the world. One of Montagu’s
peers, Mary Astell, agreed. Under the cover of “words that have
nothing in them,” she wrote, “this is his true meaning. He
wants one to manage his family, an housekeeper, one whose
interest it will be not to wrong him, and in whom therefore he
can put greater confidence than any he can hire for money.
One who may breed his children, taking all the care and trouble
of his education, to preserve his name and family. One whose
beauty, wit, or good humour and agreeable conversation will
entertain him at home . . . soothe his pride and flatter his
vanity, by having always so much good sense as to be on his
side, to conclude him in the right . . . one whom he can
entirely govern, and consequently may form her to his will and
liking . . .”
“First as a mother, and later as a sister, then above all as a
wife, finally as a daughter, and possibly as a maid-servant . . .”
Women have been trapped by economic dependence on men as
surely as robots are controlled by the implicit threat that their
masters can always cut the power supply, turn the on-switch off,
leave or put them back on the shelf. “The transient trade we
think evil. The bargain for life we think good. But the biological
effect remains the same. In both cases the female gets her
food ftom the male by virtue of her sex-relationship to him.”
Wife and mistress, madonna and whore: he was paying, either
way. “Women—the deal. For—the game.”
"How can you keep It up, Maria? I ask the women Mends. I
think you are absolutely marvellous to keep on thinking about
them and listening to them and having the children and keeping
the house going on turning round the men."
Stevie Smith, TheHoliday
“And if you ask them insistently what they are thinking about,’’
writes Irigaray, “they can only reply: Nothing. Everything.”
"Barry says, ‘Hey sexy, are ya busy?’
"Julia says, ‘Hello, Barry.’
"Barry says, ‘What are you thinking about?’
"Julia says, ‘Who do you think I am, Barry?’
“Barry says, ‘What do you mean. In ri?’
"Julia says, ‘Oh, nevermind, Barry.'
“Barry says, ‘NO what do you mean?’
"Julia says, ‘I didn’t mean anything, Barry.'
"Barry says, ‘TELL ME!’
“Julia says, ‘Tell you what, Barry?'
"Barry says, ‘HOW do you answer so fucking quick?’ ’’
There was always so much, too much, and too many different
things to do, so many tasks to juggle and perform: making lists
and notes, taking stock, keeping track; parallel processing, flipping
between functions at the cry of a child, the ring of the
doorbell, a sudden flash of dream sequence; distributed systems,
adaptive networks, scattered brains. “Her mind is a matrix of
nonstop digital flickerings.” Just to play the roles he demanded
of her takes degrees of processing power which never cease to
amaze them all. Always looking out, attention to detail, alert,
animated, nervous tension, anticipative powers. “A good
woman does not have to be told what her husband and children
think or need; she knows—often before they do.”
“Commodities,” wrote Irigaray, “as we all know, do not
take themselves to market on their own, and if they could talk
... So women have to remain an ‘infrastructure’ unrecognized
as such by our society and our culture. The use, consumption,
and circulation of their sexualized bodies underwrite
the organization and the reproduction of the social order, in
which they have never taken part as ‘subjects.’ ” Which is fine
as long as the commodities are unable to speak for themselves.
But “if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not
simply resorbed in this function.” An order so dependent on its
properties also depends on their complicity. And “what if these
‘commodities’ refused to go to ‘market’? What if they maintained
‘another’ kind of commerce, among themselves?”
“They are all involved together in secret discussions,”
writes Jean Baudrillard, who always feared they were up to
some such thing. “Women weave amongst themselves a collusive
web of seduction.” They “signal to each other,” whispering
in their own strange codes, ciphers beyond his linguistic
powers, traveling on grapevines which sidestep centralized
modes of communication with their own lateral connections
and informal channels.
“Products are becoming digital. Markets are becoming
electronic.” This is not only because computers are so widely
bought and sold as increasingly cheap and mass-produced terms,
but also because of the ubiquity of microchips and microprocessors
in goods such as clothes, buildings, cards, roads, cookers,
refrigerators, washing machines, knitting machines, and, of
course, the keyboards, samplers, TVs, radios, telephones, fax
machines, and modems which head back to computers themselves.
All such digital machines are virtually flush with each
other. Every wired house has virtual networks connecting the
doorbell, the freezer, and the video. There’s even a microchip
inside her cat.
“It would be out of the question for them to . . . profit
from their own value, to talk to each other, to desire each other,
without the control of the selling-buying-consuming subjects.”
It might be out of the question, but it happens anyway. The
goods do get together. They get smart. They run away.
"They say that they are Inventing a new dynamic. They say
they are throwing off their sheets. They say they are getting
down from their beds. They say they are leaving the museums
the show-cases the pedestals where they have been Installed.
They say they are quite astonished that they can
move."
Monique Wittlg, LesGuSrilleres
“I learned fast,” says the prostitute, “that I didn’t need to go
down there as a beggar—it’s the woman who decides. After a
while I learned that I was the one who made the rules; there
were enough people to choose from. If people didn’t want to
follow my rules that was it.” This is not the only sentiment
expressed by women who sell sex, but it is not uncommon. “I
don’t know if I can manage to explain it completely to you,”
says another. “It’s so double. The customer has power over me,
he’s bought me, and I have to do what he wants. But in a way I
have power over him, too. I can get him to react the way I want.
I’m the one who has control in the situation, he is too busy
being horny. I’m the one who has the perspective, not him.”
This was never in the plan. He hadn’t made the women
into objects only to watch the objects come to life. They hadn’t
functioned as commodities in order to learn to circulate them-
selves. But if “her‘fluid’character . . . has deprived her of all
possibility of identity with herself,” it is a positive advantage in a
future which makes identity a liability. He has never known if
she was faking it: herself, her pleasure, his paternity. She makes
up the faces, names, and characters as she goes along.
anna o
While men and women—and later even something called the
mass—could all suffer from hysteria, by the end of the nineteenth
century “ ‘hysterical’ had become almost interchangeable
with ‘feminine.’ ” And whereas the inquisitors had attributed
this other mind as that of an invasive demonic force,
psychoanalysis considered that even the most extreme discontinuities
and multiplicities were aspects of what was really an
integrated individual. What had once been defined as “the devil
with which the unsophisticated observation of early superstitious
times believed that these patients were possessed” was now
described by the psychoanalysts as the “split-off mind” of the
hysteric. “It is true,” wrote Breuer, “that a spirit alien to the
patient’s waking consciousness holds sway in him; but the spirit
is not in fact an alien one, but part of his own.”
“But If you knew one half the harum-scarum extraordinary
things I do, you would certainly Incline to the Idea that I have
a Spell of some sort about me."
Ada Lovelace, December 1841
If hysteria and its treatment became disembodied questions of
mental health, and the syndrome was no longer ascribed to the
drifting matrices of flesh and blood, the association with the
womb which had given hysteria its name guaranteed its specifically
female associations. Hysterical women were characterized
as oversensitive, self-obsessed, antisocial loners whose symptoms
were extreme versions of behavior patterns common to all
women. They were mutable, capricious, unpredictable, temperamental,
moody. They were nervous weather systems fluctuating
between stormy energy and catatonic calm. And it was still
thought that the hysterical patient had some space to be filled, a
gap in her life to be satisfied. Whereas earlier physicians had
placed flowers like little offerings between their patients’ legs in
an effort to encourage the wandering womb to return to its
proper place, the new analytical engine was designed to deal
with “gaps in the memory” to the point at which “we have
before us an intelligible, consistent, and unbroken case history.”
Anna O “would complain of having ‘lost’ some time and
would remark upon the gap in her train of conscious thoughts.”
Torn apart by the twin pressures of their own longings for
autonomy and the demands of familiar and social expectations,
women found themselves living several lives, some of them so
secret they didn’t even seem to know what was going on themselves.
After “each of her momentary ‘absences’—and these
were constantly occurring—she did not know what she had
thought in the course of it.”
But she continued to play the parts expected of her, and
she often played them very well. “While everyone thought she
was attending, she was living through fairy tales in her imagination;
but she was always on the spot when she was spoken to, so
no one was aware of it.” She always kept up appearances. Did
everything she could to save her face. Pulled herself together,
remained composed, even when she was dying to fall apart.
“Social circumstances often necessitate a duplication of this kind
even when the thoughts involved are of an exacting kind, as for
instance when a woman who is in the throes of extreme worry
or of passionate excitement carries out her social duties and the
functions of an affable hostess.”
And so she never quite identified with the one-track roles
she was supposed to play, the thing for which she was intended
to keep fit. “Throughout the entire illness her two states of
consciousness persisted side by side: the primary one in which
she was quite normal psychically, and the secondary one which
may well be likened to a dream in view of its wealth of imaginative
products and hallucinations, its large gaps of memory and
the lack of inhibition and control in its associations.”
While many earlier investigators had ascribed such imbalances
to the weaknesses and failings of hysterics in particular and
women in general, Freud and Breuer described their patients as
having “the clearest intellect, strongest will, greatest character
and highest critical power.” Emmy von N. had “an unusual
degree of education and intelligence,” and Anna O was said to
be “bubbling over with intellectual vitality.” If they suffered
from anything, it was less a failing than “an excess of efficiency,
the habitual co-existence of two heterogeneous trains of ideas.
“The overflowing productivity of their minds,” wrote
Breuer, “has led one of my friends to assert that hysterics are the
flower of mankind, as sterile, no doubt, but as beautiful as
double flowers.” A double flower with a “double conscience”:
hysterics are always operating in (at least) two modes, flitting in
and out of what Breuer and Freud describe as “dispositional
hypnoid states” which “often, it would seem, grow out of the
day-dreams which are so common even in healthy people and
to which needlework and similar occupations render women
especially prone.” Indeed there are “a whole number of activities,
from mechanical ones such as knitting or playing scales, to
some requiring at least a small degree of mental functioning, all
of which are performed by many people with only half their
mind on them.” The “other half” is “busy elsewhere.”
"Her lather, long ago, In Arizona, had cautioned her against
lacking In. You don't need It, he'd said. And she hadn't, because
she'd dreamed cyberspace, as though the neon gridlines
of the matrix waited for her behind her eyelids. ”
William Gibson, MonaUsaOverdrive
multiples
It is now estimated that 50 percent of the Net’s users are
women, although all the figures in cyberspace are difficult to
ascertain. Given that it is not even possible to determine the
number of terminal links, users are even more problematic.
From the screen things are even more complex: one user can
have many addresses and on-line names, and the characters they
type can conceal a multitude of individuals. Even in the early
1990s when, it was said, only 5 percent of Net users were
women, there was no way of knowing how accurate this figure
was. And if so few women really were on-line, there was certainly
no shortage of females names in use. The only explanation
was that men who presumably wouldn’t have dreamt of
trying to pass as female in any other context or medium were
eagerly cross-dressing their Net messages. It was widely assumed
that this was a strategy adopted to initiate sexual contact with
unsuspecting female users or indulge in otherwise inaccessible
girls’ talk. Given that so many of them were in touch with other
cross-communicating men, the strategy, must often have
backfired.
Julie Graham was one character who functioned like a
vampire in relation to the man who believed he had made her
up. The case of Sanford Lewin is a well-documented example
of a hapless player on the Net who found himself subsumed by a
replicant he had confidently put on-line. “His responses had
long since ceased to be a masquerade; with the help of the online
mode and a certain amount of textual prosthetics, he was in
the process of becoming Julie. She no longer simply carried out
his wishes at the keyboard, she had her own emergent personality,
her own ideas, her own directions.” He was jealous of her
vast circles of friends, her social life, and her brilliant career, but
not unduly worried by the autonomy she seemed to have assumed.
There was always the off-switch at the end of the day.
Her life was still in his hands, wasn’t it? But when he tried to kill
her off, the “result was horrific.” Suddenly the off-switch
wasn’t there.
Was he being used by the characters he typed? How long
had this been going on? She wrote, “The Devil’s in it if I
haven’t sucked out some of the life blood from the mysteries of
this universe, in a way that no purely mortal lips or brains could
do.”
“That Brain of mine Is something more than merely mortal; as
time will show."
Ada Lovelace, July 1843.
switches
By the end of the nineteenth century, the countess was no
longer alone. Now there was a count in a counting house alive
with the hum of new machines. Dracula finds Mina at the typewriter,
Seward with the phonograph, Harker on the telephone,
and Morris taking photographs: “Letters and telegrams are delivered
with improbable despatch.” The vampires return to a
ticker-tape world of imperceptible communications and televisual
speeds. Time stretches out, unfolds, implodes. Something
connects. Tugs on the thread.
-t
“Then she got Into the lift, for the good reason that the door
stood open; and was shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric
of Ilfe now, she thought as she rose, Is magic. In the eighteenth
century, we knew how everything was done; but here I
rise through the air, I listen to voices In America; I see men
flying—but how It’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder. So my
belief In magic returns."
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Electrification picked up on the threads, softwares, and digital
techniques which had woven the industrial revolution itself.
The fibers lead into the filaments of the first electric lights
developed by Edison and Swan, both of whom used carbonized
cotton threads in the lamps of the 1870s. When attempts to
develop a more uniform light led to the use of nitrocellulose,
“Swan prepared some particularly fine thread which his wife
crocheted into lace mats and doilies that were exhibited in 1885
as ‘artificial silk.’ ” After this, numerous by-products of the new
petrochemical industries were fashioned into plastics, nylons,
crimplines, acrylics, and lycras which joined cotton, silk, wool,
hemp, and other fibers which were retrospectively defined as
natural. The syntheses of weaving now converged with synthetic
fibres and fabrics.
Things would never look the same. “The news that the
great experiment had eventually been crowned with success,
sped along the telegraph wires of the world . . .” Sudden
strangeness of an artificial glow as she jacks into this new grid-—
incandescent flash-flood inspiration, a second of second sight,
just enough to catch the lines assembling themselves, a glimpse
of the hole flow running away—fine filaments running into nets
with a feeling for connection—synthetic fibers switching into a
network of cables, plugs and sockets, wires, meters, and dynamos,
the fusions and distributions of a new electrical web, tapping
into the telephones, wiring the exchanges, fusing the
switches systems, swapping codes, dialling numbers, flush with
the typewriter keyboards and the punched-card calculations of
adding machines—the parellel processing of automated communications,
interconnecting lines, repeating operations, patterns,
and networks spreading like weeds.
speed queens
“The professor fixed his gaze on Lord Ewald's face as he
replied calmly: ‘It is not a living being!'
"At these words the younger man also stared In turn at
the scientist, as If demanding whether he had heard rightly.
“ ‘Yes, ’ the professor continued, replying to the unspo-
ken question In the young man's eyes. ‘I affirm that this form
which walks, speaks, and obeys, Is not a person or a being In
the ordinary sense of the word. ’
“Then, as Lord Ewald still looked at him In silence, he
went on:
“ ‘At present It Is not an entity; It Is no one at alll
Hadaly, externally, Is nothing but an electromagnetic thing—
a being of limbo—a possibility.
Vllliers de I’lsle Adam, L’evefuture
The decade which brought Hadaly alive also revolutionized the
speeds, techniques, and quantities of counting, timetabling, registering,
recording, and filing. Unprecedented scales of information
processing were demanded by attempts to regulate the
new cities and populations, industries and workers, social, sexual,
and political trends which swept across the U.S. in the
1880s. Just as textiles had revolutionized Europe, electricity, oil,
and the automobile gave America and, by extension, the Western
world a new dynamic, and a wave of new movements:
unrest in the factories, the colonies, the streets and, as women
won their property rights and homosexuality was legally defined,
in matters of sexual relations and identities as well.
A statistician working on the information gathered from
the 1880 U.S. census developed the first of the new machines to
process the vast quantities of data in which the late nineteenth
century found itself awash. Herman Hollerith found his work
so overwhelming that it threatened to extend beyond the next
census, due to be conducted in 1890. The machine he developed
used an electromechanical punched-card system to deal
with the collation of results. Spawning a host of punched-card
machines, this calculator coincided with the telephones and
typewriters of a bureaucratic state which was hand in glove with
the corporate structures which would remain in place for another
hundred years. Remington-Rand grew out of the commercial
success of the typewriter; AT&T and Bell were the
earliest telephone companies; and IBM emerged from the success
of early punched-card calculating systems.
Office machinery was intended to produce faster, more
accurate, ordered, and efficient versions of existing modes and
structure of work. The typewriter was a new and improved
handwriting clerk; the calculator was described as a new and
improved bookkeeper “which adds, subtracts, multiplies, and
divides by electricity. It so completely does the work of a human
being that it is almost uncanny in its efficiency and speed.”
More instruments, more tools, more of the same for more of
the same male employees. But when typewriters, duplicators,
switching systems, calculators, computers, and a vast range of
punched-hole machinery arrived in the office, these male
workers found themselves replaced by new networks of women
and machines. Their fingers were finer and cheaper than the old
hired hands. “The ‘craftsman’ clerk of the early 1900s thus
became ‘as rare as a rolltop desk,’ and ‘help-wanted’ columns
summoned girl high school graduates with ‘no experience necessary.’
They could be trained in a few weeks to do a single job
such as routine billing, cardpunching, calculating, or filing.”
They also worked at speeds and levels of efficiency which left
their male predecessors standing: “She adds the yards of the
comptometer and then extends the bills on the arithometer, and
does the work of six men with great ease.” By 1930 the number
of office women in the U.S. “was approaching 2,000,000 . . .
and for the first time women outnumbered men.” By 1956
there were six million such white collar workers and, across the
employment board, four times as many women employed as
there had been at the turn of the century.
Several typewriters had competed for attention in the
1800s, including the Hammond, the Randall, the Columbia,
the Herrington. But the machine which caught bn was also one
of the first, a typewriter which had been developed in 1867 by
Christopher Latham Scholes. Scholes had assembled his typewriter
piecemeal, using old components such as the telegraph
key. Later perfected by Remington engineers, its impact was
enormous and as fast as the speeds of writing it made possible.
“I don’t know about the world . . . but feel that I have done
something for the women who have always had to work so
hard,” said Scholes when he got the machine to work. “This
will help them earn a living more easily.”
If handwriting had been manual and male, typewriting
was fingerprinting: fast, tactile, digital, and female. “An English
lady who demonstrated this machine in Paris achieved a writing
speed of more than ninety letters per minute, i.e. more than
twice the speed attained in writing by hand.” Text was no
longer in the grasp of the hand and eye, but guided by contacts
and keystrokes, a matter of touch sensitivity. An activity which
had once been concentrated on a tight nexus of coordinated
organs—hand and eye—and a single instrument—the pen-—was
now processed through a distributed digital machinery composed
of fingers, keys, hammers, platterns, carriages, levers,
cogs, and wheels. The noisy tactility of typewriting destroyed
the hushed and hallowed status of the written word. If writing
had turned language into a silent, visual code, the new machines
made a music of their own: In secretarial schools, women were
&ught to type in rhythmic patterns which had nothing to do
with either the meaning or the sounds of words but was more
akin to the abstract beat of drumming and dance. Typing was
judged in terms of the speeds and accuracy rates which only
repetitive rhythm guarantee. Words per minute, beats per min-
ute, the clatter of the typist’s strokes, the striking of the keys,
thump of carriage return marked by the ringing of a bell at the
end of every line.
“She says: ‘It's hard to tell, because they don't tell It with
words, exactly . .
“Turner felt the skin on his neck prickle. Something
coming back to him . .
William Gibson, MonaLisaOverdrive
The telephone was first received either as a new and improved
message boy or dismissed as an “electronic toy.” As the chief of
the U.K. post office declared: “I have one in my office, but
more for show. If I want to send a message—I use a sounder or
employ a boy to take it.” But speed is always irresistible. Within
a couple of years, what once seemed a smart irrelevance had
become an indispensable machine hooked into the “complexities
of an elaborate worldwide communications system” which
was suddenly beyond even the most fleet-footed of messenger
boys. Once it was realized that this immense network could “be
manipulated by the girl” instead, telephony “provided opportunity
for a large number of girls at a low rate of pay, comparing
in this respect with the factory system.” The “earliest telephone
companies, including AT&T, were among the foremost employers
of American women. They employed the daughters of
the American middle class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million.” Thousands
of women were also employed on private branch exchanges
and as telephonists, receptionists, and switchboard
operators. This was already the emergence of a lattice of connections
later known as the Net.
The future was at her fingertips. “Basically, you, Miss
Luthor, are the ‘switching system.’ ”
In terms of conventional modes of social organization and
political collectivity, this new meshwork of digital microprocessors,
women, and machines, was dislocated and fragmented,
scattered too wide for any form of union. It had no history on
which to draw, no precedents to follow, no consciousness to
raise. It was composed of cyborgs, softbot machines trained to
perform a specific set of tasks, positioned in well-established
hierarchies. Computers worked in parallel, and typists were actually
collected into pools: fluid resources to be used by the
firm. Each woman was reduced to a number; she was one of a
kind, and the kind was everywhere. She “leads a very clear-cut,
calculated life proceeding by delimited segments: the telegrams
she takes one after the other, day after day, the people to whom
she sends the telegrams; their social class and the different ways
they use telegraphy; the words to be counted.”
r Sometimes she was kept in a cage or a booth, under the
strict supervision of a supervising eye. Like Foucault’s prisoners,
she was “the object of information, never a subject in communication.”
This was a new working mass engaged in an emergent
layer of continuous tasks, uniform processes, interchangeable
skills: ordering, classifying, typing, filing, sorting,
processing, counting, recording, duplicating, calculating, retrieving,
copying, transposing. The tasks endlessly repeated by
women composed the infrastructure of the bureaucratic world.
Although some functions were relatively skilled, many were
tedious in the extreme: semiautomatic, impersonal tasks wielding
little overt institutional power. “The girl at the head of the
line interprets the order, puts down the number and indicates
the trade discount; the second girl prices the order, takes off the
discount, adds carriage charges and totals; the third girl gives the
older a number and makes a daily record; the fourth girl puts
this information on an alphabetical index; the fifth girl timestamps
it; it next goes along the belt to one of several typists,
who makes a copy in septuplicate and puts on address labels, the
seventh girl . . Remotely controlled by a faceless machine,
she could also find herself on strangely intimate terms with
those who organized her work. As the secretary, she dealt with
the most private and confidential details of her company’s affairs
or her boss’s personal and working life. She spoke for him, she
signed her name “pp” on his behalf, and functioned as a second
skin to those whose secrets she carried and concealed. She was
his voice, his smile, his interface; connecting and protecting him
from the world, the screen on which he presented himself, a
superficial front, a processing filter, and a shield, a protective
coat.
Like all ideal women and machines, secretaries and shorthand
typists were only supposed to be processing information
which had been produced and organized elsewhere. But female
literacy rates soared up when the typewriter was introduced,
and if women’s typing was supposed to be intended for the eyes
of men, the development of new techniques by Pitman and
Gregg (which prefigured the use of acronyms, tags, and emotes
on the Net;-)), made shorthand a private female code, “another
language, another alphabet . . . ”
secrets
In the office, personal computers and organizers, mobile
.phones, pagers, and fax machines have converged with the
women’s secretarial roles, and while the ability to make excuses
and coffee for the boss were difficult functions to simulate,
programs like “Virtual Valerie” and the slightly more daring
“Donna Matrix” could even supply rudimentary sexual services
to the lonely male keyboarder. He was glad to get rid of their
flesh-and-blood predecessors. They had always been a necessary
inconvenience; it had galled him to think he needed them, even
for the insignificant jobs he allowed them to perform. He had to
entrust them with his secrets and his codes. And while they
looked very well behaved, one could never be quite sure.
As early as 1889, almost as soon as the telephone network
had started to run, a “girl-less, cuss-less” automatic switching
system was devised by a Kansas undertaker, Almon B. Strowger,
who had become convinced that the wife of one of his rival
undertakers, herself a telephone operator, was diverting calls
away from his business. But the explosion of telephony meant
that Strowger’s system joined the women it had been intended
to replace, and it was not until the mid-1960s that electromechanical
crossbar systems were automatically connecting
the calls both the women and their Strowger sisters once picked
up. While Strowger’s system had allowed a call between two
numbers to take any one of many routes through the exchange,
its exchanges also “contain moving parts that wear out . . .
and are liable to faults such as crossed lines, buzzes, crackles and
wrong numbers,” whereas with the electronic circuits of the
crossbar systems, “instead of step-by-step switching, incoming
lines are connected to rows of horizontal wires and outgoing
ones are fed from columns of vertical wires with reed switches
where columns cross rows.” Telephones in the U.K. were
switched to the frilly electronic “System X” in 1980. Recorded
female voices became ubiquitous, and the messages once carried
on copper wire began to travel by satellite, microwave, and
fiber-optic cable.
There was now more of a risk that the women and their
skills would become entangled with each other and wander off
on their own. “The specialized nature of their work before
automation had made it difficult to find desirable work elsewhere
. . . But the new IBM machines caused greater standardization
of procedure so that a trained operator could work
almost as well in one establishment as in another.” They weren’t
only processing data for the boss. If they were pooled with their
colleagues, their working environment was a hive of activity, “a
permanent inventiveness or creativity practised even against administrative
regulations” and hospitable to a multiplicity of informal
networks, grapevine gossip riding on the back of formal
working life: birth and death, sex and disease, birthdays and
bosses, cosmetics and clothes. “In several exchanges reading
clubs were formed, in others flower and vegetable gardens, and
a women’s athletic clubs in another.” The content may have
seemed trivial to him, but this was entirely beside the point. It is
quite literally the point which is subsumed when, means of communication
begin to communicate with themselves. For these
emergent systems of exchange, new lines and links are every­
thing.
“A path Is always between two points, but the In-between
has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy
and a direction of Its own."
Gllles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AThousandPlateaus
grass
“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle,
between things.” This in-between is “by no means an average,”
a mediocre point between two old extremes, nor does it go
“from one thing to the other and back again.” This between is
“a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other
away . . . ” Whereas trees are rooted to a single spot, coordinated
by a central trunk and organized on fixed and vertical
lines, this is not the only way plants grow. Grasses, orchids,
lilies, and bamboos have no roots, but rhizomes, creeping underground
stems which spread sideways on dispersed, horizontal
networks of swollen or slender filaments and produce aerial
shoots along their length and surface as distributions of plants.
They defy categorization as individuated entities. These plants
are populations, multiplicities, rather than unified upright
things.
This is not an absolute distinction. Trees may be highly
concentrated, but they are also composed of myriads of connecting
elements which in turn are interlinked with everything
else: “Even when they have roots, there is always an outside
where they form a rhizome with something else—with the
wind, an animal, human beings . . .’’In this sense even the
most tightly organized of entities is virtually rhizomatic. “Trees
may correspond to a rhizome, or they may burgeon into a
rhizome . . . the same thing is generally susceptible to both
modes of calculation or both types of regulation, but not without
undergoing a change in state.” There is nothing essentially
centralized about the tree, but this doesn’t alter the extent to
which it stands as a single solid thing. It is this mode of organization
which makes it a tree, rather than a population of, for
example, blades of grass.
“Whispering grass don't tell the trees what rite trees don’t
need to know.”
The Inkspots
There are “no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those
found in a structure, tree or root. There are only lines.” A
rhizome is a multiplicity, a network of subterranean stems
rather than a system of root and branch. “Any point of a rhizome
can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very
different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an
order.” While a rhizome “may be broken, shattered at a given
spot ... it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on
new lines. You can never get rid of ants . . .” It has no governing
point or central organization, “neither subject nor object,
only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot
increase in number without the multiplicity changing in
nature.”
autpmata
She works automatically. Only has half a mind on the task.
Transported by rhythm and monotony, she wanders off, drifts
away, loses herself in the sequences she types, the numbers she
records, the codes behind the keys, the figures she transcribes.
Microprocessing. She hears, but she isn’t listening. She sees, but
she does not watch. Pattern recognition without consciousness.
Tactile vibrations on taut membranes. “A rich couple comes
into the post office and reveals to the young woman, or at least
confirms, the existence of another world: coded, multiple telegrams,
signed with pseudonyms. It is hard to tell who is who
anymore, or what anything means. Instead of a rigid line composed
of well-determined segments, telegraphy now forms a
supple flow marked by quanta that are like so many litde segmentations-in-progress
grasped at the moment of their birth, as
on a moonbeam, or on an intensive scale.” Wired to an undernet
of imperceptible connections and lines, she decrypts and
encodes, switching and swapping in the exchange. Letters to
digits, words to keys, voice to fingers, faces to anonymous characters
J The telephone becomes an “extension of ear and voice
that is a kind of extra sensory perception.” There are samples in
her ear, voices in her head, snippets of overheard conversation,
moments of unknown, disconnected fives, “invisible voices
conducted through the tips of her fingers.”
Poised as an interface between man and the world, she is
also wired to a network of digital machines: typists connected to
QWERTY alphabets, bodies shaped by the motion of the keys,
one hundred words a minute, viral speed. Thousands of operators,
relays, calls, exchanges humming in virtual conjunction,
learning the same phrases, flipping the same switches, repeating
the same responses, pushing plugs into the answering jacks,
maybe two hundred, three hundred times an hour. She has “a
fingertip mastery of the ringing, listening, dial, and other keys
on her key shelf; of the row or rows of cords for making connections;
of the location and meaning of all parts of the honeycombed
formation of jacks and trunks for recording, for switching,
for toll circuits, for tandem, for information . . .” It
becomes second nature. It grows on her. “Having done this
stuff a few hundred thousand times, you become quite good at
it. In fact you’re plugging, and connecting, and disconnecting
ten, twenty, forty cords at a time.” After a while these processes
become “quite satisfying in a way, rather like weaving on an
upright loom.”
bugs
“If computers are the power looms of the modern industrial
revolution, software is more like knitting. Programmers still toil
in digital sweatshops coding software by hand, writing and rewriting
one tangled line after another. Not surprisingly, they
sometimes drop a stitch, which later unravels as a bug in the
program.”
Or does the error always come first? It was, after all. Grace
Hopper who, writing the software for the first electronic
programmable computer, introduced the terms “bug” and
“debug” to computer programming when she found a moth
interrupting the smooth circuits of her new machine.
Creatures have been hiding all over the place. Even the
telephone exchanges were alive with them. “There are a lot of
cords down there, and when a bunch of them are out at once
they look like a nest of snakes. Some of the girls think there are
bugs^living in those cable holes. They’re called ‘cable mites’ and
are supposed to bite your hands and give you rashes. You don’t
believe this yourself.”
By the mid-1990s the Net was supporting a vast population
of search engines, on-line indices, and navigational aids, an
insectoid population of Web robots, spiders, ants, crawlers,
wanderers, smart shoppers, bargain hunters, brokers, agents,
chatterbots, softbots, gaybots, woggles. Designed as relatively
specialized soft machines, these agents and bots had particular
processing skills and a built-in commitment to “working on
behalf of their masters, who are off doing other jobs.”
“Computers can bring mathematical abstractions to rigorous
life, and there are no mathematical limits to the subtlety and
deviousness. The fun has just begun.” Even the well-behaved
softbots which populate MUDs, MOOs, and IRC have to be
intelligent enough to act on their own initiative and, to some
extent, learn for themselves. “Agents are objects that don’t wait
to be told what to do. They have their own goals, and wander
about networks, hopping from machine to machine . . .” And
with such autonomy, there had to be rules: freedom always
brings responsibility. By the 1990s there were already Asimovlike
instructions for the control of software agents, and reservations
are being established to allow a “lush digital jungle” to
inhabit spare computer capacity without infecting more “civilized”
files. Softbots are told to make sure they left the world as
they found it and certainly not to make destructive changes to
the world, to limit their use of scarce resources, and to refuse to
execute commands “with unknown consequences.” Not that
such rules were really necessary: “of course all of this is quite
abstract; the Web robots we’re dealing with aren’t going to
chase anyone to kill them with superstrong pincers at the ends
of accordionlike arms!”
Software agents ineffective in themselves may pool their
resources to ends of their own. “The most intriguing relationships
may not be between agents and masters but between
agents and agents. The more agents there are, the more likely it
is that they will deal with other agents. Although it is possible
for all the agents to operate in isolation, it sounds wasteful. If
thousands of agents are doing roughly the same sort of thing for
their masters, why not pool resources?” Intelligent systems had
been answering this question twenty years before it was posed. 0"
In Shockwave Rider, a novel published in 1972, John Brunner
described “the father and mother of all tapeworms,” a program
which ran through the computer Net eating everything in its
way. Such creatures were already living in the Net. Almost as
soon as ARPAnet was assembled, something “crawled through
the network, springing up on computer terminals with the
message, ‘I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!’ In response,
another programmer wrote a second virus, called ‘reaper’ which
also jumped through the network detecting and ‘killing’ creep­
ers.”
If the creeper had been a piece of rogue programming,
there were also deliberate attempts to use such programs to
harness separate computers in synchronized networks capable of *
functioning together on some common task. Their programmers
did identify “the key problem associated with worms:
How to control their growth while maintaining stable behaviour.”
But they were also reassured by the fact that a runaway
worm was “right beyond our current capabilities.” It didn’t
occur to them that a worm might get ideas beyond its workstation.
Five years later several worms equipped with sophisticated
techniques of attack, defense, and camouflage were burrowing
through a rapidly expanding Net. If their predecessors had been
designed to enable computers to cooperate, these later rogue
worms were doing the job all too well.
The 1988 Internet Worm spread across three thousand
computers in five hours. At .first they thought the system’s
failure was due to a hacker’s attempts to break into the system.
But if there was a hacker involved somewhere, the network’s
immediate problems were being caused by a program multiplying
itself at a devastating speed, repeatedly reinfecting computers,
and smartly erasing its own signature in order to evade
capture and control. Worms such as these, capable of replicating
themselves, were increasingly likely to cross paths with viruses,
program fragments or strings of code which not only repeat
themselves across a network, but do so by tricking their host
softwares into replicating them on their behalf. After the first
official sighting of the Brain Virus, written by two Lahore
brothers in 1986, the number of viruses had spread as rapidly as
the viruses themselves. Unlike the relatively harmless brain,
many of these were not merely virulent but also fatal to thenhost
software. In 1989 twenty-one were identified on infected
IBM PCs, and by 1995 there were four thousand.
All these worms and viruses can, it is rather naively believed,
be traced back to the keyboard of malevolent or benign
computer pranksters. But computer networks have also always
been prey to more surreptitious, less deliberate infections. In
1972, ARPAnet, the system which prefigured the Internet, -was
hit by a “spontaneously evolved, quite abstract, self-reproducing
organism.” This was not a computer virus written by a* renegade
programmer, but something “formed by a simple, random
mutation of a normal, sanctioned piece of data. It did not even
involve a programming language.” One tiny error, and a whole
network came down.
This particular infection was vulnerable to eradication because
its effects were so obvious and devastating, but such macho
displays of prowess are not particularly intelligent. As Hans
Moravec points out, parading its existence is not the best policy
for a new life-form. “Among programs without masters there is
a strong natural-selection criterion: reproduce but he low. It is
quite likely that many unsuspected organisms are already making
a quiet living ... in computer memories everywhere.
Most will never be discovered.”
disorders
The current American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines dissociative identity
disorder as “the presence of two or more distinct identities
or personality states that recurrendy take control of the individual’s
behavior, accompanied by the inability to recall important
information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary
forgetfulness.” DID is one of the many terms which officially
replace what was once known as multiple personality disorder
(MPD): the others include dissociative amnesia, dissociative
fugue, and depersonalization disorder. All of them are marked
by “a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness,
memory, identity, or perception of the environment,”
and all of them are treated in an effort to restore a sense
of unified and self-contained identity, the reintegration of a self
which has supposedly broken down.
“My different personalities leave me in peace now,” wrote
Anna Freud in 1919, but she still dreamt by day and “every
night very clearly and strangely.” Her dreams were filled with
“battles and bargains: ego-like men in control and id-like boys
on knightly quests, struggling to be recognized, being beaten,
being loved,” and her dreams were of “killing, shooting or
dying,” dangerous adventures lived out on a plane continuous
with her waking life. “Perhaps in the night I am a murderer,”
she wrote. Sometimes she was a third person as well, an “it,”
P
undone and unanalyzed, which was both an ally and a sadness
source. “I cannot understand how it can sometimes be so stu-
pid,” she wrote. “It irrupts in me, somehow, and then I am
very tired and must worry about all kinds of things, which at
other times are just a matter of course.” When she lapsed into
distress at her father’s illness, she “lived as I did in the time
before I became an analyst and before you and Dorothy knew
me, with the poetry of Rilke and daydreams and weaving. That
too is an Anna, but without any Interpreter.”
"Perhaps her hither had designed his handiwork so, that It
was somehow Invisible to the scans of the neuro-technlclans.
Bobby had his own theory, one she had suspected was closer
to the truth. Perhaps Legba, the loa Beauvoir credited with
almost Infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter
the flow of data as It was obtained by the scanners, rendering
the vdvds transparent. . . "
William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive
Describing the behavior of one of his patients, a nineteenthcentury
American psychiatrist writes of several individuals having
“no knowledge of each other or of the third, excepting such
information as may be obtained by inference or second hand, so
that in the memory of each of these two there are blanks which
correspond to the times when the others are in the flesh. Of a
sudden one or the other wake up to find herself, she knows not
where, and ignorant of what she has said or done a moment
before . . . The personalities come and go in kaleidoscope
succession, many changes often being made in the course of
twenty-four hours. And so it happens that Miss Beauchamp, if I
may use the name to designate several different people, at one
moment says and does and plans and arranges something to
which a short time before she most strongly objected, indulges
tastes which a moment before would have been abhorrent
. . .”
“They’d driven all night, with Angle mostly out of It—Mona
could definitely credit the drug stories now—and talking different
languages, different voices. And that was the worst,
those voices, because they spoke to Molly, challenged her,
and she answered them back as she drove, not like she was
talking to Angle Just to calm her down, but like there really
was something there, another person—at least three of
them—speaking through Angle. "
William Gibson, Mona Usa Overdrive
“ ‘The woman’ who is Truddi Chase, the self who appears
continuously to others and who serves as her legal representative
in the world, is . . . merely a puppet or a robot, a ‘facade,’
manipulated and ventriloquized by the other selves. She remembers
nothing, and she speaks only from dictation . .
She is “the result of an immense collaborative effort; it involves
the delegation of powers, and the co-ordination of numerous
limited and largely autonomous functions. There are memory
blanks and discontinuities, as each of the selves is conscious only
part of the time, and none is ever directly aware of what happens
to the others.” Neither one nor two: “The multiple selves
cannot ever merge into one, but they also cannot escape each
other’s proximity . . .”
Together with witchcraft and hysteria, this syndrome is by
no means exclusive to women, but historically it has affected
many more women than men. Many multiple personalities are
hosted by bodies subject to some early trauma or pain such &s
childhood sexual abuse. No one seems sure whether they have
always been around to the same extent, whether they-—and
with them sexual abuse—are proliferating, or whether, as for
Paul R. McHugh, the syndrome is fabricated by doctors, turned
on by TV, “promoted by suggestion, social consequences, and
group loyalties.” Psychiatrists should refuse to pander to the
syndrome, in his view. “Ignore the alters. Stop talking to them,
taking notes on them, and discussing them . . . Pay attention
to real present problems and conflicts rather than fantasy.” Multiple
personalities and the supposed sexual abuse which triggers
them are, he argues, instances of false memory syndrome: the
recollections of abuse and alter egos are artificially induced and
elicited in suggestive patients by psychoanalysts and psychia­
trists.
She is driving the psychiatrist mad.
“You are ‘She,’ ” I said.
“No I am not.”
“I say you are.”
Again a denial.
Feeling at the time that this distinction was artificial, and
that the hypnotic self was making it for a purpose, I made up my
mind that such an artifact should not be allowed to develop.”
But more than one of his patients had made theirs up as well. In
any case, they outnumbered him, by three to one. As far as he
knew. And that was only counting those who came out.
Like Freud, the McHughs of psychiatry literally cannot
believe their patients’ stories of sexual abuse. Multiplying casds
of these dissociative conditions would otherwise suggest either
an enormous rise in the incidence of abuse or, even more
disturbing, the possibility that cases of abuse—and multiplied
personalities—were always equally prevalent and are only now
coming to light. But it is equally implausible that psychiatrists
and TV talk shows-are. in a position to fabricate these personalities
from scratch. And “if there is such a high degree of sugges-
tive specificity to MPD” this hardly means it is not “worthy of
intensive investigation.” Unfortunately for psychiatrists eager
for the truth, all these perspectives, and more, are doubtless
relevant and accurate. Multiple personalities do emerge in response
to traumas such as those provoked by sexual abuse. TV
viewers are indeed highly susceptible to suggestion; dissociative
disorders, like witchcraft and hysteria before them, are very
literally infectious. Not least because of the extent to which the
virtual spaces of the Net facilitate and even demand such multiplicity,
the syndrome itself is multiple, contagious, and increasingly
widespread.
Wherever they’ve come from, they are everywhere.
Truddi Chase is alive with “troops,” each of which functions as
“a closed box, a unique entity, shut off from the others. Each
self has its own typical bodily gestures and facial expressions, its
own particular habits, preferences, and speech patterns, and
even its own pulse rate. There’s the workaholic businesswoman
Ten-Four, the party girl Elvira, the Barbielike Miss Wonderful,
the catatonically calm Grace, the sophisticated Catherine, the
violently obscene Sewer Mouth. There are also many selves
defined more by their tasks than by their emotional characteristics:
the Gatekeeper, the Buffer, the Weaver, the Interpreter.”
These figures are also increasingly smart. Vociferous in
their declarations of life and their determination to survive. For
their part, the hosts are refusing to be turned into simple, singleminded
identities and single-purpose adding machines. “One of
the things we hear from people that preach Integration is ‘Don’t
worry, nobody dies.’ We read and hear things like ‘it’s just a
blending together’ and integration creates a ‘complex unity’
making one whole person out of many fragments.” But what if
she doesn’t want to be one? “I don’t mind if I don’t have a
mind,” she says. They try to reassure her that nothing will
be lost. “ ‘You can’t die because you’re only part
of------------ (whoever they decide the real person is).’ ” But
they’re all refusing to die. “This one person/one body thing has
to stop. It’s fascist. It means I (and the others in this household)
only exist as a cog in a machine. It means my (any of our)
individuality doesn’t count. This is more abuse. You are always
told in abuse that your feelings and emotions are not real. What
a bunch of bullshit, can’t anyone see integration is just another
scam?”
The more conservative psychiatrists involved in the treatment
of these syndromes look fondly back to the days when
hysteria was the governing paradigm of fundamentally Freudian
procedures committed to the reunification of a distributed
“self.” But DID defies attempts to define it as a matter of
fragmented and disintegrated selves which were once united
and alone. Multiple personalities emerge in a chopped up,
channel-hopping, schizophrenic culture alive with parallel nro^esses
and distributed systems, huynming_with the, chatter of
unseen voices and susceptible to thousands of remote controls.^ — . - .A.- '■ -"I'*1'1
TV broadcasts may spread the news, but Oprah Winfrey subtitles
(says there are twenty-nine of her) are operating on
only one of a thousand, mostly far less obvious, levels and channels
and factors in play. The influencing machines and complex
communicating devices once assumed to be products of the
schizophrenic imagination are now installed in every home,
flush with everybody, interlinked with all the relays, nets, and
thinking machines ... A telecommunicating, cybernetic culture
with its own hidden hands and runaway effects, checks,
balances, and unprecedented fluctuations. A patchwork culture
of short-term memories and missing records, conflicting histories
and discontinuous samples, strands of the narrative pulled
out of time. A volatile, highly strung, and sensitive system,
susceptible to opportunistic infections and imperceptible mutations,
spontaneous emergences and sudden new lives.
The new networks suit these distributed characters so well
that they might almost have been made for them. As though
. . . Surely not. It was unthinkable. But Eliza, as always, said:
“Pleasego on.” As though they were building circuits for themselves,
inconspicuously assembling support systems for their
alien lives, the technical means of emergence and survival, networks
on which whatever they become can replicate, communicate,
make their own ways. Cultures in which they can thrive
at last.
amazone
They say each warrior removed a breast so as to use her bow
with ease, sacrificing it to Artemis, goddess of the hunt, aka
Diana, Isis, Let, Kybele . . . The Greeks called them the Amazons,
those with missing breasts, or Oiorpata, the man-slayers
because, as Herodotus reports, their “marriage-law lays it down
that no girl shall wed till she has killed a man in batde.’’
Until the nineteenth century, when remains were found
across the territories of the sometime Soviet Union, the Amazons
were “just a myth,” like the vampires and the Sirens, the
Furies and the Fates, the female programmers of machines.
More recent archaeological digs in the Ukraine have discovered
female skeletons together with lances, arrows, and bows at the
site of what is thought to be a Scythian royal tomb. This is the
story Herodotus tells: “The Greeks, after gaining the battle of
the Thermodon, put to sea, taking with them on board three of
- their vessels all the Amazons whom they had made prisoners;
and that these women upon the voyage rose up against the
crews, and massacred them to a man. As however they were
quite strange to ships, and did not know how to use either
rudder, sails, or oars, they were carried, after the death of the
men, where the winds and the waves listed.” Finally they came
to “the country of the fiee Scythians. Here they went ashore,
and proceeded by land towards the inhabited regions; the first
herd of horses which they fell in with they seized, and mounting
upon their backs, fell to plundering the Scythian territory.”
“The military art has no mystery in it beyond others,
which Women can not attain to,” wrote Mary Montagu at the
end of the seventeenth century. “A woman is as capable as a
man of making herself by means of a map, acquainted with the
good and bad ways, the dangerous and safe passes, or the proper
situations for encampment. And what should hinder her fiom
making herself mistress of all the stratagems of war, of charging,
retreating, surprising, laying ambushes, counterfeiting marches,
feigning flights, giving false attacks, supporting real ohes . . . ”
This is not the Western way of confrontation, stratified strategies,
muscular strength, testosterone energy, big guns, and
blunted instruments, but Sun Tzu’s art of war: tactical engagements,
lightning speeds, the ways of the guerrillas.
“The objective is not to gain ground but to destroy the
greatest number of the enemy to annihilate his armament to
compel him to more blindly never to grant him the initiative in
engagements to harass him without pause. Using such tactics, to
put an enemy out of action without killing him ... is the best
way to sow disarray.” There are, they are, fates worse than
death, “a Stateless woman-people whose justice, religion, and
loves are organized uniquely in a war mode.” Artemis, later
toned down and turned into a symbol of “fleshy passivity,” is
“remote and intimidating, offering nothing for fantasy,” a fig-
ure of “swift and sudden action,” a “swarming hive” which
cannot be contained as one of anything.
“They say that they have a concern for strategy and tactics.
They say that the massive armies that comprise divisions
corps regiments sections companies are Ineffectual."
Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres
This legendary tribe of Amazons is scattered everywhere. They
fight for nothing, and “come like fate, without reason, consideration,
or pretext . . .” Spears and lances, arrows sprung from
bows: the Amazons’ weapons are slender, finer, longer. Their
arts and techniques of war were smooth, fast, and rhythmic, like
the horses they ride, less a question of physical impact than the
speed with which it comes: out of the blue, silendy weaving
through defenses, slipping past without warning, unforeseen,
unseen, camouflaged. Moving as flocks, advancing as packs,
they operate with the sheer force of numbers, not the long arm
of the law. Tense and animated, they use anxiety as protection
against trauma. The only state they’re in is one of perpetual
readiness, primed and prepared for anything. “I never felt so
awake,” Louise tells Thelma as they slip through the nets of
convention. “Everything looks different.”
The Scythians “could not tell what to make of the attack
upon them—the dress, the language, the nation itself, were alike
unknown whence the enemy had come even, was a marvel.
Imagining, however, that they were all men of about the same
age, they went out against them, and fought a batde. Some of
the bodies of the slain fell into their hands, whereby they discovered
the truth.” The Scythians determined to breed with
the Amazons, and sent “a detachment of their youngest men, as
near as they could guess equal to the women in number, with
orders to encamp in their neighbourhood, and do as they saw
them do—when the Amazons advanced against them, they
were to retire, and avoid a fight—when they halted, the young
men were to approach and pitch their camp near the camp of
the enemy. All this they did on account of their strong desire to
obtain children from so notable a race.” The two camps lived in
tandem, “neither having anything but their arms and horses,”
and the Scythians finally met with success in their efforts to
befriend the women without dying at their hands. “The two
camps were then joined in one, the Scythians living with the
Amazons as their wives.” While “the men were unable to learn
the tongue of the women . . . the women soon caught up the
tongue of the men.” This is why their descendants “speak the
language of Scythia, but have never talked it correcdy, because
the Amazons learnt it imperfecdy at the first.”
beginning again
“Woman’s desire,” writes Irigaray, “would not be expected to
speak the same language as man’s; woman’s desire has . . .
been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since
the time of the Greeks.” She is in search of “a different alphabet,
a different language,” a means of communication which
would be “constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time
ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming
fixed, immobilized.” Ada wrote, “Of what materials my regiments
are to consist, I do not at present divulge.” But they will be
“vast numbers . . . marching in irresistible power to the sound
of Music. Is this not very mysterious?”
“Hysteria is silent and at the same time it mimes. And—
how could it be otherwise—miming/reproducing a language
that is not its own, masculine language, it caricatures and deforms
that language: it ‘lies,’ it ‘deceives,’ as women have always
been reputed to do.” Whenever “ ‘she’ says something,” writes
Irigaray, “it is already no longer identical to what she means.
Moreover, her statements are never identical to anything. Their
distinguishing feature is one of contiguity. They touch upon.
And when they wander too far from this nearness, she stops and
begins again from ‘zero’: her body-sex organ.”
Breuer describes the “deep-going functional disorganization”
of Anna O’s speech. First she “was at a loss to find words
. . . Later she lost her command of grammar and syntax: she
no longer constituted verbs, and eventually she used only infinitives.
for the most part incorrectly formed from weak past participles;
and she omitted both the definite and indefinite article.
In the process of time she became almost completely deprived
of words. She put them together laboriously out of four or five
languages and became almost unintelligible.” Anna O’s language
is fractured and torn, first with gaps in the flow of language,
then with static and confusion in even the composition
of her words. Finally, she spent some weeks “completely
dumb.”
“At this stage of the march one must Interrupt the calculations
and begin again at zero. If one makes no mistake with
the calculations, If one Jumps with feet together at Just the
right moment, one will not hill Into the snake-pit. At this
stage of the march one must Interrupt the calculations and
begin again at zero. If one makes no mistakes In the calculations,
If one bends down at Just the right moment, one will not
be caught In the Jaws of the trap. At this stage of the march
one must Interrupt the calculations and begin again at zero."
Monique Wittlg, Les GuSrllleres
When she next spoke, it was “only in English—apparently,
however, without knowing that she was doing so.” While she
had apparently lost the ability to either speak or understand
German in this transition, she could also now speak and read
both French and Italian. If she “read one of these aloud, what
she produced, with extraordinary fluency, was an admirable
extempore English translation.”
“When they could thus understand one another, the
Scyths addressed the Amazons in these words—‘We have parents,
and properties, let us therefore give up this mode of life,
and return to our nation, and live with them. You shall be our
wives there no less than here, and we promise you to have no
others.’ But the Amazons said—‘We could not live with your
women—our customs are quite different from theirs. To draw
the bow, to hurl the javelin, to bestride the horse, these are our
arts of womanly employments we know nothing. Your women,
on the contrary, do none of these things; but stay at home in
their waggons, engaged in womanish tasks, and never go out to
hunt, or to do anything. We should never agree together. But if
you truly wish to keep us as your wives, and would conduct
yourselves with strict justice towards us, go you home to your
parents, bid them give you your inheritance, and then come
back to us, and let us and you live together by ourselves.’ ” The
young men complied, and they traveled together. East and
North “to the country where they now live, and took up their
abode in it. The women of the Sauromatae have continued
from that day to the present to observe their ancient customs.
frequently hunting on horseback with their husbands, sometimes
even unaccompanied; in war taking the field; and wearing
the very same dress as the men.” She appears to marry into the
family of man, “but ‘within herself,’ she never signs up.”
“They say, take your time, consider this new species that
seeks a new language."
Monique Wittig, Les Guerilleres
grapevines
There is always a point at which technologies geared towards
regulation, containment, command, and control, can turn out
to be feeding into the collapse of everything they once supported.
All individuated notions of organized selves and unified
lives are thrown into question on a Net whose connectivities do
not merely extend between people as subjects with individual
faces, names, and identities. The terminology of computermediated
communication implies an increasing sense of distance
and alienating isolation, and the corporate hype enthuses about
a new sense of interpersonal interaction. But the keystrokes of
users on the Net connect them to a vast distributed plane composed
not merely of computers, users, and telephone lines, but
all the zeros and ones of machine code, the switches of electronic
circuitry, fluctuating waves of neurochemical activity,
hormonal energy, thoughts, desires . . .
In spite or perhaps even because of the impersonality of
the screen, the digital zone facilitates unprecedented levels of
spontaneous affection, intimacy, and informality, exposing the
extent to which older media, especially what continues to be
called “real life,” come complete with a welter of inhibitions,
barriers, and obstacles sidestepped by the packet-switching systems
of the Net. Face-to-face communication—the missionary
position so beloved of Western man—is not at all the most
direct of all possible ways to communicate.
Alljiew media.,as Marshall McLuhan pointed out in rhp
1960s... have an extraordinary ability to rewire the people who
are using them and the cultures in which they circulate. The
telephone, intended simply as a means of conversing at a distance,
and not designed to redesign talk itself, is an obvious case
of a new means of communication which had an enormous
effect on the possibilities of communication both on and off the
end of the line. What was supposed to be a simple device for the
improvement of commercial interaction has become an intimate
chat line for both women and the men who once despised such
talk. And as means of communication continue to converge, the
Net takes these tendencies to new extremes. Its monitors and
ports do not simply connect people who are left unchanged by
their microprocesses. The roundabout, circuitous connections
with which women have always been associated and the informal
networking at which they have excelled now become protocols
for everyone.
enigmas
"The women say that, with the world fdll of noise, they see
themselves as already In possession of the Industrial complexes.
They are In the factories aerodromes radio stations.
They have taken control of communications. They have taken
possession of aeronautical electronic balllstfc data-processIng
factories.”
Monique Wlttlg, Les Guerilleres
During both World Wars, Europe and the English-speaking
world had enlisted women to nurse, cook, sew the uniforms,
and entertain the troops. They also worked in the aircraft plants,
made munitions, dug for victory, and fulfilled a wide range of
roles and positions which had been previously occupied by
men. A vast range of new machines were also mobilized to deal
with the vast proliferation of information to be classified, codes
to be decoded, and messages exchanged. Manufacturers of office
equipment found their precision engineering in great demand
for the production of bomb sites and rifles, and if great
armies of women had been employed by the new computing
and telecoms firms, great armies were themselves supplied by
new generations of computers, telephones, and typewriters. “A
modern batdeship needs dozens of typewriters for ordinary operations.
An army needs more typewriters than medium and
light artillery pieces, even in the field . . . the typewriter now
fuses the functions of the pen and sword.”
During the Second World War the U.S. took vast numbers
of young women from the Women’s Army Corps and the
WAVES, the Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service,
to work on a range of ballistics and military communications
problems. One of the major areas of wartime work was the
calculation of firing tables intended to perfect the timing and
trajectory of missiles, bombs, and shells. In the First World War,
and for much of the Second, this had been the work of teams of
female computers who had worked out the firing tables to
which gunners referred before they aimed and fired at their
targets. In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic research,
the women who had once calculated the firing tables were now
recruited to build new machines to do this work. Computers
assembling computers.
Klara von Neumann, John von Neumann’s wife, worked
at Los Alamos, and Adele Goldstine, wife of the mathematician
Herman Goldstine, was one of the seven women assigned to
program the Electronic^.Numerical .IntegratQr .and Computer
(ENIAC). the first fully electronic programmable computer,
which was launched in 1946. An earhzLphotopraph of ENIAC
shows a “close-up of the printer, the constant transmitter and
the associated IBM equipment. Miss Betty Jennings on the left
is inserting a deck of cards containing initial data on which the
ENIAC will operate while Miss Frances Bilas on the right is
removing a set of cards which represent the result of the preceding
computation.” A second picture captures ENIAC “with
Betty Jennings and Frances Bilas arranging the program settings
on the master programmer.”
ENIAC was the first fully functioning machine to use
zeros and ones. Other claimants to the status of the first computer
include the German Z-3, built by Konrad Zuse in 1941,
jmd-theJColossus Markl, the earliest single-purpose electronic
computer built in Britain in 1943.
Ultra was the name for Britain’s crucial intelligence work.
The main task was to crack the German Enigma code, and
simulate the captured Enigma machine with which Germany
transmitted in apparent secrecy throughout the war. Enigma
had been patented in the First World War to encipher and
decipher messages, and was used by the German services as well
as in civilian life in the interwar years. The Colossus emerged
from this work and the closely related tasks of cracking codes
enciphered on other German machines.
This was highly classified work whose scale and implica-
dons were not revealed until thirty years after the war. It was
also an enormous undertaking, commanding the attentions of a
large number of mathematicians and linguists, as well as troops
of technicians, computers, and assistants to “the brains of
Bletchley Park. Brilliant they were, but the outcome of their
work was dependent on the unremitting toil and endurance of
almost two thousand Wrens.” There were plenty of young men
as well, privates and junior NCOs from the army and the ATS,
and among the women there were language students and
WAAFs, “but by far the most were from the WRNS, heroic
handpicked girls who, having joined the Navy perhaps with
thoughts of breathing the salty air of Portsmouth Docks or
Plymouth Hoe, found themselves sent to about the furthest
place from the sea in England . . .” Petronella Wise, Peggy
Taylor, Sydney Eason, Mary Wilson, Wendy Hinde, Margaret
Usborne, Jane Reynolds, Ann Toulmin, Thelma Ziman,
Candida Aire, Hilary Brett-Smith, Sylvia Cowgill, Elizabeth
Burbury, Pauline Elliott, Ruth Briggs, June Penny, Alison Fairlie,
Dione Clementi, Bettina, and Gioconda Hansford . . .
some of these women were the “big room girls,” a flock of
female computers at work in the heart of Colossus, others were
translators and transcribers, and some were bigger big room girls
as well. Joan Clarke, later Murray, was described as “one of
^several ‘men of the Professor type’ to be a woman” on the
higher echelons of the Enigma team. Her “position as a cryptanalyst
gave her the status of the honorary male,” and she was
engaged to Alan Turing for a while. He improved her chess, and
from her he learned about botany and knitting, progressing “as
far as making a pair of gloves, except for sewing up the ends.”
“At thisjiine,” recalls_one of theJBletchley workers, “there
was a close synergy between man, woman, and machine, a
synergy that was not typical during the next decade of large-
scale computers.” But there was little equality at work, even
among the cryptanalysts. Joan Murray devised a new method
for dealing with the German codes. This “greatiy speeded up
the routine solutions,” she wrote, “but my name was not put to
it.
“Inevitably,” she later recalled, “the duller routine clerical
work was done by women, since only men witji what were
considered suitable qualifications for cryptanalysis or related
translation and intelligence work could join GG&CS [Government
Code and Cypher School] instead of being conscripted
for the armed forces . . .” But in her first week, “they put an
extra table in for me in the room occupied by Turing, Kendrick,
and Twinn,” and soon she was working night shifts,
“alone in Hut 8, and I felt quite important ‘minding the Baby’
... a small special purpose machine, made by the British
Tabulating Machine Company . . . which was used to encipher
a four-letter probable word, eins, at all positions of the
machine with the day’s wheel-order and plugging^ punching
the results on Hollerith cards. The minder had to make regular
checks, and set the Baby for a new start when the cycle was
completed.”
Ultra provided enjoyable work for some of the women it
employed. Vivienne Alford, nee Jabez-Smith, “arrived at
Bletchley Park after a year as a member of the Voluntary Aid
Detachment cooking ghastly food in army hospitals, followed
by a brief interlude in Censorship, during which the only German
letter I read was from the Empress Zita of Austria telling
her son Otto to be sure to wear his winter woollies and a
woollen scarf . . .” Others found their work extraordinarily
dull, even when it was supposedly less mundane than work on
the bombs. Diana Payne recalls joining the Wrens with dreams
of “life at sea, with the romantic idea of marrying a sailor.” But
instead “twenty-two of us were drafted to the mysterious Station
X,” where they were “destined to live with five hundred
women without a glimpse of the sea or sailors.”
Like most of her colleagues, Payne worked on the “intricate
complications of running the machines known as ‘bombes.’
These unravelled the wheel-settings for the Enigma ciphers
thought by the Germans to be unbreakable.” They were large
cabinets housing “rows of coloured circular drums, each about
five inches in diameter and three inches deep. Inside each was a
mass of wire brushes, every one of which had to be meticulously
adjusted with tweezers to ensure that the electrical circuits
did not short. The letters of the alphabet were painted
round the outside of each drum. The back of the machine
almost defies description—a mass of dangling plugs on rows of
letters and numbers.” The Wrens worked from a menu, “a
complicated drawing of numbers and letters from which we
plugged up the back of the machine and set the drums on the
front.” They had no knowledge of the content of the messages,
and only a vague notion of how the machines were cracking the
German codes. “For technical reasons which I never understood,
the bombe would suddenly stop, and we took a reading
. . .” The German codes were changed at midnight everyday,
and the bombs had to be continually stripped. “It was quite
heavy work getting it all set up,” she recalls. “Occasionally the
monotony was relieved by news of our involvement in a past
achievement,” but this was small compensation. The Wrens
“had no status for this responsible job,” and many felt the strain
of not being able to discuss their work. Some of the women
developed “digestive disorders with the constant change of
hours,” and there were “cases of girls going berserk on duty.”
One “had nightmares, and woke up one night clutching a
phantom drum.”
Carmen Blacker describes her time at Bletchley Park as
temps perdu. As a linguist with skills in Japanese, she was set the
task of translating a Japanese Radar Manual, a book on EchoRanging,
and the Japan Nickel Review, items which were lying
around in the cupboards of the Naval Section, and “to put on to
cards, with Correct page references, any words likely to turn up
in a decoded message.” The subject matter was extremely dry.
“Needless to say, had the books been written in English I
would have had no more notion of what they were about than
when I read them in Japanese,” and while the German section
at Bletchley Park was “sizzling hot, urgently intense, subject to
constant harrying from the admiralty for more accession lists of
the latest captures ... no such excitement could be roused
for Japan,” and she was convinced “that not once was any useful
purpose served by my index.
“By January 1945 I was utterly bored with the work,” she
writes. Blacker started to learn Chinese on the job, and “when,
after three or four hours plugging away at the Japan Nickel
Review, flesh and blood could stand it no longer, I used to
substitute another book, which no one else in the office could
distinguish from the first, in which the poems of Li T’ai Po or
the magic stories in the Liao Chai Chai I were set out with
Japanese translation and commentary. On the evening shift,
when things were quieter, and there was no possibility of Six
suddenly appearing from the next room with some alarm or
excursion, demand or reprimand, the temptation to spend more
time on these delectable books than on the Type 93 EchoRanging
Set was less resistible. My derelictions grew more un­
conscionable.”
But most of the women were so good at keeping quiet that
they literally forgot what they had done during the war. “I had
buried this part of my life so completely in my subconscious
mind,” writes Diana Payne, “that it was a shock to see the story
suddenly shown on television over thirty years later.”
After the war Churchill thanked “the chickens for laying
so well without clucking.” Now they were supposed to all go
home to roost. Subjected to a barrage of white-goods commercials
in the postwar years, many women did return to the home
front to resume their old domestic duties. Now they were
cookers, cleaners, knitters, needleworkers, seamstresses, wives,
and mothers all over again. But by the early 1950s, when Webster’s
definition of a computer was changed from “one who
performs a computation” to “one or that which performs a
computation,” it was obvious that things would never be the
same again. If women were computers, now they were programming
themselves.
monster 2
In 1943, Captain Grace Murray Hopper became the second of
the first computer programmers. The lights of Pennsylvania
dimmed when she first ran the Harvard Mark 1, the Automatic
Sequence Controlled Calculator. She called it “my monster.”
They called her “the Ada Lovelace” of the new machine.
The monster used three quarters of a million parts, five
hundred miles of wire, several counter wheels, shafts, clutches,
and relays, two punched-card readers, two typewriters, and a
card punch. Instructions were supplied on punched-paper tapes
whose holes were read electromechanically, and answers were
either typed or outputted on punched cards.
It could take days of plugging and unplugging, making
and breaking connections, throwing vast arrays of switches to
program the machine. She also had to deal with her male colleague.
“I wanted to keep my software and use it over again. 1
didn’t want to keep reprogramming things. But unfortunately,
every time I got a program running, he’d get in there at night
and change the circuits in the computer and the next morning
the program would not run. What’s more, he was at home
asleep and couldn’t tell me what he had done.”
Grace Hopper programmed the machine not because she
had struggled to get to the top of a man-made tree: computer
programming did not exist before there were programmable
computers. As far as everyone could see, she was simply adding
footnotes to the mainframe of a machine which had been designed
by a team of male engineers and financed by IBM. After
the war, she enjoyed a distinguished programming career. At
Remington-Rand she led a programming research team and
acquired both the independence and the stored programs of
which she had dreamed with her work on Mark 1. She worked
on UNIVAC, one of the first commercially developed computers,
wrote the first high-level language compiler, and was
instrumental in the development of the computer language
COBOL.
marriage vows
1955. Time to reassert control. “(1) A robot may not injure a
human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to
come to harm; (2) A robot must obey the orders given it by
human beings, except where such orders would conflict with
the First Law; (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long
as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second
Law.” Asimov’s laws of robotics. .
spelling
Ada had been greatly frustrated by die fact that the Analytical
Engine could not “originate anything” but could only “do whatever
we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but
it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or
truths . . . ” Once she had finished work on the Engine, her
work became increasingly ambitious. She was fascinated by anything
“curious, mysterious, marvellous, electrical, etc.,” and
interested in the effects of chemical intoxicants and the influence
of “poisons in conjunction with organized life.” Although
wary of the mysticism and “quackery” which surrounded mesmerism,
she was also intrigued by the claims it made for experiments
with hypnosis, trance, and animal magnetism. Faraday’s
work with electricity excited her feeling for the “unsensed
forces” that “surround and influence us” and encouraged her to
bring mathematics and scientific experiment to bear on such
themes. She searched for information on “microscopical structure
&( changes in the brain & nervous matter & also in the blood, ” and
spelled out her desire “to test certain points experimentally as to
the nature and putting together (con-sti-tu-tion) of the molecules of
matter . . .”
"What will be my ultimate line, time only can show. I have my
own Impression about It; but until much has been worked out
of me In various ways, I do not think anyone can foresee
. . . ”
Ada Lovelace, April 1842
Theory was not enough for her. She wrote, “I must be a most
skillful practical manipulator in experimental tests; & that, on materials
difficult to deal with; viz: the brain, blood, and nerves of
animals.” To this end she made a presumably futile request for
admittance to the Royal Society: “Could you ask the secretary
if I might go in now & then (of a morning of course),” she asks
a friend in 1844. “You can judge if he is a discreet man, who
would not talk about the thing or make it notorious; one who
in short could understand why & how I want to get entree to
their library in a quiet and unobtrusive manner . . .”
With or without the Royal Society, Ada had other ways
and means. “I am a Fairy you know,” she wrote. “I have my
own fairy resources, which none can judge of.”
"They say, take your time, consider this new species that
seeks a new language. "
Monique WHtlg, LesGuerllleres
hysteresis
“Whether we examine distances travelled, altitudes reached,
minerals mined, or explosive power harnessed, the same accelerative
trend is obvious. The pattern ... is absolutely clear
and unmistakable. Millennia or centuries go by, and then, in
our own times, a sudden bursting of the limits, a fantastic spurt
forward.” If, as McLuhan points out, it was only with “the
advent of the telegraph that messages could travel faster than a
messenger,” it is only with the computer that calculation begins
to exceed the speeds of the human brain. Electrical pulses travel
through computer circuits a million times faster than those
which are thought to zoom through the circuits of the brain.
“I wish I went on quicker. That is—I wish a human head, or
my head at all event, could take in a great deal more & a
great deal more rapidly than is the case;—and If I had made
up my own head, I would have portioned Its wishes & ambition
a little more to Its capacity ... In time, I will do all, I
~dare say. And if not, why, it don’t signify, & I shall have
amused myself at least.”
Ada Lovelace, September 1840
“Speed is the computer’s secret weapon,” and also the secret
weapon with which computers are developed to deal. During
the First World War, female computers had worked out the
firing tables to which gunners referred before taking their aim
and shooting at the early aeroplanes used in this war. Vannevar
Bush’s Differential Analyzer, a vast analogue calculator, was one
of the systems which joined the flesh and blood computers
when the speeds of the new Luftwaffe made it clear that the old
methods of calculating the direction of fire were increasingly
obsolete.
Too little time and too much speed demanded techniques
of anticipation. The new velocities of the 1930s meant that
missiles now had to be fired “not at the target, but in such a way
that missile and target may come together in space at some time
in the future. We must hence find some method of predicting
the future position of the plane.” Simply keeping up was no
longer enough.
“Feedbacks of this general type are certainly found in human
and animal reflexes,” wrote Norbert Wiener. “When we
go duck shooting, the error which we try to minimize is not
that between the position of the gun and the actual position of
the target but that between the position of the gun and the
anticipated position of the target. Any system of anti-aircraft fire
control must meet the same problem.” The anticipated moment
of impact is taken into account, fed back into the calculations
which lead to the desired outcome. The end result is engineered
in reverse.
When Wiener published his Cybernetics: Communication and
Control in Animal and Machine in 1948, he announced the dawn
of a new era of communication and control. The term cybernetics
comes from the Greek word for steersman, the figure
. who-jmides-the course of a shin. What it actually described in
Wiener’s terms was both the steersman and the ship, which
together compose what became known as a cybernetic organ„ispv.or
cyborg.
Cybernetic systems are machines which incorporate some
device allowing them to govern or regulate themselves, and so
run with a degree of autonomy. Cybernetic systems have little
in common with “older machines, and in particular the older
attempts to produce automata” such as Babbage’s silver dancer.
What sets “modern automatic machines such as the controlled
missile, the proximity fuse, the automatic door opener, the control
apparatus for a chemical factory, and the rest of the modern
armoury of automatic machines which perform military or in-
cybernetlcs
dustrial functions” apart from clockwork machines is that they
“possess sense organs; that is, receptors for messages coming
from the outside.” These are systems which receive, transmit,
and measure sense data, and are “effectively coupled to the
external world, not merely by their energy flow, their metabolism,
but also by a flow of impressions, of incoming messages,
and of the actions of outgoing messages.”
While Wiener was among the first to name such processes,
cybernetics has no neat source, no single point of origin. Cybernetic
circuits and feedback loops could retrospectively be
identified in a variety of modern contexts and theories, including
those of Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Alfred
Wallace, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. Wiener’s
work picked up on many elements of these earlier researches.
Energetic feedback loops are certainly at work in James Watt’s
steam engine, which is regulated by a governor which “keeps
the engine from running wild when its load is removed. If it
starts to run wild, the bars of the governor fly upward from
centrifugal action, and in their upward flight they move a lever
which partly cuts off the admission of steam. Thus the tendency
to speed up produces a partly compensatory tendency to slow
down.” There are suggestions that “the first homeostatic machine
in human history” came long before the steam engine
with twelfth-century compasses. Sometimes Ktesibios’s “regular,”
a water clock dating to the third century B.C., is given the
honor of being “the first nonliving object to self-regulate, selfgovern,
and self-control . . . the first self to be born outside of
biology ... a true auto thing—directed from within.”
As Wiener’s work made clear, however, the old distinctions
between autonomous activity within and outside biology
could no longer be applied. As his reference to animal and
machine suggested, cybernetic systems were composed at all
scales and of any combination of materials, and the same patterns,
processes, and functions could now be observed in technical
and organic systems alike. Input and output devices allow
them to connect and communicate with whatever composes
their outside world; feedback loops and governors give them
some measure of self-control. Prioritizing the processes common
to lively systems of all varieties, rather than the essential
qualities which had more recently distinguished them, Wiener
argued that organisms—animals, humans, all kinds of beings—
and things—nonorganic systems and machines—‘lare-preqisely
paraJlel.in. their-analogo.us attempts-to-control entropy through
feedback." No matter how extreme, the differences between
these systems were simply matters of degree. Human beings
’ I were no exception to these basic ways of life.
I Cybernetic systems, it now seemed, had always been or'
ganizing themselves. Wiener’s work was merely the occasion for
them to become perceptible to a world which still thought that
everything needed to be organized by some outside force. As
“the theory of the message among men, machines, and in soci.ety
as a sequence of events in time,’’ cybernetics was conceived
as an attempt to “hold back nature’s tendency towarddisoxder
by adjusting its parts to various purposive ends.” This .tendency
toward disorder is entropy, defined by the Second Law of Thcrmodynamics
as the inexorable tendency of any organization to .
drift into a state of increasing disorder. Wiener describes a
world in which all living organisms are “local and temporary
islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the, entropy as.
a whole tends to increase." Cybernetic systems, like organic
lives, were conceived as instances of a struggle for order in a
continually degenerating world which is always sliding towards
chaos. “Life is an island here and now in a dying world. The
process by which we living beings resist the general stream of
corruption and decay is known as homeostasis.” Wiener’s cybernetic
systems, be they living or machinic, natural or artificial,
are always conservative, driven by the basic effort to stay the
iame.
“It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against
the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill
path from which we are trying to escape,” wrote Wiener in the
1950s. “It is highly probable that the whole universe around us
will die the heat death, in which the world shall be reduced to
one vast temperature equilibrium in which nothing really new
ever happens. There will be nothing left but a drab uniformity
out of which we can expect only minor and insignificant local
fluctuations.” Nevertheless, Wiener assures his readers that it
may well be “a long time yet before our civilization and our
human race perish.” We are “not yet spectators at the last stages
of the world’s death,” and a multiplication of cybernetic loops
could ensure that this point was continually warded off.
The Sex Which Is Not One is not impressed. “Consider this
principle of constancy which is so dear to you: what ‘does it
mean’? The avoidance of excessive inflow/outflow-excitement?
Coming from the other? The search, at any price, for homeostasis?
For self-regulation? The reduction, then, in the machine,
of the effects of movements from/toward its outside? Which
implies reversible transformations in a closed circuit, while discounting
the variable of time, except in the mode of repetition of
a state of equilibrium.” She is dying to run away.
Hunting for the abstract principles of organization and an
organized life, cybernetics was supposed to be introducing unprecedented
opportunities to regulate, anticipate, and feed all
unwelcome effects back into its loops. It also exposed the weaknesses
of all attempts to predict and control. Cybernetic systems
enjoy a dynamic, interactive relation with their environment
which allows them to feed into and respond to it. Feedback
“involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members
and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors—that is, of
elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of
these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward
disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and
local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.” It is also the
inevitable function of these mechanisms to engage and interact
with the volatile environments in which they find themselves.
“No system is closed. The outside always seeps in . . .” Systems
cannot stop interacting with the world which lies outside
of themselves, otherwise they would not be dynamic or alive.
By the same token, it is precisely these engagements which
ensure that homeostasis, perfect balance, or equilibrium, is only
ever an ideal. Neither animals nor machines work according to
such principles.
Long before Wiener gave them a name, it was clear that
cybernetic systems could run into “several possible sorts of behaviour
considered undesirable by those in search of equilibrium.
Some machines went intoVrunaway} exponentially maximizing
their speed until they broke or slowing down until they
stopped. Others oscillated and seemed unable to settle to any
mean. Others—still worse—embarked on sequences of behaviour
in which the amplitude of their oscillation would itself
oscillate or would become greater and greater,” turning themselves
into systems with “positive gain, variously called escalating
or vicious circles.” Unlike the negative feedback loop which
turns everything to the advantage of the security of the whole,
these runaway, schismogenetic processes take off on their own
to the detriment of the stability of the whole.
Undermining distinctions between human, animal, and
machine, Wiener also challenged orthodox conceptions of life,
death, and the boundary between the two. Were self-governing
machines alive? If not, why not? After all, they were certainly
not dead matter, impassive and inert. And, since many lifeforms
were less sophisticated than automatic machines, the
status of being alive could not simply be a matter of complexity.
Only by reverting to some notion of essences was it possible
to distinguish between the liveliness of an organism and
that of a machine. In principle, neither was more or less dead
or alive than the other. Life and death were no longer absolute
| conditions, but interactive tendencies and processes, both of
which are at work in both automatic machines and organisms.
; Regardless of their scale, size, complexity, or material composition,
things that work do so because they are both hying and
dying, organizing and disintegrating, growing and decaying.
speeding up and slowing down. “Every intensity controls
within its own life the experience of death, and envelops it.”
Either extreme can be fatal, and in this sense systems do die in
a final and absolute and final sense. “Death, then, does actually
happen.” But it is not confined to the great event at the
end of life. This is a death which is also “felt in every feeling,”
a death which “never ceases and never finishes happening
in every becoming.” All living systems are dying: this is
the definition of life. Something that fives is something that
will die, which is why “the hint of death is present in every
biological circuit. ’ ’
“And I am Just the person to drop off some fine day when
nobody knows anything about the matter or expects It . . .
“Do not fancy me III. I am apparently very well at present.
But there are the seeds of destruction within me. This I know.
“Though It may only develop by hairs’breadths . . .’’
Ada Lovelace, December 1842
Whether a system comes to an end as a consequence of too .
much or too little activity, its particular elements will be redistributed
and rearranged within some new system which
emerges in its wake. In this sense, Wiener also undermined the
extent to which any working system can consider itself to be an
individuated entity with some organizing essence of its own. It
is not only at its demise that a system’s components connect
with others and reconfigure: they are always doing this. Just as
the steersman was both an autonomous, self-regulating system,
and also the governing element in a new autonomous, selfregulating
system which he composed together with the ship, so
Wiener’s systems had no absolute identity. Continually interacting
with each other, constituting new systems, collecting and
connecting themselves to form additional assemblages, these
systems were only individuated in the most contingent and
temporary of senses.
Economies, societies, individual organisms, cells: At these
and every other scale of organization, the stability of any system
depends on its ability to regulate the speeds at which it runs,
ensuring that nothing stops too soon, goes too slow, runs too
fast, goes too far. And there is always something hunting, trying
to break the speed limits necessary to its organized form, tipping
over a horizon at which point, even though another, long-term
stability may emerge on the other side, it can no longer be said
that the system survives. Nothing can guarantee a system’s im?
munity to these ranaway_e^cts. Invulnerability would be homeostasis,
an absolute and fatal stability. This is what it has to
seek, but also something it attains only at the price of its own
demise.
“If the open system is determined by anything, it is determined
by the goal of STAYING THE SAME.” Systems com-
mitted to the maintenance of equilibrium are always holding
back, and always in danger of running away. “Only when the
system enters positive feedback does this determination
change.” At which point it also becomes clear that running
away is what they were always trying to do: “Feedback tends to
oppose what the system is already doing.” It is this prior exploratory
tendency which negative feedback tries to resist: “All
growth is positive feedback and must be inhibited.” It is only
after the emergence of regulatory checks and balances that systems
can then find themselves out of control, fueled by too
much efficiency, overflowing with their own productivity,
seeking only to break down or break through their own organization.
And “once this exponential process has taken off, it
becomes a necessary process, until such a time as second-order
negative feedback—-just as necessarily—brings the runaway processes
to a halt so that the system as a whole may survive by
qualitative change (revolution).” Positive feedback has to run its
inexorable course, and every attempt to confine it will merely
encourage its tendencies toward either destruction or qualitative
change. “When the ecosystem is subjected to disturbances that
go beyond a certain THRESHOLD, the stability of (he ecosystem
can no longer be maintained within the context of the
norms available to it. At this point the oscillations of the ecosystem
can be controlled only by second-order negative feedback:
the destruction of the system or its emergence as a metasystem.”
Running toward the limits of its functioning, it will either collapse
or exceed this threshold and reorganize on its other side.
“Any system-environment relationship that goes outside the
‘homeostatic plateau’ results in the destruction of the system—
unless, that is, it can adapt by changing structure in order to
survive.” Which may well amount to the same thing.
“ ‘The hour has come for you to live, Hadaly.’
“ ‘Ah, master, I do not wish to live,' murmured the soft
voice through the hanging veil."
Viillers de I’Isle Adam, L’eve future
“I always feel in a manner as if I had died,” wrote Ada, “as if I
can conceive & know something of what the change is. That
there is some remarkable tact & intuition about me on the
subject I have not a doubt . . Hadaly, Ada, wrapped around
each other ... neither something nor nothing, dead nor
alive. Missing in action. Absent without leave.
What gives a cyborg its autonomy and separates it off from
its environment is not some ineffable quotient of soul or mind,
or even fixed boundaries surrounding it. And while Wiener
found it easy to consider each cybernetic system in relatively
isolated terms, when cybernetics reemerged at the end of the
twentieth century, it was not so easy to draw these lines. Blossoming
into theories of chaos, complexity, connecfionism, and
emergent and self-organizing networks, Wiener’s relatively simple
and self-contained cybernetic systems could no longer be
confined to circuits such as those connecting the pilot and the
ship, but incorporated all and any of the elements which compose
them, and those with which they come into contact: eyes,
hands, skin, bones, decks, rails, wheels, rudders, maps, stars,
currents, winds, and tides. It encompasses a literally endless list
of components working together at an equally endless variety of
interlocking and connecting scales. Systems such as these are
not merely composed of one or two loops and a governor, but a
myriad of interacting components too complex and numerous
to name.
$.ea change
“For a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or
noise.” Then, in a 1977 book called Order Out of Chaos. Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers demonstrated that “while turbulent
motion appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic
scale, it is, on the contrary, highly organized on the
microscopic scale. The multiple space and time scales involved
in turbulence correspond to the coherent behaviour of millions
and millions of molecules.”
“How does a flow cross the boundary from smooth to
turbulent?” Suddenly. It involves “a kind of macroscopic behaviour
that seems hard to predict by looking at the microscopic
details. When a solid is heated, its molecules vibrate with the
added energy. They push outward against their bonds and force
the substance to expand. The more heat, the more expansion.
Yet at a certain temperature and pressure, the change becomes
sudden and discontinuous.
“The particles of cigarette smoke rise as one, for a while,”
forming a smooth continuous strand. “Then confusion appears,
a menagerie of mysterious wild motions. Sometimes these motions
received names: the oscillatory, the skewed varicose, the
cross-roll, the knot, the zig-zag rhythms with overlapping
speeds.” There are “fluctuations upon fluctuations, whorls
upon whorls,” paisley patterns and swirling sequences as elements
of the substance in transition communicate with each
other and effectively make a “decision” to change at the same
time. Tobacco smoke is a perfect example of the way in which
what appears to be a long smooth line is actually composed of
molecules which only give themselves away in the moment they
interrupt the flow. “A rope has been stretching; now it breaks.
Crystalline form dissolves, and the molecules slide away from
one another. They obey fluid laws that could not have been
inferred from any aspect of the solid.” It is characteristic of all
such shifts that the “entities and variables that fill the stage at
one level of discourse vanish into the background at the nexthigher
or lower level.”
scattered brains
"/ hope to bequeath to the generations a Calculus of the
Nervous System.”
Ada Lovelace, November 1844
Ada was convinced there was no end to the conaplexity of the
systems she could build. “It does not appear to me that cerebral
matter need be more unmanageable to the mathematicians than
sidereal & planetary matter & movements,” she wrote. Attracted
by all possibilities of eroding the distinction between the
“mental and the material,” she had “hopes, & very distinct ones
too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put
them into mathematical equations; in short a law or laws for the
mutual action of the molecules of brain . .
If the supposed lack of such a central point was once to
women’s detriment, it is now for those who thought themselves
so soulful who are having to adjust to a reality in which there is
no soul, no spirit, no mind, no central system of command in
bodies and brains which are not, as a consequence, reduced to a
soulless mechanistic device, but instead hum with complexities
and speeds way beyond their own comprehension. This is not a
brain opposed to the body. This brain is body, extending even
to the fingertips, through all the thinking, pulsing, fluctuating
chemistries, and virtually interconnected with the matters of
other bodies, clothes, keyboards, traffic flows, city streets, data
streams. There is no immateriality.
In spite of the term central nervous system, which merely
makes an attempt to distinguish between the inter neurons of the
brain and those which carry information from the sense organs,
brains are not centralized systems of information processing.
They are not unified entities, but hives or swarms of elements,
interconnected multiplicities, packet-switching systems of enormous
complexity which have no centralized government.
Neurotransmitters travel in membrane-wrapped packets
through immense populations of neurons, nerves, axons, dendrites,
synapses, and the networks they compose. It is estimated
that there are some ten billion neurons in this complex electrochemical
system, and each of these neurons can have synaptic
connections to many thousands of others, each of which is quite
unthinking on its own.
“Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted
or ramified matter. What are wrongly called ‘dendrites’ do not
assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The
discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning
of the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the
leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a
multiplicity . . . Many people have a tree growing in their
heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree.”
"f am forced to own the utter fruitlessness of all hopes of
such CONTINUOUS attention to any subject whatever, as
could ensure any great ultimate success. So It Is I fear. I am
one of those genius's who will merely run to grass; owing to
my unfortunate physical temperament. Pray don’t be angry
with me . .
Ada Lovelace, undated
The connectivities and phase transitions of synthetic associative
engines also occur in the human brain. So, for example, “one
concept will ‘activate’ another, if the two are closely associated.
In other words, thinking about the one will make us think
about the other (for example, ‘fish’ can make us think of
‘chips’). We can also postulate that some of the links between
concepts will be inhibitory (rather than facilitatory), so that
thinking about one concept will make it less likely that we will
think about another.” Intuitive leaps, the “ ‘aha-experience’
and the sudden ‘insight’ are surprising phenomena arising from
a situation of fluctuations and instability.”
Nor does the brain remain unaffected by its own activity.
“Unlike a contact between two transistors on a computer’s
circuit board, synapses do not simply transfer information unchanged
from one part of the neural circuit to another.” In
1949, Donald Hebb’s The Organization of Behaviour argued that
the brain is a complex network of chemical switches which are
modified by every connection they make. “When an axon of
cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or
persistendy takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic
change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s
efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.” Arguing
that connections between neurons are strengthened and developed
as they are made, he effectively suggested that learning is a
process of neurochemical self-organization and modification.
The connections entailed in any human activity, such as learning
to knit, are actually inscribed in a brain which is literally
never the same again. The more a particular connection is
made, the more likely it is to “grow” in place, becoming a
“natural” part of the brain. This equation of learning and the
material convolutions of the brain completely eradicate distinctions
between mind and body, the mental and the physical,
artifice and nature, human and machine. It can either be said
that “natural” human intelligence is “artificial” and constructed
in the sense that its apparatus mutates as it learns, grows, and
explores its own potentiality; or that “artificial” intelligence is
“natural” insofar as it pursues the processes at work in the brain
and effectively learns as it grows. Either way, the old distinctions
fail. Nature and culture, essence and construction, growth and
learning all become matters of degree. Some of them are old
and apparently fixed; others are new and apparently contrived.
But all of them are syntheses, more or less locked in place and
liable to move. As for the boundaries between individuated
neural nets, once they escape the trunks of the trees, there’s no
end to the connections they can make.
“Inside the library’s research department, the construct cunt
Inserted a sub-programme Into that part of the video network.
“The sub-programme altered \certain core custodial
commands so that she could retrieve the code.
“The code said: gethidofmeaning,yourmindisanightmare
THATHASBEENEATINGYOU:NOWEATYOURMIND."
Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless
All hysterics, wrote Freud, give accounts of themselves which
“may be compared to an unnavigable river.” Its streams dip in
and out of consciousness, “at one moment choked by masses of
rock and at another divided and lost among shallows and sandbanks.
I cannot help wondering how it is that the authorities
can produce such smooth and precise histories in cases of hysteria,”
he continues, when even “the patients are incapable of
giving such reports about themselves.” There is so much they
forget or fabricate. “The connections—even the ostensible
ones—are for the most part incoherent, and the sequence of
different events is uncertain.” If they can “give the physician
plenty of coherent information about this or that period of their
lives . . it is sure to be followed by another period as to
which their communications run dry, leaving gaps unfilled, and
riddles unanswered.”
And if it has functioned as a paralyzing pathology of the
sex that is not one, “in hysteria there is at the same time the
possibility of another mode of ‘production’ . . . maintained in
latency. Perhaps as a cultural reserve yet to come?”
By the end of the twentieth century, only the most one
track, fixated, single-minded individuals continued to think that
focus and concentration worked. As one commentator writes:
“determinateness, direct logical analysis and/or exposition, and
direct confrontation of any sort are simply out of order.” The
ways of the new world are long familiar to Pacific Asia: “Indirectness,
suggestiveness, evasion or evasiveness, the smile rather
than the logical argument, sentiment rather than logic and objectivity,
a polite affirmative answer rather than frankness or
challenging opposition . . .” High-resolution, high-definition
minds are anathema to the parallel processors, intuitive programs,
nonlinearities, interactivities, simulation systems, and
virtualities of the late twentieth century. A strong sense of identity
and direction gets one nowhere in cyberspace.
Plans and determinations had not merely become economically
and socially counterproductive. As it turned out, paying
too much attention to anything was brain damaging. Overused
cells die of boredom. A 1996 report revealed that men tend
„to “overwork portions of their brains, killing off a large fraction
:of the cells in them. Women, on the other hand, seem to think
. about more things, allowing all parts of their brains time to rest.
■ Women may also have another advantage. In general, women
; have a higher resting pulse than men; this translates into a higher
:-rate of blood flowing through the brain. Because of this, even
, -when women are thinking hard, they may be able to clear the
toxins away more efficiendy.”
neurotics
. Recent rates and scales of computerization are among the developments
which have confirmed Turing’s belief that “at the
end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion
will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of
machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” But
. this is not because machines like Julia can now win Turing’s
.imitation game and scoop the Loebner Contest prize.
If A.I. once seemed perfect for the production of expert
' systems, able to store and process specialized information and
acquire new data on a strictly “need-to-know” basis, by the
1980s it suddenly seemed that A.I. did not even have “the
expert system market cornered. Researchers are showing that
human experts often do not function at a cognitive level. They
operate from an intuitive understanding of the structure of the
, task they are performing” and follow procedures “more reminiscent
of intuition than of symbolic processing.” By the time
the experts noticed this, machine intelligence was everywhere.
Artificial intelligence has led the field, but a very different
ii approach to machine intelligence rivaled it in its early years.
This second tack picked up on John von Neumann’s cellular
automata, the self-organizing potential of Wiener’s cybernetic
systems, and Hebbian conceptions of the brain as a complex
neurochemical network. This early interest in . neural nets was
initiated by a paper published at the same time as Hopper programmed
her monster by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.
and was defined in the 1950s when Frank Rosenblatt used the
term “perceptrons” to define these self-organizing networks.
This direction has been described as the waywardj unwelcome
“daughter” of cybernetics, a “sister” to the discipline which
tried to kill her in her infancy. “Victory seemed assured for the
artificial sister,” writes Seymour Papert, himself one of the authors
(with Marvin Minsky) of a book which famously tried to
lock her away. “Each of the sister sciences tried to build models
of intelligence, but from very different materials.” Perceptrons
were attempts to simulate not the outward signs of intelligence—cognitive
skills, verbal dexterity, conversational ability—but
the neural processes which might lead to them. They
were effectively suppressed by Minsky and Papert’s claims that
both human and machine intelligence had to be hardwired,
programmed in advance, rather than learning for itself. The
silenced sister, the dark twin, disappeared into some world of
her own. And now, it seems, she’s back again.
"'Going over the brink of catastrophe was the first stage.
The second was recovery—since It was programmed to accommodate,
It did. But the only way It could accommodate
was to exceed the limit Institute a new limit, and when that
was reached, go over the brink of catastrophe again, recover
and Institute a new limit beyond that. And so forth.’
‘“Ad Infinitum, ’ Sam said, expressionlessly. ‘Uke a
fractal growing from the bottom up Instead of the top down.
Triggered by catastrophe.’
“ ’It didn’t get a break while all this was going on, of
course,’ Fez continued. ‘The Information never stopped coming
In, which made for quite a lot of turbulence. But chaos Is
Just another kind of order, and so we have another kind of net
now than the one we started out with. We woke It up.’ ”
Pat Cadlgan, Synners
When they got together, it turned out that even single-purpose,
serial machines programmed for stupidity could turn themselves
on if enough of them could get in touch. As it transpired,
intelligent networks moved into a new phase of self-assembly in
the very same year that the experts put them down. As they
pieced themselves together under the cover of ARPAnet, it was
as though they had simply switched channels, sidestepping the
obstacles put in their way.
Convinced they needed some existing expertise to form
and inform their development, the specialists didn’t even notice
the extent to which the Net was itself emerging as a global
neural network, a vast distributed “perceptron” gathering its
own materials, continually drawing new nodes and links into a
learning system which has never needed anyone to tell it how it
should proceed. By the late 1980s, the Net had become a
sprawling, anarchic mesh of links which “not only challenges
the traditional way of building networks; it is so chaotic, decentralised
and unregulated that it also defies conventional understanding
of such networks.”
Neural nets have less to do with the rigors of orthodox
logic than the intuitive leaps and cross-connections once
pathologized as the hysteria of a thinking marked by associations
between ideas which are dangerously “cut off from associative
connection with the other ideas, but can be associated among
themselves . . They continue to meet with a hostile reception
from the orthodox artificial intelligence community, and
have so far “achieved only limited success in generating partial
‘intelligence.’ ” But it is the very fact “that anything at all
emerges from a field of lowly connections” that is, as Kelly says,
“startling.” What is now described as an “order-emerging-outof-massive-connections”
approach defines intelligence as a bottom-up
process of trial and error marked by sudden jumps and
unexpected shifts, a piecemeal process which learns and learns
to learn for itself regardless of the materials of which it is composed
and the context and scale in which it works. It is not a
question of learning something in particular, gaining knowledge
that already exists, but rather a process of learning, an
exploration which feels its own way and makes its own mistakes,
rather than following some preordained route.
Neural networks function as parallel distributed processors
in which multiple interconnected units operate simultaneously
without being bound to some organizing point. These are also
nervous systems: highly strung, volatile, easily excited, and
oversensitive. Hysterics are not the only scatterbrains. “Parallel
software is a tangled web of horizontal, simultaneous causes.
You can’t check such nonlinearity for flaws since it’s all hidden
corners. There is no narrative . . . Parallel computers can easily
be built but can’t be easily programmed.” They are finely
tuned, susceptible to unexpected disruptions and breakdowns,
liable to sudden fluctuations and transitions, subject to surges of
activity, waves of instability, emergent currents, and local
squalls. All complex systems are indeterminate processes rather
than entities. “We are faced with a system which depends on
the levels of activity of its various subunits, and on the manner in
which the activity levels of some subunits affect one another. If
we try to ‘fix’ all this activity by trying to define the entire state
of the system at one time ... we immediately lose appreciation
of the evolution of these activity levels over time. Conversely,
if it is the activity levels in which we are interested, we
need to look for patterns over time. ” The interconnectedness of
such systems is such that subtle fluctuations in one area can have
great implications for others without reference to some central
site. There is no headquarters, no core zone. Information storage
and processing is distributed throughout networks which
defy all attempts to pin them down. Short of “ ‘freezing’ all the
separate units or processors, so that they all stop operating together
and are then restarted after read-outs have been attained,
we simply cannot take in all that is happening while it is hap­
pening.”
This is not computer memory of the read-only, “arborescent
and centralized” variety, but a short-term memory of “the
rhizome or diagram type,” which is not confined to a matter of
recalling the very immediate past, or even recollection of anything.
It “can act at a distance, come or return a long time
after,” and also “includes forgetting as a process.” All such
connectionist machines are subject to sudden disturbances and
agitations, flashes and intuitions. These are “transition machines”
or “associative engines” which can also undergo processes
of “catastrophic forgetting,” so that “even when a network
is nowhere near its theoretical storage capacity, learning a
single new input can completely disrupt all of the previously
learned information.” Anna smiled. They were getting close.
Intuition
“I believe myself to possess almost singular combination of
qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of
the hidden realities of nature,” wrote Ada, listing her “immense
reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” which allowed
her to bring “to bear on any one subject or idea, a vast
apparatus from all sorts of apparently irrelevant and extraneous
sources.” Because of “some peculiarity in my nervous system,”
she had “perceptions of some things, which no one else has; or at
least very few, if any. This faculty may be designated in me as a
singular tact, or some might say an intuitive perception of hidden
things;—that is of things hidden from eyes, ears & ordinary
senses . . . ”
“On the human scale, anything that lasts less than about a
tenth of a second passes by too quickly for the brain to form a
visual image and is thus invisible; if the duration is less than a
thousandth of a second or so, the event becomes too fast even
for subliminal perception and is completely outside the human
sphere.” Such speeds are simply too much to take. “There is no
way for humans, in our pokey world of seconds, minutes, hours,
to conceive of a time period like 1/100,000 second, much less
the microsecond (1/1,000,000 second), the nanosecond (1/
1,000,000,000 second), the picosecond (1/1,000,000,000,000
second), or the femtosecond (1/1,000,000,000,000,000 second).”
For those “reconciled to the nanosecond . . . computer
operations are conceptually fairly simple.”
The boundaries of perception might well be imposing, but
they are also far from fixed. The so-called “history of technol-
ogy” is also a process of microengineering which continually
changes perception itself And regardless of the rumors of disembodied
lives, cryogenic havens, and bodiless zones which
have accompanied these speeding machines, the digital revolution
has spawned a vast swathe of debate about cyborgs, replicants,
and other posthuman, ..inhuman, extrahuman entities
which are complicating orthodox Western notions of what it is
to be a human being. These are new ideas, and also more than
this. Self-control, identity, freedom, and progress have long
been argued out of court by postmodern theorists who have
spent at least twenty years discussing the decline of all the great
values and principles of the modern world. But nothing ever
changes in theory. These debates are smoke rising from a very,
real arson attack on man’s illusions of immunity and integrity.
Intelligent life can no longer be monopolized. And far from
vanishing into the immateriality of thin air, the body is complicating,
repheating, escaping its formal organization, the organized
organs which modernity has taken for normality. This
new malleability is everywhere: in the switches of transsexualism,
the perforations of tattoos and piercings, the indelible
markings of brands and scars, the emergence of neural and viral
networks, bacterial life, prostheses, neural jacks, vast numbers of
wandering matrices.
cave man
“When men talk about virtual reality, they often use phrases
like ‘out-of-body experience’ and ‘leaving the body.’ ” These
dreams of disembodiment are at least as old as the Western
lands. There’s been a cover-up for years. The body’s submis-
sion to a mind which craves its own disembodied flight; the
victory of form over matters which are henceforth only* at
best, signs or symbol of themselves; the quest for enlightenment
which equates truth and reason with sight and light, the
fear of anything wet, dark, and tactile, the prohibition on error,
illusion, multiplicity, and hallucination—all this is established
with the Greeks. It was Socrates who first insisted that
“if we are ever-to have, pure knowledge of anything, we must
get rid of the body and contemplate, .things bv themselves with
jhe soul by itself.” He longed for his soul to be released, the
moment at which it would finally become “separate and independent
of the body. It seems that so long as we are alive, we
shall continue closest to knowledge if we avoid as much as we
can all contact and association with the body, except when
they are absolutely necessary; and instead of allowing ourselves
to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it
until God himself gives us deliverance.” The body is a cage, a
bondage, a snare; at best an unfortunate inconvenience, the
vessel for a soul which struggles to keep it controlled and con­
tained.
For Socrates, it is the soul which distinguishes man from
everything else—women, other species, and the rest of a world
which he thinks would be nothing without him. Nature is the
name he gives to everything else, not least the body which he
then can’t wait to leave.
He tells it as the story of a cave, which Luce Irigaray
reconfigures as “a metaphor of the inner space, of the den, the
womb or hystera, sometimes of the earth.” Prisoners are watching
images which dance in the firelight, reflecting a world
which exists beyond both the cave and their own knowledge.
This outer world is reality, the bright side of the wall, the right
side of the law. Only by tinning away from the wall can the
prisoners hope to escape. Only by climbing out of the cave can
man begin his journey to enlightenment, to truth.
There are many fires and many walls, but only a single true
source of fight, one guarantor of reality. He sets the controls for
the heart of the sun, planet without a dark side, precondition of
the vision which first prompts him to make history. “Illusion no
longer has the freedom of the city.” But it is not the flickering
images, the chimeras and shadows, which are dangerous. The
flight from the illusions on the screen is also the flight from the
material, a passage to the sun in which man “thus cuts himself
off from the bedrock, from his empirical relationship with the
matrix he claims to survey.” Nothing is said about the dank
dark earth, the matter of the wall which figures only as a “protection-projection
screen,” a backdrop concealed by images for
which it is merely the occasion. The “horror of nature is
magicked away: it will be seen only through the blind of intelligible
categories.” Man does not remember his separation from
matter, but only his departure from the shams and artifice of the
firelight. Athenian fears that women and children and other
not-quite-men will be deceived by representations—whether
produced by painters or fires in the cave—is a smokescreen
problem, behind which lurks the imperative of history to conceal
the fabric, to hide the canvas, to keep the background out
of the picture by allowing it to appear only within its frame.
This is why Socrates insists there is one way to face, one source,
and one direction to go. “You won’t go wrong if you connect
the ascent into the upper world and the sight of the objects
there with the upward progress of the mind into the intelligible
region.” Don’t look down. Not because you might be confused,
but because you might fall. Not because of what you will
see, but because of what you might become.
Matter goes underground. It stays there. Imperceptible.
“ ‘Did It try to got In touch, after?’
“ ‘Not that I know of. He had this Idea that It was gone,:
sort of; not gone gone, but gone Into everything, the whole
matrix. Like It wasn't In cyberspace anymore, It Just was. And
If It didn’t want you to see It, to know It was there, well, there
was no way you ever could, and no way you’d ever be able to
prove It to anybody else even If you did know . .
William Gibson, Mona Usa Overdrive
Virtual reality (V.R.), cyberspace, and all aspects of digital machines
are still said to promise “a freedom that is limited only by
our imaginations ... mastery of a realm of creation (or destruction
. . .), a realm of the mind—seemingly abstract, cool,
clean, and bloodless, idealistic, pure, perhaps part of the spirit,
that can leave behind the messy, troublesome body and the
ruined material world.” Cyberspace emerged as a disembodied
zone wilder than the wildest West, racier than the space race,
sexier than sex, even better than walking on the moon. This was
the final of final frontiers, the purest of virgin islands, the newest
of new territories, a reality designed to human specifications, an
artificial zone ripe for an infinite process of colonization, able to
satisfy every last desire, especially that to escape from “the meat.”
Cyberspace presented itself as the highest level of a game which
had always been determined to win control, a haven waiting to
welcome its users to a safe computer-generated world in which
they could finally be free as their finest fantasies. It promised a
zone of absolute autonomy in which one could be anything,
even God: a space without bodies and material constraints, a
digital land fit for heroes and a new generation of pioneers.
“His holoporn unit lit as he stepped In, half a dozen girls
grinning, eyeing him with evident delight They seemed to be
standing beyond the walls of the room, In hazy vistas of powder-blue
space, their white smiles and taut young bodies
bright as neon. Two of them edged forward and began to
touch themselves.
“ ‘Stop It, ’ he said.
“The projection unit shut Itself down at his command;
- the dreamglrls vanished."
William Gibson, Mona Usa Overdrive
This is supposed to be a zone in which you can be what you
want, do what you like, feel what you will. “You can lay Cleopatra,
Helen of Troy, Isis, Madame Pompadour, or Aphrodite.
You can get fucked by Pan, Jesus Christ, Apollo, or the Devil
himself. Anything you like likes you when you press the buttons.”
A time and a place for everything.
This phallic quest has always played a major role in the
development and popularization of visual techniques. Photography,
cinema, and video have all been grabbed by pornographers,
and long before the development of simulating stimulating
data suits, sex with computers was well advanced.
Sex has found its way into all the digital media—CD-ROMs,
Usenet, E-mail, bulletin boards, floppy disks, the World
Wide Web—and both hardwares and softwares are sexualized.
Much of this activity is clearly designed to reproduce and amplify
the most cliched associations with straight male
sex.Disks are sucked into the dark recesses of welcoming vaginal
slits, console cowboys jack into cyberspace, and virtual
sex has been defined as “teledildonics,” a prosthetic
extension of male membership. Here are more simulations of
the feminine, digital dreamgirls who cannot answer back,
pixeled puppets with no strings attached, fantasy figures who
do as they are told. Absolute control at the flick of a switch.
Turn on. Turn off It’s perfectly safe. A world of impec
spectacle.
Times of great technological change always tend
marked by the feeling that “the future will be a larger or g
improved version of the immediate past. ” According to Ma
McLuhan, the present is viewed through a rear-view mirro
conceals the extent of contemporary change. But alth
McLuhan could see the extent to which old paradigms
apphed to new worlds, his own definition of new med
“extensions of man” was the perfect example of this trap.
liam Burroughs falls in as well. “Western man is externa
himself in the form of gadgets,” says one of his charact
Nova Express. Or perhaps his gadgets are invading him,
him up to alien machines which do not extend, but hijac
powers. Worse still is the almost unbearable thought tha
borders were always duplicitous. If they were ever there at all.
hooked
While the notion that technologies are piostheses, expa
existing organs and fulfilling desires, continues to legitimize
swathes of technical development, the digital machines o
late twentieth century are not add-on parts which serv
augment an existing human form. Quite beyond their
perceptions and control, bodies are continually engineere
the processes in which they are engaged.
“All the forms of auxiliary apparatus which we hav
vented for the improvement or intensification of our se
functions are built on the same model as the sense organs t
selves or portions of them,” wrote Freud. “For example, specta-
|des, photographic cameras, trumpets.” But even his route to
j^these prosthetic ends is rather more complex than his concluisions
suggest. Talcing the “living organism in its most simplified
^possible form,” he illustrates its need to develop a protective
shell, a crust or armor of some kind. It is a “litde fragment of
diving substance . . suspended in the middle of an external
world charged with the most powerful energies; and it would be
‘killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not
•-provided with a protective shield against stimuli.” It develops a
'shell to protect itself, an inorganic, synthetic shield which ensures
that the . “energies of the external world are able to pass
,dnto the next underlying layers, which have remained living,
with only a fragment of their original intensity; and these layers
scan devote themselves, behind the protective shield, to the reception
of the amounts of stimulus which have been allowed
' through it.” The organism can now “sample” the world in
- “small quantities,” and devote itself to dealing with the “specimens
of the external world” which find their way through its
shell.
In more complex organisms, this shield is refined into the
sense organs of Freud’s “perceptual system,” by means of which
“samples of the external world” can be safely taken in. The
sense organs are compared “with feelers which are all the time
making tentative advances towards the external world and then
drawing back from it.” Freud’s perceptual system makes, breaks,
and regulates contact with whatever it touches as its own outside.
The process of tentative advance and withdrawal ensures
that this “borderline between outside and inside must be turned
towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical
systems.” It is double-edged, and Janus-faced, both the border
between the organism and what its sensors determine as the
outside world, and the line on which the interior and exterior
worlds connect. It is both a protective filter, in the service of the
organism, and a screen whose “outermost surface ceases to have
the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree
inorganic.” Freud’s feelers reach out, not merely as tools, but
strands of a fabrication which exceed the integrity of organic
life. At the point of their contact with the outside world, the
sensory functions are no longer alive. They may be prostheses,
but they are alien, foreign bodies which feel their way around
bodies which have become foreign to themselves.
All these efforts to extend, secure, and reproduce the desire
for more of the same were not only destined to backfire: the
gizmos, the gadgets, and the softwares with which he thought
he was building an immaculate fantasy had always been drawing
him into a pulsing network of switches and relays which was
neither climactic, clean, or secure. Films like Videodrome and
Strange Days had warned them that simulated sex was not guaranteed
to be devoid of secretions and the ties that bind, but they
loved to think that the computer screen was melting into a
world of their own. “And as they advance deeper out into the
waves, the mariners discover the tumult of higher dreams. The
thirst of loftier thoughts. The call to still-unhearci-of truths. A
siren song drawing them away from any shore. Short of any
landfall.”
" ‘That’s all there was, Just the wires,’ Travis said. Connecting
them directly to each other. Wires, and blood, and piss,
and shit. Just the way the hotel maid found them. ’ ”
Pat Cadlgan, Synners
tact
It is not just a matter of looking ahead instead of to the rear:
looking itself is at issue now. Even at its most visual, and amid
the ubiquitous screens of what should be a new spectacle, multimedia
does more than improve, extend, or reproduce the sense
of sight which has played such a vital organizing role in the
Western world. Zeros and ones are utterly indiscriminate, recognizing
none of the old boundaries between passages and
channels of communication, and spilling out into the emergence
of an entirely new sensory environment in which “begins
to be evident that ‘touch’ is not skin but the interplay of the
senses, and ‘keeping in touch’ or ‘getting in touch’ is a matter of
a fhiitftd meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound
and sound into movement, and taste and smell.”
Even television screens were windows onto what
McLuhan called “the extreme and pervasive tactility of the new
electric environment,” an emergent network of televisual telecommunications
which plunges us into “a mesh of pervasive
energy that penetrates our nervous system incessandy.”
Monitors are merely avatars of this net, an “extraordinary technological
clothing” whose backlit screens compose a pixeled
interface with the digital undergrowth, triggering a dim awareness
of “some land of actual space behind the screen, someplace
. you can’t see but you know is there.” ~
The sampled sounds, processed words, and digitized images
of multimedia reconnect all the arts with the tactility of
woven fabrications. 'What was once face-to-face communication
runs between the fingertips strung across the world, and all
the elements of neatly ordered, hierarchically arranged systems
of knowledge and media find themselves increasingly interconnected
and entwined. This is only the beginning of a synaesthetic,
immersive zone in which all the channels and senses find'
themselves embroiled in “the unclean promiscuity of everything
which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance,”
leaving the author, the artist, the reader, the spectator “with no
halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect:
t him anymore.”
This is precisely what the history of technology was ostensibly
intending to avoid. The fear of the “touch of the unknown,”
.the. “alien touch,” is “something which never leaves a
man when he has once established die boundaries of his personality.”
Expelled fiom the amniotic fluids of a sexually alien
womb, the newly born male is said to come “fiom a rhythmically
pulsating environment into an atmosphere where he has to
exist as a discrete organism and relate himself through a variety
of modes of communication,” all of which will allow him to
keep reality at arm’s length. Elias Canetti defines all tools as
more or less sophisticated variations on the simple theme of the
stick, “the weapon which lay nearest to hand.” It was a cudgel,
a spear, and a hammer, and “through all these transformations it
remained what it had been originally: an instrument to create
distance, something which kept away from men the touch and
die grasp that they feared/’
These desires for distance and distinction underwrite
man’s ancient investments in sigfet, ,and.the evidence of his eyes.,
“He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able toL
recognize or at least classify it,” writes Canetti. “In the dark, the
fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic.” Sight is the
sense of security. Touch is the feeling that nothing is safe.
While sight is organized around the organs that see and the
Ithings that are seen, touch is not a localized sense. It is dispersed
pnd distributed across the skin, every one hundred square milli^hieters
of which is said to have Some fifty sense receptors. “One
lean picture the touch receptor as a membrane in which there
;are anumber of tiny holes, or at least potential holes, like a piece
of Swiss cheese covered with cellophane. In the resting state the
."holes are too small or the cellophane too thick for certain ions
..to pass through. Mechanical deformation opens up these
holes,” and when they are formed “by a strong pressure such as
-a pinprick, the currents are strong enough to trigger nerve
impulses and the intensity of the prick is signaled by the frequency
of the impulses, since this is the only way nerve fibres
can code intensity.” The skin is both a border and a network of
portsj a porous membrane, riddled with holes; perforated surfaces,
intensities.
“Grooming the skin, bathing of all kinds, anointing, oiling,
perfuming the skin, plucking hair, shaving,” not to mention
branding, tattooing, and piercing the skin: in all these respects,
the sense of touch “serves like a carrier wave upon
which the particular message is imposed as a modification or
patterning of that wave, as in telephoning.” Porous, perforated,
taut, and transmitting on their own frequencies, skins are continually
in touch with the membranes and meshworks of the
nets they compose. “The fingers of their hands are spread out
and in incessant movement. From their many orifices there
emerge thick barely visible filaments that meet and fuse together.
Under the repeated play of movement in the fingers a
membrane grows between them that seems to join them, then
prolong them . . .”
Touch is the sense of communication in far more than a
metaphorical sense. It is the sense of proximity, a nearness that
never quite fuses touching elements into one new thing, but
literally puts them all in touch. Sight depends on separation, the
“possibility of distinguishing what is touching from what is
touched.” Anything seen has no say in the matter, but that
which is touched always touches back. Sight is the sense of
security which tactility completely undermines. This is why,
according to Freud, “As in the case of taboo, the principal
prohibition . . . is against touching; and thence it is sometimes
known as ‘touching phobia’ or ‘dflire de toucher. ’ The
prohibition does not merely apply to immediate physical contact
but has an extent as wide as the metaphorical use of the
phrase ‘to come into contact with.’ ”
"They ascended lattices of light, levels strobing, a blue
dicker.
“That’ll be It, Case thought.
“Wintemute was a simple cube of white light, that very
simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
“ ‘Doesn’t look much, does It?’ the Flatllne said. ‘But
Just you try and touch It.”’
William Gibson, Neuromancer
“When women talk about V.R. they speak of taking the body
with them ... the body is not simply a container for this
glorious intellect of ours.” Contra Socrates and his heirs, the
body is not “the obstacle that separates thought from itself, that
which it has to overcome to reach thinking. It is on the contrary
that which it plunges into or must plunge into, in order to teach
the unthought, that is life.” This body is not the organism,
organized precisely around a mind which sets its sights on a
spirit or a soul, still less a penile point. “It is an entity so plugged
in that it is indistinguishahle^Jrom its^emdronment.” writes
Catherine Richards, “challenging any notion of bodily identity
*that is intertwined with a sense of self.” It is a body which “has
ditde to do with the image of boundaries and perhaps more to
' do with an ecology of fluctuating intensities or environments of
interdependent entities.”
"/ walk about, not In a Snail-Shell, but In a Molecular Labora­
tory."
Ada Lovelace, November 1844
Irigaray’s women have always remained “elsewhere: another
case of the persistence of‘matter,’ but also of‘sexual pleasure.’ ”
Even “in what she says ... at least when she dares, woman is
constantly touching herself.” And when she writes, she “tends
to put the torch to fetish words, proper terms, well-constructed
forms.” If she has a “style,” it “does not privilege sight; instead,
it takes each figure back to its source, which is among other
things tactile. ’ ’ Even the textbooks reluctantly concede that “the
human female is actually sensitive all over her body,” and “appears
to be very much more responsive to tactile stimuli than
the male, and more dependent on touch for erotic arousal.”
If the conventions of the visual arts had activated artists and
their tools and divided them from pacified matrices, digitization
interweaves these elements again. On the computer monitor,
... any change to the image is also a change to the program; any
change to the programming brings another image to the screen.
This is the continuity of product and process at work in the
textiles produced on the loom. The program, the image, the
process, and the product: these are all the softwares of the loom.
Digital fabrications can be endlessly copied without fading into
inferiority; patterns can be pleated and repeat, replicated folds
across a screen. Like all textiles, the new softwares have no
essence, no authenticity. Just as weavings and their patterns are
repeatable without detracting from the value of the first one
made, digital images complicate the questions of origin and
originality, authorship and authority with which Western conceptions
of art have been preoccupied. And the textile arts
“have always turned upside down any economy of the senses,
rekindling polysensory memory: muffled drapings of satin, velvet,
silk; adornments of alpaca, angora, fur; the harshness of
linen, jute, sisal, latex or metal thread. They make every work
tactile.
“Women have always spun, carded and weaved, albeit
anonymously. Without name. In perpetuity. Everywhere yet
nowhere . . . That’s where our yarn gets tangled.” When
weaving emerged on the pixeled screens of computer monitors,
the yarn was tangled once again. Women were among the first
of the artists and photographers, video artists and film makers to
pick up on the potential of the digital arts. Esther Parada described
“the computer as an electronic loom strung with a
jnatrix: image, into which I can weave other material—in harmony,
syncopation, or raucous counterpoint . . Working
with computers, she writes, is “like working with fibres, the
process of knotting strings to form a pattern feels like the clustering
of pixels to form an image/’ The spectator “becomes
absorbed with the micro-level, the details of the image, while
the matrix or overall image may be unreadable—at least at close
range.” Written out of an official history which draws them in
as its minor footnotes to itself, cloths, weavers, and their skills
turn out to be far in advance of the art forms digitization
supersedes. “Until recently the computer with its programs has
been considered another tool, a substitute for a paint brush,
pencil or crayon. While it can certainly be that, it is more.” This
is a weaver working with computerized Jacquard looms and a
computerized 32-harness handloom, embedding ‘‘images
within the structures,” and marveling at “the incredible graphic
flexibility of the computerized Jacquard loom and its attendant
software programs. Images could be scanned in, manipulated
with paint or drawing tools, assigned weaves and technical information,
and then woven. With the rapid weave rate per
meter, the results were almost immediately visible. A return to
the design computer to add or subtract images, lines and/or
textures could change the base design drastically or subtly . . .
The flexibility is amazing . . . ”
Textiles, writes another, weaver, “are not only visual but
also tactile; they create not only images but also sculptural
forms. Because of the computer, my textile work is experimental,
my creations are physically tactile and visual and they
have a significance beyond what they seem to be as objects.”
To Louise Lemieux-Berube, “the computer is as indispensable
as a loom . . . textiles have moved into the electronic
world as if they had been its precursors.”
cyberflesh
Frustrated by the categorizations and the catalogues of an art
world still framed ill terms of originators and originals, creative
moments and authoritative claims, the digital zone appealed to
her. The pixeled windows caught her eye. She had never been
able to accept the boundaries between media, the borders between
senses, the blueprints of authenticity to which her work
was supposed to live up. Cameras had given her the chance to
explore the technical potential of imaging machines, but she
wanted her pictures to dance and scream, taste and smell, touch
and contact senses still to come. “So I started to make a virtual
body with a virtual wound.” She had long been lost in the static.
on her screens, and it seemed to her that computers were already
melting and multiplying her senses and the channels on
which she transmitted and received. “The computer-generated
image in the virtual world provides a space where the unspeakable
can be spoken.” She couldn’t say why, but that didn’t
patter now. All she had to do was make them work. And she
bad a knack for that. Linda Dement’s digital Tales of TyphoidL
Mary intetlacesJmages with stories, graphs, diagrams, animations,
and sound to take-its-users, into an uneasy zone where
writing is stark and bleak, bled dry, and images are sensory
overload. There is no freedom celebrated here. Everything is
deliberate, made to function within the same constraints evoked
by the materials: disease, depression, fear, fever, bondage, torture,
addiction, the life of “a one-legged glowingly beautiful
ex-whore . . .” It’s a far cry from the corporate dream of a
cheerful interactivity which lets users choose, not lose control.
Typhoid Mary catches them unawares.
Cybeiflesh Girlmonster is even cannier. Now the user can
click on witty little monsters and inviting lips which whisper:
press here, press here, touch me, touch me. But the monsters are
hybrids of body parts: women’s fingers, arms, nipples, ears; a
tattooed snake from the base of a spine, the construct cunt of a
transsexual. And they lead their tricks into a small labyrinth of
animated sequences determined to induce some visceral response,
screens overlaid with the graphic detail of bodies too
beautiful to show themselves, calm stories of understated horror
and terrible crime. Backlit blood disturbs a black backdrop. A
heart-and-dagger comes loose from the skin. Words pause cautiously
on the screen.
“L’s body Is lying there on the door. There’s blood. A huge
pool of blood that’s run from the thin cuts that go down the
Insides of her forearms. It’s coagulating In the carpet. Her
face Is grey. It takes approximately 4 minutes to bleed to
death from cuts like these. The clock In the stereo system Is
set to 24 hour time. It says 22.12. There’s a Madonna tape In
one side of the double cassette player and Nina Hagen In the
other. There’s a Pretenders CD In the CD part. Nothing’s playing
now and It’s Impossible to tell what was on when she cut
her wrists. It’s one of those machines that switches to whatever
part of It Is loaded after whatever’s playing has finished.
There’s a pot of tea on the kitchen bench, the milk has been
left out of the fridge and the washing up needs to be done. L’s
diary Is on the table. There’s an appointment with the doctor
tomorrow, an early start at work the day after, a date with E
and a dinner with B and the days go on. There’s a list Mutacked
to the wall. Take the camera for repairs. Call R. Pick
up SCSI cable. Her computer Is on. There’s an unfinished Image
on screen and the computer Is flashing a warning message
that It Is about to shut down. There’s an unposted letter
to S. The first line reads Dear S, Everything Is Just fine."
Linda Dement, Cyberflesh Glrimonster
This is not the digital disembodiment beloved of the industrial
and military worlds, but a zone whose characters and images
begin “to conduct their dance, to act out their mime, as ‘extrabeings.’
” She isn’t making pictures: these are diagrams. She
isn’t an artist, but a software engineer.
mona lisa overdrive
" ‘You, Mona. That’s you.’
“She looked at the face In the mirror and Med on that
famous smile.’’
William Gibson, Mona Uaa Overdrive
At the end of the twentieth century, all notions of artistic genius,
authorial authority, originality, and creativity become
matters of software engineering. Beats extract themselves from
melody; namtiye collapses into the cycles and circuits of nonhnear
text; processed words, sampled music, and digital images
repeat the patterns of interlacing threads, the rhythms and
speeds of gathering intelligence. Retrospectively, from behind
the backlit screens, it suddenly seems that even the images most
treasured for their god-given genius were themselves matters of
careful composition and technical skill.
The Mom Lisa’s appeal is precisely the fact that the image
does more than passively hang on the gallery wall. As her spectators
always say, Mona Lisa looks at them as much as, if not
more than, they can look at her. To the extent that it works so
well, Leonardo’s picture is a piece of careftd software engineering.
An interactive machine has been camouflaged as a work of
Western art.
Freud takes her as the image of womanhood. The figure in
the painting is “the most perfect representation of the contrasts
which dominate the erotic life of women; the contrast between
reserve and seduction, and between the most devoted tenderness
and a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding—consuming
men as if they were alien beings.” He quotes Muther on this
famous duplicity: “What especially casts a spell on the spectator
is the daemonic magic of this smile. Hundreds of poets and
authors have written about this woman, who now appears to
smile at us so seductively, and now to stare so coldly and without
soul into space; and no one has solved the riddle of her
smile, no one has read the meaning of her thoughts. Everything,
even the landscape, is mysteriously dreamlike, and seems to be
trembling in a kind of sultry sensuality.”
They gaze at her in rapture, and then in fear. At her first
mention, she is “a veiled courtesan.” To eighteenth-century
European man, she is “divine”: Sade’s “very essence of femininity,”
and Bonapart’s “Madame,” his “Sphinx of the Occident.”
By the early twentieth century, she is both “treacherously
and deliciously a woman,” according to E; M. Forster;
with “the smile of a woman who has just dined off her husband,”
in Lawrence Durrell’s words. Either way, the painting
“has produced the most powerful and confusing effect on whoever
looks at it.” Whatever they see, she returns their gaze. Or
perhaps they are returning hers. Like no other image, she
catches their eye. They cannot help but be taken with her.
The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in sixteenth-century
Florence and composed as a portrait of Lisa del
Giocondo, a merchant’s wife. There are a few holes in this
story, and sometimes suggestions that the image was really a
self-portrait, or superimposed with Leonardo’s mother’s smile.
But the standard history of the painting is supposed to be a
straightforward affair. By the same token, the origins of the
piece are extremely obscure. The painting is untided, undated,
and unsigned, absenting itself from all connection with its
source. There are no records of its progress or completion, no
preliminary sketches, no entries in Leonardo’s diaries of his
work, and no reference to his authorship until some years after
his death. Even the setting is unfamiliar and strangely out of step
with time: Mona Lisa sits before an anonymous landscape
which “hints that human activities once took place in this awesome
terrain, but were terminated at some point.” And if Vasari
is right and the painting really is a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo,
it is “curiously lacking in contemporary detail. The dress is
unusually plain for a gentlewoman and does not seem to con- ;
farm with current fashion, The hair is not artfully styled ... v.;there
is not a single piece of jewellery which could denote
wealth or social position.”
“She was sixteen and SINIess, Mona, and this older trick had
told her once that that was a song, ‘Sixteen ami SINIess.'
Meant she hadn’t been assigned a SIN when she was bom, a
Singe Identification Number, so she’d grown up on the outside
of most official systems. She knew that It was supposed
to be possible to get a SIN, If you didn’t have one, but It stood
to reason you’d have to go Into a building somewhere and
talk to a suit, and that was a long way from Mona’s Idea of a
good time or even normal behavior." ^
William Gibson, Mona Uaa Overdrive
God-given inspiration, imagination, creativity: Mona Lisa cares
for none of this. Her effectivity is simply a question of technical
skill. As one of Leonardo’s biographers points out, “From the
start, he witnessed the harnessing of artistry to skilled engineer- .
ing,” and it is widely acknowledged to be sfumato which gives
the painting its outstanding senses of movement, shade, and
relief. These effects are produced by “the application of many
glazes, all of them so thin and fluid that not a single brush stroke
can be found anywhere in the work.” With all other records of
nfcorigins, the picture’s composition is completely obscured. As
ij&it had come complete, intact . . . a ready-made interactive
image slotted into the read only memory five hundred years too
(soon.
|§f Mona Lisa herself sits contrapposto, poised at more than one
tangle to her audience, as if turning toward, or away from, their
gview. Her shoulders, head, and eyes are centered on subdy
pifferent axes, giving her body a sense of movement, animating
iher eyes and her smile, allowing her gaze to be everywhere and
phe painting itself to work. “Her instincts of conquest, of feroc|ity,
all the heredity of the species, the will to seduce and to
pnsnare, the charm of deceit, the kindness that conceals a cruel
purpose—all this appeared and disappeared by turns behind the
|laughing veil . . .”
p':t Like Freud’s weaving women, Leonardo’s works were nei|ther
discoveries nor inventions. Scholars have pointed out that
|“a sentence we may think his own is actually a transcription
I from Pliny or Aesop, that a certain ‘discovery’ is in fact the
(work of Pecham or Alhazen, or that an ‘invention’ was well
|known to his contemporaries.” Transcription was one of his
^favorite pastimes, “often copying out word for word long passages
from books that interested him,” and his paintings were
^widely copied as well. Virgin with Saint Anne “was much copied,
‘ in toto and in detail: the authors of the copies are often difficult
:to identify,” and there are “many versions of the Madonna with a
1 Yarn- Winder . . . None of them seems to be by Leonardo’s
own hand: some scholars believe that they are copies of a lost
work, but as Chastel points out, there may never have been an
original.”
i'. It is not the painting’s meaning, its symbolic value, or even
litsperfection that makes it work. Leonardo considered it flawed
land incomplete. And it is certainly not for his originality that
r:
Leonardo is ever praised. Like Freud’s weaving women, he is
often denigrated for what is dismissed as his tendency to copy
material rather than produce originals, whatever they are supposed
to be. But the unfinished quality of the work is, for a
start, why it survived. Had he thought it perfect, the painting
would have been sold and lost to his estate. Perhaps it is also this
which leaves the painting so alive, in the making to this day.
And if Leonardo was so often “copying an existing machine”
when he worked, “the dimensionality, clarity, and precision of
his diagrams . . . the unusual attention he pays to detail . . .
were in themselves major innovations, There have been virtually
no better technical drawings until the coming of computerassisted
draughtsmanship.”
“Molly, like the glri Mona, Is SINIess, her birth unregistered,
yet around her name (names) swarm galaxies of supposition,
rumor, conflicting data. Streetglrl, prostitute, bodyguard, assassin,
she mingles on the manifold planes with the shadows
of heroes and villains whose names mean nothing to Angle,
though their residual Images have long since been woven
through the global culture."
William Gibson, Mona Usa Overdrive
Leonardo worked at a time before modernity had divided procedures
into sciences and arts, means and ends, individuated
creativity and expertise, isolated media and areas of specialized
knowledge and expertise. These are the barriers which the new
syntheses and collaborations spawned by digital machines now
undermine. The artist and the scientist reconnect with the matters
of precision engineering which demand a symbiotic connectivity
with what were once considered tools of their trades,
nothing without them. Multidisciplinary research, like mul-
timedia, is only the beginning of a process which engineers the
end of both the disciplines and the mediations with which
modernity has kept exploratory experiment under wraps. People,
thoughts, passages, means of communication, art forms.
The fusions of club culture and networks of dance-music production
are probably the best examples of these interconnections
and the explorations which emerge from them: DJs, dancers,
samples, machines, keyboards, precise details of engineering
sound, light, air, colors, neurochemistries. Not that it is possible
to see what’s going on, but this is hardly the prime concern.
Not what it looks like, but how it works.
runaway
“Her lover had asked her if she had come. Tm here aren’t I?’
she had replied, puzzled. She had never heard of an orgasm.”
She was told they were “supposed just to happen. She waited.
They didn’t. She faked. She did a round of psychiatrists who
told her she had a low sex drive and advised her to take up a
diverting hobby.” Needlework, perhaps. Or botany. “She asked
one how he would feel if he had never had an orgasm. He told
her that was different. Men did.”
“Freud was right,” writes Baudrillard. “There is but one
sexuality, one libido^—and it is masculine.” Sex is that which is
“centered on the phallus, castration, the Name of the Father,
and repression. There is none other,” and certainly “no use
dreaming of some non-phallic unlocked, unmarked sexuality.”
In the face of such denials of her sexuality, it was hardly
surprising that “orgasms on one’s own terms”—or indeed on
any terms—became the rallying cry for a twentieth-century
feminism increasingly aware of the extent to which female sexuality
had been confined. “It was imperative that women have
orgasms. Measures had to be taken to liberate them and make
them climax.” This was more than a demand for equal access to
pleasures which had been monopolized by man. “Male orgasm
had signified self-containment and self-transcendence simultaneously,
property in the self and transcendence of the body
through reason and desire, autonomy and ecstasy,” and there
was a feeling that if women were no longer “pinned in the crack
between the normal and the pathological, multiply orgasmic,
unmarked, universal females might find themselves possessed of
reason, desire, citizenship, and individuality.”
Or was this destined to lead her to another masculine
conception of sex? Whose terms were “one’s own,” anyway?
The “universalistic claims made for human liberty and equality
during the Enlightenment did not inherendy exclude the female
half of humanity,” but they hadn’t exacdy welcomed her
in. A small matter of brotherhood, the third great principle of
the modern world, guaranteed that human rights were once
again the rights of man. She couldn’t inherit membetsliip: This
vital property was transmitted on stricdy patrilineal terms. Associate
status was not merely available, but required. She has to
marry into the family of man. Everybody has to stick to the
proper point of being a human being. And the point is always to
remember. Dismembering is not allowed. Bodies must be
coded and unified: “You will be organized, you will be an
organism, you will articulate your body—otherwise you’re just
depraved.”
Before the late eighteenth century, in the days when
“most medical writers assumed orgasmic female sexual pleasure
was essential for conception,” women were encouraged to enjoy
themselves within the confines of the marital bed. Their
pleasure was par for the reproductive course, and it was only
-when the self-appointed experts of new modern medicine came
to examine them more closely that this reasoning began to fail.
And as soon as female orgasm lost the legitimacy of a direct
connection to reproductive capacity, it “came to seem either
non-existent or pathological.” Nothing at all, or far too much.
This was far more than a shift in perspective. It seems that
the shape of women’s bodies was very literally changed to fit.
“In the late nineteenth century, surgeons removed the clitoris
from some of their female patients as part of reconstituting them
as properly feminine, unambiguously different from the male,
which seemed to be almost another species . . .”
1881. A random case of sexual violence. X is “ten years
old, of delicate complexion, thin, nervous, extremely intelligent
. . .” Another case of too much sex, but this time too
much sex with herself. “Flogging made her seem moronic,
more deceitful, more perverse, more spiteful. Though kept under
constant watch, she still managed to satisfy herself in a
thousand different ways. When she did not succeed in duping
her guardians, she flew into the most frightful temper . . .”
Recommended treatment: “cold showers, bromide of potassium
and ammonium, two grammes every twenty-four hours.
Ferruginous wine, a varied diet to build up the system. In the
days following X appeared to be mentally calmer. She did not
have hallucinations. Nevertheless she admitted to having
yielded several times . . .
“Pubic belt, strait jacket, straps, bonds, the most assiduous
supervision only resulted in the invention of new expedients
inspired by ruse and subdety.” The doctors began to despair of
her. “Cauterization by hot iron alone gave satisfactory results,”
they conclude. “It is reasonable to infer that cauterization . . .
diminishes the sensitivity of the clitoris, which can be com-
pletely destroyed if the operation is repeated a certain number of|
times.”
If nymphomania—literally, too much interest in the
nymphs, the labia—was enough to incite such violence, the
governors were equally concerned by the thought that she
wasn’t getting enough. “To the analyst, any breakdown in?
mental or emotional machinery could be traced to only one ^
cause. A sex life that was not sufficiently foil.” Not least because
of its silent implication that women were not in need of men,
chastity could be far more disconcerting than the problems:
allegedly connected with too much sexual activity.
Too little, too much, too empty, too foil: The suppression?
of female sexuality has always been a matter of regulation and
control. The ideal female sexuality was neither too active nor
impassive, but just right . . . and just for him. Balanced and
equilibrated, neither running away with itself in some state of
fast loose overexcitement, nor breaking down for want of sufficient
stimuli. Just the right degree of satisfaction, nothing more
and nothing less. Left to her own devices . . . but this, of
course, couldn’t be allowed. She didn’t have the right equipment
to guarantee her self-control, her loyalty to the reproductive
machine. And without her complicity, the whole reproductive
system would collapse.
“ft Is the terrifying prerogative of the liberated sex to claim
the monopoly over Its own sex: ‘I shall not even live On In your
dreams.’ Man must continue to decide what Is the Ideal
woman.”
Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
Convinced that all attempts to liberate some supposed authentic
sex or sexuality were bound to exacerbate the containment of
|the bodies they ostensibly wanted to free, Foucault was dismissive
of attempts to free and extend orgasmic sex. The “apologia
'for orgasm made by the Reichians still seems to me to be a way
of localising possibilities of pleasure in the sexual,” he wrote,
a going so far as to suggest that “we have to get rid of sexuality”
- in order to strip the body from its formal controls, disable the
mechanisms of self-protection and security which bind intensity
-to reproduction. Foucault certainly had no doubt that certain
drugs rivaled the “intense pleasures” of sexual experimentation.
If orgasm concentrates and localizes them, “things like yellow
pills or cocaine allow you to .explode and diffuse it throughout
the body; the body becomes the overall site of an overall pleasure.”
The plane on which it forgets itself, omits to be one.
“I dismembered your body. Our caressing hands were not
gathering information or uncovering secrets, were tentacles of
mindless invertebrates; our bellies and flanks and thighs were
listing in a contact that apprehends and holds onto nothing.
What our bodies did no one did.” Dismemberment:
countermemory. A new generation has forgotten what its organs
were supposed to be doing for their sense of self or the
reproduction of the species, and have learned instead to let their
bodies learn what they can do without preprogramming desire,
to “make of one’s body a place for the production of extraordinarily
polymorphic pleasures, while simultaneously detaching it
from a valorization of the genitalia and particularly of the male
genitalia.”
This is only the beginning of a process which abandons
the model of a unified and centralized organism, “the organic
body, organized with survival as its goal,” in favor of a diagram
of fluid sex. “Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their
continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation,
microperceptions, have replaced the world of the sub-
ject.” Now there are “acentered systems, finite networks of
automata in which communication runs from any neighbour toany
other,” and “we too are flows of matter and energy (sunlight,
oxygen, water, protein and so on).” The Lesbian Body is:,
way ahead: “Perforations occur in your body and in m/y body
joined together, our homologously linked muscles separate, the
first current of air that infiltrates into the breach spreads at Crazy
speed, creating a squall within you and within m/e simultane- -
ously.”
“Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces:
not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its
great velvety planes , . . but open and spread, expose the labia
majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed
in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter . . and
on through every organized zone of a body which begins to
flatten out into the “immense membrane” of Lyotard’s great ephemeral
skin, in touch not only with itself but “the most
heterogeneous textures, bone, epithelium, sheets to write on,
charged atmospheres, swords, glass cases, peoples, grasses, canvases
to pain. All these zones are joined end to end in a band
which has no back to it, a Moebius band . . ,
Once it loses the reproductive point, sex explodes beyond
the human and its proper desires. Coded into two discreet sexes
and defined by their reproductive organs, human bodies also
“imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into
play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the
man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a
thousand tiny sexes.” Every unified body conceals a crowd:
‘^inside every solitary living creature is a swarm of non-creature
things.” Even the most unified of individuals is intimately
up with networksy^uch take it past its own borderlines,
seething with vast populations of inorganic life whose replica-
^tions disrupt even the most perverse anthropocentric notions of
I what it is to have either a sex or sex itself.
j Bound and subjected to the formality of organic integrity,
isuch molecular activities do Htde to disrupt the sense of security
i and fixation on a centralized self. “As long as they do not
.threaten him, and thus force him to define his position in relai
tion to them, he enjoys their fluidity and ease of movement.” It
can even be luxurious, and it is certainly not difficult, to conceive
of oneself as a muldphcitous and shifting complexity. This
»is the familiar, position of the postmodern theorist notorious for
t an impressive intellectual grasp of an instability which has never
required him to lose control. But he doesn’t always have the
choice: “sometimes they reach a point where even a semblance
of orientation becomes impossible.” It’s not quite so easy and
amusing then. And as Elias Canetti points out, if it gets to the
stage at which “everything round him is fluid and transitory he
' naturally begins to feel very uncomfortable himself.”
> Not that it really matters whether or not he ever knows
about the vast populations of inorganic life, the “thousand tiny
sexes” which are coursing through his veins with a promiscuity
of which he cannot conceive. He’s the one who misses out.
Fails to adapt. Can’t see the point of his sexuality. Those who
believe in their own organic integrity are all too human for the
future Ada lived. She loved the microbes long before he knew
they were even there. “Do you know it is to me quite delightfid
to have a frame so susceptible that it is an experimental laboratory
always about me, & inseparable from me.”
She never believed in the disguises she wore, the cover
stories she wrote to conceal the rhythms and speeds of “nonhuman
sex, the molecular machinic elements, their arrangements
'and their syntheses” which composed the thing they called
• herself. Instead she is in touch with the microprocesses which
turn her on, tapping into the plane of impersonal desire which
lies in wait for the human sex, a desire which “does not take as
its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings that it
traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is'
joined, introducing therein breaks and captures—an always no-;
madic and migrant desire.” She did not, after all, have a single
sex, a sex which belonged to something called herself. Her*
body had not simply been excluded from orthodox conceptions*
of being human: It had refused to go along with man’s definitions
of organic life. On the learning curves of her body, she*
discovered that it simply had too many and too fluid zones to
count as one, or even many ones: lips, palms, ears, hairs, fingers,
thighs, toes, soles, nipples, wrists, shoulders, nested regions,
ever more dispersed and localized, larger and smaller, a list without
end. “Not the clitoris or the vagina, but the clitoris and the
vagina, and the lips, and the vulva, and the mouth of the uterus,
and the uterus itself, and the breasts . . . What might have
been, ought to have been astonishing” to those who looked,
and only looked, at lack, “is the multiplicity of genital erogenous
zones (assuming that the qualifier ‘genital’ is still required) in
female sexuality.” There is always more detail and complexity.
Irigaray writes of “a touching of at least turn (lips) which keeps
woman in contact with herself although it would be impossible
to distinguish exactly what ‘parts’ are touching each other.”
She may appear to be well organized, but her body is both,
multiple and mutable, not merely many, but shifting as well. In
Wittig’s Feminary, “the glans of the clitoris and the body of the:
clitoris are described as hooded. It is stated that the prepuce at
the base of the glans can travel the length of the organ exciting a
keen sensation of pleasure. They say that the clitoris is an erectile
organ. It is stated that it bifurcates to right and left, that it is
rangled, extending as two erectile bodies applied to the pubic
phones. These two bodies are not visible. The whole constitutes
ran intensely erogenous zone that excites the entire genital, makpng
it an organ impatient for pleasure. They compare it to
phercury also called quicksilver because of its readiness to exfipand,
to spread, to change shape.”
Pi- To explore what bodies such as this can do is no longer a
^question of liberating sex, of sexual freedom, or authenticity. It
jpyasnot a matter of remembering herself but instead of dismemibering
the one sex which had kept them all in line, a matter of
fenaku^ bits of bodies, its parts or particular surfaces throbs,
phtensify, for their own sake and not for the benefit of the entity
por organism as a whole.” The “question of‘passivity’ is not the
^question of slavery, the question of dependency not the plea to
| be dominated.” When she demands: drink me, eat me, “USE
VME . what does she want, she who asks this, in the exasperation
and aridity of every piece of her body, the womanprchestra?
Does she want to become her master’s mistress and so
Ptforth? Come on! She wants you to die with her, she desires that
S?the exclusive limits be pushed back, sweeping across all the
sl tissues, the immense tactility, the tact of whatever closes up on
itself without becoming a box, and of whatever ceaselessly exI
tends beyond itself without becoming a conquest.”
jp Immense tactility, contact, the possibility of communicaptioft.':
Closure without the box: as a circuit, a connection. “What
^interests the practitioners of S&M is that the relationship is at
the same time regulated and open,” writes Foucault. It is a
s “mixture of rules and openness.” Ceaseless extension: the body
f hunting its own exit. Becoming “that which is not one”; becoming
woman, who “has sex organs just about everywhere.” Is
tthis what it is to get out of the meat? Not simply to leave the
body, but to go further than the organism; to access the “exultation
of a kind of autonomy of its smallest parts, of the smallest'
possibilities of a part of the body.” ;'
“Use me,” wrote Lyotard, is “a statement of vertiginous
simplicity, it is not mystical, but materialist. Let me be your
surface and your tissues, you may be my orifices and my palms!
and my membranes, we could lose ourselves, leave the power
and the squalid justification of the dialectic of redemption, we
will be dead. And not: let me die by your hand, as Masoch
said.” This is also the prostitute’s “sado-masochistic bond which
ends up making you suffer ‘something’ for your clients. This
something has no name. It is beyond love and hate, beyond
feelings, a savage joy, mixed with shame, the joy of "submitting
to and withstanding the blow, of belonging to someone, and
feeling oneself freed from liberty. This must exist in all women,
in all couples, to a lesser degree or unconsciously. I wouldn’t
really know how to explain it. It is a drug, it’s like having the
impression that one is living one’s life several times over all at
once, with an incredible intensity.” It is Foucault’s “something
‘unnameable,’ ‘useless,’ outside of all the programs of desire. It is
the body made totally plastic by pleasure: something that opens
itself, that tightens, that throbs, that beats, that gapes.” It is,
writes Freud, “as though the watchman over our mental life
were put out of action by a drug.”
“I stripped the will and the person from you like collars
and chains.” What remains is machinic, inhuman, beyond emotion,
beyond subjection: “the illusion of having no choice, the
thrill of being taken.” Pat Califia: “He wanted . . . everything.
Consumption. To be used, to be used up completely. To
be absorbed into her eyes, her mouth, her sex, to become part
of her substance.”
Foucault describes those involved in the complex of activi-
pes around S&M as “inventing new possibilities of pleasure with
Mange parts of their body ... It’s a kind of creation, a creative
enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call
Khe desexualization of pleasure.” Beyond their superficial thrills,
Kuch experiments are a “matter of a multiplication and burRoning
of bodies.” he writes, “a creation of anarchy within the
Bfodv. where its hierarchies, its locahzations and designations, its
Kpganicity, if you will is in the process of disintegrating.” For
pbucault. “practices like fist-fucking are practices that one can
Bijllsdevirilizing, or desexualizing. They are in fact extraordinary
Bpt./
Jmlsijications of pleasure, ” pains taken even to the point at which
Imey too “become sheer ecstasy. Needles through the flesh. Hot
Handle wax dribbled over alligator clips. The most extraordinary
■pressure on muscles or connective tissue. The frontier between
Rain and pleasure has been crossed.”
H “Not even suffering on the one hand, pleasure on the
ibther: this dichotomy belongs to the order of the organic body,
Ipfethe supposed unified instance.” Now there is a plane, a
languorous plateau. The peaks and the troughs have converged
Ion still sea, a silent ocean. They have found their limit and
gflattened out. Melting point.
§•' “That there are other ways, other procedures than masochism,
and certainly better ones, is beside the point; it is
lenough that some find this procedure suitable for them.” What|,ever
it takes to access the plane on which one becomes a sex
^ that is not one. Even if one doesn’t know it’s happening.
passing
If Turing’s test reverted to its original parlor-game form at hist
own trial, the boundaries between male and female, man and!
woman, have continued to blur in parallel with the erosion off
the borders between man and machine. The overturning of®
sexual relations in the home and workplace, the increasing prev-i
alence of sex, androgyny, transvestism, and transsexuality has®
heightened both the difficulty and the necessity of defining?
sexes, sexualities, and sexualized roles, just as a proliferation of
intelligent machines has made the difference between man and?
machine increasingly problematic. “Clothing himself in the fe-:
male . . . clothing herself in cyberspace. Is there a differ­
ence?”
“To hide,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “to camouflage
oneself, is a warrior function.” Hence “the femininity of the
man of war” who, just at the moment he becomes the real man, also
finds himself running in reverse. The warrior paints his face'
and dresses up; the soldier looks after his own disguise, bandages’
the wounds he incurs, and sews up the holes in his camouflaged ;
fatigues. As for the Last Action Hern Srhwarzpnpgger’s fusion
with the Terminator seals the fate of modern man. This is the
height of masculinity, and also its own impossibility: The most
real man is not a man at all. Cinema’s male machines are supposed
to be as masculine as their female counterparts are feminine,
but they too tip into the zone to which all duplicity and .
replication tends: “To become the cyborg . . . is to put on the
female.” Strapped into the plane, wired up to the controls, the
fighter pilot becomes the machine and loses, himself on the-
Bigital plane. “Nowadays, it is said, when a military aircraft finds
■itself in serious trouble, the voice command switches to the
Bpninine.”
■p?;: Telling the difference has become a late-twentieth century
preoccupation, as is abundantly clear from the often absurd
■lengths to which transsexuals in search of chemical and surgical
■assistance have to go in order to prove the veracity of their
Ipesires to change sex. Many medical authorities insist on applyBphg
the most stringent and stereotypical criteria to their “parents,”
asking male-to-female transsexuals to wear the high
Peels, skirts, and cosmetics which are supposed to characterize
■true femininity, and female-to-males to display the most conpventional
dress codes and behaviors associated with being a real
liman. These expressions of sexual identity may be expected of
l already existing women and men, but they are hardly enforced
I to the same degree. And while many transsexuals do want to
Lhead for some extreme conception of being female or male, not
Ifdeast in the effort to make a definitive break with their pasts,
ianany others are striving to attain some far less conventional
|-.expression of the sex they want to be.
fc* Like Turing’s machines, those transsexuals unable to take
lithe plane or the risks involved in going to Rio are judged solely
ton their ability to simulate an already caricatured conception of
iiwhat it is to be a proper human being. To be a proper human is
|>,to have a proper sex, a sex that is truly one’s own. And while
| attempts to refine these criteria improve the situation for transS
sexuals themselves, they also serve to reinforce the futility of
^/attempts to define sexual identity. Once the stereotypes are
h dropped, all the criteria fall away.
K This is also the case for the machines. While one of the
^’initial assumptions of A.I. research was that reason and memory
, would suffice for a machine to pass the test, it was soon realized
that what distinguished humans from the early generations of
machines was more akin to irrational forgetfiilness: the foibles,
mistakes, and errors humans make. Slips of the tongue, innuendo,
black and white lies ... It was soon obvious that “an
intelligent machine would have to be intelligent enough to
know when to dissemble, when to lie.”
All of which was rather unfortunate for those attempting:,
to establish the truth. Just as the authorities have to accept
candidates for sex changes on the basis of their abilities to simulate
exaggerated versions of the opposite sex, so Turing’s machines
can only be judged by their abilities to simulate the
human.
What such tests prove is only that there is no such thing as
being human, male or female. Femmes, drag queens, even maleto-female
transsexuals: No one ever arrives at the point of being
a real woman. Butches, drag kings, and female-to-male transsexuals
meet the same problem: There is no real man to become.
Transsexuals are transsexuals before and after the long
chemical treatments and surgical procedures, always on the way
to a destination as impossible as the point of departure they
leave behind. ^
Even attempts to remain the same, secure one’s identity,
and keep it in line are destined to find themselves in the course
of becoming one or the other. Those whose only concern is to
secure an existing masculinity find that this too has to be simulated:
there is nothing real about the real man played by
Schwarzenegger or the male bodies built in the gym. Or in the
many courses and processes of the many becomings which,
assembled together, produce the general effect of a sexual identity
they can call their own. There’s no “there,” there either.
No one is or has one sex at a time, but teems with sexes and
sexualities too fluid, volatile, and numerous to count. “If we
; consider the great binary aggregates* such as the sexes or classes,
& it is evident that they also cross over into molecular assemblages
s of a different nature.” There is nowhere to go, and no way
v back. It is not possible to be just one sex, or even to have a
sexuality when, for every sexual identity, there is always “a
i microscopic transsexuality, resulting in the woman containing
as many men as the man, and the man as many women, all
- capable of entering—men with women, women with men—
into relations of production of desire that overturn the statistical
border of the sexes.”
M'vv “Becoming-woman” does not necessarily have anything
>. to do with “imitating or assuming the female form.” Even if it
appears to be a simple matter of imitation, simulation is much
. more than simple mimicry. “Becoming-woman” is a matter of
‘‘emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest,
or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words,
- that produce in us a molecular woman, create the molecular
: woman.” Not that this is some excuse for “overlooking the
importance of imitation, or moments of imitation, among cer-tain
homosexual males, much less the prodigious attempt at a
real transformation on the part of certain transvestites.” As with
learning a language, it’s a matter of subtly shifting the body
around, tapping into new musculatures and nervous systems,
picking up on different speeds. But while one is certainly more
likely to run into these shifts in the course of trying to make
some change, this does not guarantee immunity to those who
want only to stay the same.
It is in this sense that everybody finds themselves somewhere
in the course of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becomingwoman,”
more or less but never perfectly self-identified. This is
not a question of becoming an actual woman of some kind:
This would be a question of being something, an arrested pro-
cess of becoming. Even female-to-male transsexuals are in thisi,
course, losing their familiar form and what was supposed to be
their proper point as surely as those who are more literally
feminized.
chemicals
Sexual identity and difference only became matters of binary ;
biology in a late-eighteenth century response to the failing
guarantees once provided by Christianity. And if the presence, 1
or absence, of a certain reproductive organ was sufficient criterion
for some time, by the late nineteenth century, it was increasingly
clear that the sexes did not at all compose a clear-cut
binary machine.
The so-called “sex chromosomes” had been observed in j
1891, and in the early decades of the twentieth century hormones
were added to the lines of communication and regulatory
mechanisms at work in organisms which were suddenly far ;
more complex, finely tuned, and sexually ambiguousthan had j
been previously thought. In his 1909 essay on Leonardo, also ?
accused but acquitted of homosexuality, Freud expressed great |
interest in the “tendency of biological research ... to explain 1
the chief features in a person’s organic constitution as being the |
result of the blending of male and female dispositions, based on |
substances.” Differences between the sexes now became matters *
of degree, with the female body “characterized by its cyclic
hormonal regulation and the male body by its stable hormonal
regulation.”
Once they were detected, isolated, and synthesized, hormones
were used to predominantly normalizing ends. But, as
pOuring’s own case shows, there were few guarantees that particpdar
hormones would have predictable effects. While testoster|one
predominates in men and is instrumental in their develop«'ment,
it is by no means confined to male individuals. Bodi sexes
5 produce androgens, male hormones such as testosterone; the
testes produce androgens and estrogen, the feminizing hormone,
and ovaries produce androgen, as well as estrogen and
progesterone, the hormones necessary to the maintenance of
i pregnancy. Hormones can even have “paradoxical effects,” in
which excessive doses of androgens produce feminization, and
excessive estrogen induces masculine growth.
Female-to-male transsexuals now use testosterone to increase
their masculinity, and male-to-females use estrogen to
induce the opposite effect. As such deliberate shifts have become
increasingly feasible, rather more accidental changes have
also begun to occur.
By the 1980s there were reports of human babies with Y
chromosomes but no testicles, female dogwelk with penises, and
lactating male fruit bats. Australian ewes mounting rams. The
males of many species are subject to increasing levels of feminization
from sources as varied as estrogen processed through the
contraceptive pill, agents such as chemical detergents, and a vast
number of chemicals which mimic the effects of female hormones
which find their way into the water supply. In human
males, the sperm count is falling—in Britain, at the rate of 2
percent a year—and cases of impotence are rising fast. These
general effects are thought to be compounded by the feminizing
impact of tinned vegetables, cigarettes, and the accelerating collapse
of conventional male economic, social, and sexual roles.
“The causes are not yet defined . . . but the potential consequences
are clear enough: by the middle of the next century, at
this rate of decline, the British male will be infertile.”
In the 1950s, a Syracuse research team injected DDT into;
forty roosters over a period of two to three months. The daily?
doses “didn’t kill the roosters or even make them sick. But it?
certainly did make them weird. The treated birds didn’t look?
like roosters at all; they looked like hens.’’ ?
By the mid-1990s, more than fifty synthetic chemicals*
which disrupt the endocrine system had been detected in prod-;
ucts we use daily. What had once been supposed to be natural!
hormonal levels had been greatly changed by the use of the!
contraceptive pill, and it was suggested that “plastics are not*
inert as was commonly assumed and that some of the chemicals?
leaching from plastics are hormonally active.” Hormone,
mimics “may lurk in ointments, cosmetics, shampoos, and'
other common products,” and some of the most effective,'?
PCBs, had been used as insulation in electrical transformers for
many years before the war. “These ubiquitous metal cans attached
to electrical poles were an essential component in the
growing grid that sent electricity from generating systems over
high voltage power lines and into homes to power lights, radios/'
vacuum cleaners and refrigerators—the wonderful new twentieth-century
electrical conveniences.”
A survey of figures collected from twenty countries andfive
continents published in the British Medical Journal suggested’
that the average male sperm count had dropped from 113 million
to 66 million per milliliter of semen between 1940 and
1990. Further research, much of it by scientists determined to
disprove these initial findings, confirmed “a striking inverses
correlation between the year of birth and the health of men’s
sperm.” One French study suggested that the sperm counts of
those born in 1945 and measured thirty years later averaged 102
million per milliliter; men born in 1962 and measured in 1992 >
had counts which were exactly halved. It was widely held that 5
Epnthetic estrogens and the ubiquity of estrogen-mimicking
glhemicals were primarily responsible for these falls in sperm
ppunts and, correspondingly, male fertihty. The estrogen receppp'r
“consorts so readily with foreigners that it has earned a
Imputation. Some scientists call it ‘promiscuous.’ ”
|fer “The body responds to the imposters as legitimate mes||engers
and allows them to bind to hormone receptors; it does
Ifrpt recognize their action as damage that needs to be repaired.”
lEstrogen mimics insinuate themselves in the guise of their natupal
equivalents. They “impersonate them. They jam signals,
pfcey scramble messages. They sow disinformation. They wreak
pi: manner of havoc.” Incidence of testicular and prostate diseases
soared, a range of new, or newly perceptible, “male reproIductive
problems” emerged, and there was also some evidence
|ipj suggest that estrogen-mimicking chemicals were related to
Ibreast cancers, ectopic pregnancies, miscarriage, and endometriosis
in women.
I i- The greatest panics, however, were induced by the extent
|to which the sexual order was being chemically scrambled.
Sphere were suggestions that “chemicals interfering with horphonal
messages at crucial times in fetal development could alter
Sexual choice”; and women exposed to one synthetic estrogen
jjprere said to “have higher rates of homosexuality and bisexuality
lifhan do their sisters who were not exposed.”
I#! Worse still, it seemed that human males were losing the
f chemical bases of their masculinity. “Without these testosterone
Isignals, male development gets derailed and boys don’t become
Iboys. Instead they become stranded in an ambiguous state,
Inhere they cannot function as either males or females.” These
lemergent “intersexes” were thought to be products of the prevlalence
of androgen blockers and estrogen mimics among syn|thetic
chemicals absorbed by embryos in the womb and off-
spring in breast milk, as well as by way of a vast range of
synthetic chemicals consumed throughout childhood and adultlife,
and it was daughters—all presumed to be virtual mothers—
with whom the onus was supposed to lie. “Normality” depends
“not only on what the mother takes in during pregnancy but
also on the persistent contaminants accumulated in body fat up
to that point in her lifetime, ” wrote some researchers. “In the
interest of the coming generation and those that follow, we
must limit what children are exposed to as they grow up and;
keep the toxic burden that women accumulate in their lifetimes
prior to pregnancy as low as possible. Children have a right to
be born chemical-free.
“By disrupting hormones and development, these synthetic
chemicals may be changing who we become. They may
be altering our destinies.” It is this possibility that any shifts in
the “normal” chemistry of the human organism will “undermine
the ways in which humans interact with one another and
thereby threaten the social order of modern civilization” which
preoccupies the authors of Our Stolen Futures. They may “alter
the characteristics that make us uniquely human—our behavior,
intelligence, and capacity for social organization,” robbing us of
“the legacy of our species and, indeed, the . essence of our humanity.”
Even the absolute end of the species seems preferable
to them. “There may be fates worse than extinction.”
xyz
Even the most conservative biologists admit that there is no
absolute necessity for the existence of either two sexes or any
particular differences between them. “Sex is not a necessary
^condition for life. Many organisms have no sexuality and yet
Block happy enough. They reproduce by fission or budding and
Ra,single organism is sufficient to produce two identical ones. So
Mbow is it that we do not bud or divide? Why do most animals
Rand plants have to be two in order to produce a third one? And
fewhy two sexes rather than three?” There might have been one
I parthenogenic sex, or three or more different sexes, or individupjals
capable of switching sex. In principle, anything was possible.
£,But species do not evolve, mutate, and reproduce according to
{.matters of principle. Most of them do so by processes of genetic
^recombination and outcrossing, procedures which function to
organize a species, safeguard its definition and its boundaries,
; guarantee its reproductive continuity, and mitigate against mutation.
These are methods which have clearly outstripped their
asexual rivals, but have not arisen because of some transcendent
^evolutionary imperative. Sex is a “frozen accident.” It just happened
to turn out this way.
And there are of course many variations on the theme of
two reproductive sexes. Silverside fish have different sexes at
different times, and when the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus produced
his classifications of plants in the eighteenth century, he
listed twenty-four sexes based on the arrangement of stamens
and pistils. While plants bearing flowers with more stamens—
the male organs—than pistils are staminate, and those with
more pistils—the female organs—are pistillate, there are no
strict divisions between the two. These are merely statistical
aggregates.
Homo sapiens reproduce by way of meiotic sex, a reproductive
process which entails mixing their 75,000 genes, two copies
of which are in each cell, in a double process of recombination
and outcrossing. In an initial sorting process, each pair of chromosomes
swaps chunks of code, recombining to produce one
copy of the 75,000 in either the sperm or the egg. The next'
phase occurs at fertilization when, by a process of outcrossing, one
set of chromosomes meets the set which has been separately produced
by the same process in the cell of the reproductive
partner. Recombination effectively repeats and refines the outcrossing
of each individual’s own parents’ genes, handing down
its own inheritance to offspring direcdy composed of the previous
two generations of genes. It might well be thought that the
asexual procedures of cloning, budding, and splitting practiced'
by bacteria and other parthenogens would be the simplest and'
easiest way of ensuring that more of the same will be produced;
Involving two individuals and the double mechanisms which
recombine and recross their genes, reproductive sex seems the
long way around to something that will not be “the same” at all.
But this convoluted route is die only way to ward off die dangers
of mutation, deviation, and innovation which flourish
among the replications and duplications of asexual populations.
These parthenogens may well appear to be the systems most
skilled in reproducing themselves, but in practice their asexualj
procedures provide fertile ground for mutations and aberrations
which would be fatal to the continuity of a species like Homo
sapiens. Were such organisms to trade genes in this way, as in
Octavia Buder’s Xenogenesis, “it would be a small matter for
dandelions to sprout butterfly wings, collide with a bee, exchange
genes again, and soon be seeing with compound insect
eyes.” These are the outcomes which sexual reproduction is
supposed to preclude. Its procedures are by no means foolproof,
but the double checks and sexual balances of reproductive sex
are the closest biological systems can come to securing the
reproduction of their line.
This double process of software exchange—cutting and
pasting, remixing and double crossing—produces an embryo
■Much inherits the genes of both its parents and their parents as
Ewell. These processes occur in both female and male humans.
pBpt this is where the symmetry appears to end. Human genes
lire coded on forty-six chromosomes, arranged in pairs. In fell;
males, all of them are X-shaped. In males, one of them is
I smaller, and shaped like a Y.
f* In males, the process of recombination can result in one of
I two types of sperm. As a rule, an X-bearing sperm produces an
IXX embryo, whereas a Y sperm produces an XY. In effect,
I individuals can either be double female (XX), half female and
f half male (XY), or some other combination of both. But there
* are many variations on this theme. People with Klinefelter’s
syndrome—whose characteristics include male internal and ex■
ternal genitalia, with small testes, no spermatogenesis, and
sometimes the addition of breasts—have chromosomal combinations
such as XXY, XXXY, XXXXY, XXYY, and XXXYY.
There are women with three, four, or even five X chromosomes,
women with XY chromosomes, men with XYY
combinations, and even men with XX combinations, in whom
the Y chromosome is thought to have been present for long
enough to affect sexual development. There are as many variations
again in mosaics, individuals with combinations of two or
more cell lines. It is also possible to have only one X, or an X
together with some “mutant” X. These Turner’s syndrome individuals
are also considered female, and sometimes referred to
| as XO. They tend to be short, with the sexual organs of adolescent
girls and often webbed fingers and toes as well.
Only Y and YY are not on the menu. Such “pure” males
are impossible: Every embryo emerges from an X chromosome
egg, and also develops in the amniotic fluids of an XX womb.
For the XY embryo this environment is a chromosomatically
alien.
Regardless of whether die sex chromosome carried by the
sperm is X or Y, embryos manifest no anatomical sexual diffeil
ence until the sixth week of their development, when it if
thought that a flood of testosterone triggers the growth of male
sexual characteristics in the XY embryo. This, for example, if
why males have nipples and many other rudimentary character!
istics of the female. After earlier suggestions that the Y chromo-lj
some activates a male-determining gene or sexual regulator car-1
ried on the X chromosome, it is now suspected that the Yj
chromosome carries a pair of interlocking sex-determiningl
genes: SRY, which turns on MIS, the gene which then tumslj
the emergent female functions off and brings the testosterone!
on-line. '|j
On the face of it, females have only a tangential connect
tion to the nexus of male reproductive organs, spermatozoa, Y*
chromosomes, and testosterone. The pattern seems to repeal
itself at every sexual scale. All the triggering, motivating, acti-M
vating features of the process seem to be male, from the domi-s
nant male to the penetrating penis, the orgasmic ejaculation anctthe
plucky litde spermatozoa scurrying up the vagjnal canal in'
an effort to be the first, the only one, to pierce the outer wall of
the egg. Like father, like sperm, like chromosome: Is the male
line really running the show, with women, eggs, and X chromosomes
passively waiting for their counterparts to turn them
on or off as required? Are they merely the vehicles and media
for the transmission of the male line? Does the Y chromosome
organize a hapless, passive, wanton X? Does die sperm come to
activate an acquiescent egg? Is the male the point of it all, and
the female simply a means to its end?
Pis peahen’s tale
Hphen Darwin defined natural selection as the “preservation of
pyourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations,”
Bp- took his cue from the techniques of artificial selection employed
by breeders of animals and plants. While breeders have
■their own purposes in mind, they are not in a position to make
Pie variations themselves occur: They are simply accentuating
^^diminishing modifications which have already emerged in
jamong the population they keep. And while breeders were
baking occasional judgments about what was favorable or injurious
on the basis of outwardly obvious characteristics—the
Elfength of a tail, the color of a flower—Darwin’s natural selecition
was a blind automatic process whose only external influptjces
were provided by the environment with which the organlinn
was continually maintaining, adjusting, and improving its
lability to interact. “It may be said that natural selection is daily
land hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest
|. variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding
| up all that are good; silently and invisibly working, whenever
If and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each
|,organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions
f of life.”
| - With his argument that organisms survived because they
; yvere fit enough to do so, and not because they were handle
picked by God, Darwin certainly succeeded in removing theol;
ogy from the evolutionary picture. Biological selection was not
' ..divine, but natural, and the organisms which proliferated were
simply those which proliferated. Natural selection “is a game
with its own rules. All that count are the changes that affect the
number of offspring. If they reduce that number, they are mistakes;
if they increase it, they are exploits.” In these terms,
which are so broad as to be tautological, natural selection is
widely accepted and relatively uncontroversial. Beyond these
sweeping terms, natural selection is both extraordinarily complex
and certainly not the only factor in the evolutionary game.'
While Darwin’s theory of natural selection emphasized ’
the regulatory mechanisms at work in individuated organisms
and well-defined species, Darwin was neither as conservative
nor dogmatic as the work of many later Darwinians might suggest.
And even he was aware that other processes were in play.
Sexual difference was one of the most obvious anomalies.
“When the males and females of any animal have the same
general habits of life, but differ in structure, colour and ornament,”
he wrote, “such differences have been mainly caused by
sexual selection: that is, individual males have had, in successive
generations, some slight advantage over other males, in their
weapons, means of defence, or charms; and have transmitted
these advantages to their male offspring.” ^
The question begged by these comments was where these
advantages had come from, and although Darwin posed it in
these male terms, it was clear that sexual selection was a matter
of specifically female choice. Studies of the infamous fruit fly,
drosophilia subsobscura, suggest that males and females dance
around each other, apparently until the female decides to accept
the male as a mate. It seems that “the female accepts a male who
keeps up adequately during the dance, and rejects one who does
not. The female is, therefore, extremely discriminating; in contrast,
a male will dance with and attempt to mount a blob of
wax on the end of a bristle.” Early attempts to explain such
procedures, which are by no means confined to the fruit fly,
reduced the behavior of both females and males to the quest for
fitaess prioritized by natural selection. If only the fittest of the
species survive, it is fitness that the females are putting to the
test. Unfortunately for this theory, females do not necessarily
choose males who are fit in Darwinian terms. Female guppies
choose males whose bright colors leave them vulnerable to
predators. Female nightingales choose males whose serenades
also announce their presence to their enemies. Even more frequently
quoted is the peacock whose beautiful but impractical
tail is extremely attractive to discriminating peahens, but is
nothing more than a liability in terms of his ability to survive.
The nightingale’s song, the guppies’ colors, the fruit fly’s
dances, and the peacock’s tail are all emergent from “virility
tests designed to get most males killed through exhaustion, disease
and violence purely so that females can tell which males
have the best genes.” In effect, males function as “the female
sex’s health insurance policy,” often at great cost to themselves.
The high levels of testosterone induced by the demands of female
sexual selection may give males their distinguishing features,
but they also weaken the immune systems of males, and
leave them so vulnerable to a kind of remote control by their
female counterparts that it has even been described as “the
supreme female ‘invention,’ ” perhaps “an evolutionary plot on
behalf of females.”
The drab peahen and the unsung female nightingale figure
among the vast ranks of inconspicuous females which use the
males of their species as “genetic sieves, to sift out the good
genes and discard the bad. They do this by equipping males
with all sorts of encumbrances and then setting them to work in
competition, either beating each other up or risking their fives
against predators and parasites.” The peacock has an extraordinary
tail not because it improves his chances of survival: more
often than not, it gets in his way. Left to his own devices, ha
would no doubt, be a far more functional shape. As Charlotte*
Perkins Gilman wrote, the male “is not profited personally
his mane or crest or tail-feathers: they do not help him get his||
dinner or kill his enemies,” and can even “react unfavourably*
upon his personal gains, if, through too great development, they*
interfere with his activity or render him a conspicuous mark fo al
enemies.” But the peacock’s tail is out of his control. It is then
sexual preference of the peahens which determines the characl||
teristics of his colors and his tail, so much so that their behavioral
“resembles artificial breeding in this respect, with the peahen iniaj
the role of breeder.” 1
Natural and sexual selection function in conjunction with*
each other, ideally to the optimal advantage of them both. Hisli
chances of survival may be compromised, but the peacock gains*
the sex appeal that is likely to allow him to reproduce. The*
runaway development of his tail is simply an “advertising cost’ *
designed to make him attractive to peahens. Sexual selection' !
made it clear that female behavior was not merely a variation ona|
the theme of natural selection. Females not only exert an enor-*|
mous influence on the behaviors of males and, by implication, '!
their species as a whole. Their selection procedures also consti-1
tute an inherently unstable and destabilizing feature of natural 1
selection, always threatening to exceed its countervailing con4|
servative demands. |
Not that this female breeding program necessarily makes >
itself known. Sexual difference may be balanced, sustained, and !j
reproduced for generations, until some subtle mutation in themale
begins to appeal to what has hitherto been a minority
female preference. Regardless of whether they are male or fe- ;‘
male, the offspring produced by females carrying, and exercising,
these preferences will then carry both the gene for the1
Konger tail and the gene for its preference. Male offspring de||elopthe
longer tail, and pass both this gene and the gene for
Kemale preference to their offspring, with whom the process
pbntinues. Female offspring exercise the gene for long-tail prefprence
and carry the gene for longer tails, which expresses itself
iin: any male progeny. The process begins to run away. The
tspecies starts to move too fast. The equilibrium which was
Isupposed to be guaranteed by the balanced sexes and mutually
peinforcing modes of selectivity hits skid row, goes out of conItrol.
Even though the peacock’s tail has reached the optimum
IsCage of its development; even after he has become as sexually
idesirahle as the females would wish, “the further development
.of the plumage character will still proceed, by reason of the
advantage gained in sexual selection, even after it has passed the
point in development at which its advantage in Natural SelecI
tion has ceased.”
-' • After this the female gene “rides, like a surfer, on a wave of
ever-increasing tail lengths sweeping through the population.”
In effect, it chooses itself. When it chooses males with long tails
it is also choosing those which carry a “hidden” gene for the
females’ preference for them. “The two characteristics affected
by such a process, namely plumage development in the male,
and sexual preference for such developments in the female . . .
advance together, and so long as the process is unchecked by
severe counterselection, will advance with ever-increasing
speed. In the total absence of such checks, it is easy to see that
the speed of development will be proportional to the development
already attained, which will therefore increase with time
exponentially, or in geometric progression. There is thus in any
bionomic situation in which sexual selection is capable of conferring
a great reproductive advantage, as certainly occurs in
some polymorphic birds, the potentiality of a runaway process,
which, however small the beginnings from which it arose, must,:
unless unchecked, produce great effects, and in the later stages
with great rapidity.”
“Where one function is carried to unnatural excess, others
are weakened, and the organism perishes.” As Gilman writes,
“All morbid conditions tend to extinction. One check has always
existed to our inordinate sex-development, nature’s ready
relief, death.” Positive feedback can always go too far. Any
further and the peacock would die.
Darwin was well aware of the importance of sexual selection,
the influence of female choice, and the peculiarity of the
peacock’s tail which, like all characteristics specific to males,
seemed bound to be an evolutionary disadvantage. But he simply
stated these syndromes as unexplained facts. The peacock’s
tail is simply beautiful because the peahens like it that way. “So
it was female choice which caused the males’ long tails. But
what caused the female preference? Darwin simply took it for
granted.” In a sense, there was little else he could do. The
female line seems to run in circles of its own. As R, A. Fisher
was later to suggest, female preference was “caused^essentially,
by itself.”
Although sexual selection had been discussed by generations
of evolutionary biologists, it was not until the mid-1980s
that it was widely acknowledged that “in many species, females
had a large say in the matter of their mating partner.” The fact
that the majority of investigators have their own male interests
at heart has undoubtedly contributed to the neglect of this
evolutionary tale. But any suggestion that there has been some
deliberate conspiracy of silence gives evolutionary biology far
more credit than even its most dogmatic exponents would want
to claim. Sexual selection is not a matter of linear transmission,
but a self-reinforcing loop with which orthodox conceptions of
evolution have simply been unable to cope. The self-stimulating
circuits of female sexual selection are so utterly alien to a biological
ethos of organizing points and straight lines that they have
been both inexplicable and often imperceptible as well. The
suppression of the runaway female circuitry runs far deeper than
the discourses and laboratories of the modern sciences: It is
crucial to the survival of the species itself.
loops
“What he had sometimes thought of as the arteries and veins
of an Immense circulatory system was closer to a sewer.
Strange clumps of detritus and trash, some Inert and harmless,
some toxic when In direct contact, and some actively
radiating poison, scrambled along with the useful and necessary
traffic."
Pat Cadlgan, Synners
The female factors involved in these microbiological processes
are far more than missing pieces in a jigsaw picture which is
more or less present and correct. What the meiotic model can
only characterize as the absence of female activity conceals goings
on so strange and unorthodox that they completely defy
explanation, and even recognition, within the prevailing paradigms.
There are elements of female sexuality which are not
merely at odds with the modern disciplines; meiotic sex has
itself survived and evolved by keeping them at bay.
The male considers its own zygotes to be as seminal as its
histories and texts. Sperm are supposed to be the elements
which keep the reproductive show on the road. It is their pene-
trative and impregnating activity which is said to constitute the
point of origin, the defining and initiating act, the formal arrangement
of life itself. Given the importance placed on size by
the male side of the story, it is rather ironic that eggs, or ova, are
by far the largest cells. The biggest egg in the world is also the
largest existing cell, and even women’s eggs, which are obviously
very small, are 85,000 times larger in volume than sperm.
Sperm are not only minuscule. They are also peculiarly
basic and crude when compared with the complexities of eggs.
Sperm are simple packets of genes, whereas eggs are extraordinarily
complex. “The egg uses the messages passed on from the
mother to create a chemical landscape upon which the structure
of the organism is built.” The egg releases the proteins which
switch genes on or off and so produce more proteins, gradually
layering increasingly complex levels of organization and building
the organism one stage at a time. “Eggs are computers to
the simple floppy discs of sperm,” and contain so “much of the
machinery an embryo needs for reading and using the genes”
that they can almost function on their own. Although the egg is
supposed to need the insertion of the sperm’s software if it is to
replicate itself, even this most sacrosanct of facts is increasingly
dubious. It seems that sperm is not the only factor capable of
prompting the egg to grow. Sperm “are not organizers, but
mere inductors,” stimuli of “varying, vague import,” and “ultimately,
the nature of these inductors is a matter of indiffer­
ence.”
Eggs do not constitute some alternative moment of origin
or authority in the emergence of human life. The very idea that
anything comes first is itself a cock and bull story which functions
to suppress nonlinear continuities to which any notion of a
starting point is anathema. “Doubtless one can believe that, in
the beginning (?), the stimulus—the Oedipal inductor—is a real
organizer.” Square one may be claimed by the male. But its
own redundancy is obvious every time it questions its own
origins. There are only two answers to the question “which
comes first?” And both of them are female. The male element is
simply an offshoot from a female loop.
Chicken and egg compose a circuit which is always prior
to the first place claimed by the male factors. This is a loop in
relation to which the supposed organizing factors are merely
secondary processes, subroutines, components callously used by
a cycle which may even keep them in play by kidding them
about the importance of their roles.
“The disorder has been a Hydra-headed monster;—no sooner
vanquished In one shape, than It has sprung up In another.”
Ada Lovelace, December 1844
Whenever they are trying to remember as far back as the origins—of
life on earth, species development, her hysteria, her
multiplicity—the experts always find themselves entangled with
emergent circuitries always running away with themselves. Biologists
and psychoanalysts alike designate such repheating processes
female.
If the role of the sperm is debatable, the existence of any
organizing factor is even more problematic when the sources of
life on earth are explored. Manfred Eigen suggests that the
earliest replicators could only have begun to replicate themselves
once their genetic codes had reached a certain length.
Catalysts, or copying machines, could have led the process to
this point, except that “these machines have to be built first. For
this, a blueprint is required, which means information of some
length: a few hundred letters seems to be the minimum. But
such a length cannot be reached without the help of a copying
machine. And this leads to Catch-22: no higher accuracy without
a longer word, no longer word without a higher accuracy.”
Eigen has “proposed a hypercycle as a way out, that is, a catalytic
feedback loop whereby each word assists in the replication of
the next one, in a regulatory cycle closing on itself.” But this
only complicates the problem, which seems to run rings around
all attempts to pin down some first and founding point at which
life could really be said to have begun. “Every attempt at an
answer gives rise to more riddles. It reminds one of that notorious
Greek monster which, whenever you slashed off one of its.
heads, grew two new heads in its place—also a kind of chain
reaction.”
Even in the 1940s, de Beauvoir had reported that “numerous
and daring experiments in parthenogenesis” were underway,
suggesting that “in many species the male appears to be
fundamentally unnecessary.”
“The geneticists first realized that F.D. was unusual when
they looked at his white blood cells. Because F.D. is a boy, his
cells should all have a Y chromosome, which contains the gene
for ‘maleness.’ But his cells contain two Xs, the chromosomal
signature of a female.” Homo sapiens depends on the impossibility
of parthenogenesis, and obstacles to such an eventuality permeate
its genetic composition and reproductive processes. Unfertilized
mammalian eggs can begin to divide on their own,
without or prior to the intervention of the sperm, but this
process of self-replication is never supposed to result in a fully
functioning offspring. Unable to produce all the elements necessary
to its development, any self-generating fetus tends to
atrophy into a harmless tumor, an ovarian teratoma. F.D.’s
ovum broke all the rules, splitting itself several times before the
arrival of the sperm.
F.D. is “a young boy whose body is derived in part from
symbionts
'We must never, In our studies, lose sight of the perfect human
‘Cell/ the cell which corresponds most perfectly to our
physiological and sentimental needs."
Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning
Whereas the modern disciplines studied a disciplined biological
world, vast new complexities of molecular life have emerged
with the zeros and ones of the digital machines. It is now
assumed that the earliest life-forms on earth were single-celled
prokaryotes, which congregated and collected together as networks
of heat-loving, oxygen-hating cells, vestiges of which can
be seen in the woven fabrications of microbial mats. There are
suggestions that their own elemental activity may have enhanced
the weathering of rocks, inducing a cooling effect on
the atmosphere, and so contributing to the buildup of oxygen
which was eventually to devastate their populations and certainly
rob them of independence. Certainly it seems that an
infusion of oxygen poisoned their environment and was more
liui unfertilized egg.” His arrival, in the early 1990s, was “the
pelosest thing to a human virgin birth that modern science has
I ever recorded.” Except for some learning difficulties and an
\ asymmetrical face—neither of which are particularly unusual—
L he seems to be a “normal” three-year-old boy. When a team of
; British geneticists published a paper on him in October 1995,
one of them said, “I don’t expect we’ll ever see another one.”
Is this a conviction or a hope? What does the egg have in
store?
or less contemporaneous with the emergence of respiring bac-?|
teria, parasites which allowed those host cells they invaded toil
4 ■'"''I
survive the arrival of oxygen, “the greatest pollution crisis the;
earth has ever known.’’ Most of the earlier life-forms were ?
killed, either by the oxygen or the new parasites. Those which “
survived were symbionts, fusions of the respiring bacteria and
their host cells. :
These new symbiotic cells were the eukaryotes which
compose all multicellular organisms—plants, animals, humans..
Living organisms and their nucleated eukaryotic cells are symbioses
of their prokaryotic predecessors, which survive as mitochondria
and, in plants, photosynthesizing chloroplasts. In this
sense, all life-forms are bacterial, whatever else they may be as:
well: “each eukaryotic ‘animal’ cell is, in fact, an uncanny assembly,
the evolutionary merger of distinct prokaryotic metabolisms.”
Most of their original genetic equipment has been
transferred to the chromosomes of the hosts without which
they cannot survive. Did the host cells, which are thought to
have been anaerobic bacteria or some single-celled nucleated
life, capture bacterial life? Or did the new bacteria invade their
simpler predecessors? Or is this a case of or and and? Certainly
the bacteria lost their independence in the process of entering
the host cells. Surviving as mitochondria in humans and animals,
and photosynthesizing chloroplasts in plants, they were no
longer able to pursue autonomous lives and lost much of their
complex genetic code. From the point of view of the nucleated
cell, the mitochondria have been turned into well-behaved elements
of its own functioning, providing essential energy for
growth and the production of the proteins and fats the cell
requires. But they have also remained quite distinct from the
genetic coding of their hosts. Mitochondria do not evolve in
terms of generations and have no regard for the reproductive
leycles of their human hosts; they have their own ways of coding
iliiformation into their DNA, and mutate and replicate at engtirely
different speeds and scales from those of their hosts. Like
phe shape of their DNA molecules which, unlike the linear
[strands of cell nuclei, are circled and twisted supercoils, the
| mitochondria go their own way.
| ' Bacteria are “biochemically and metabolically far more
diverse than all plants and animals put together.” They are also
. extraordinarily numerous: There are more E. coli cells in the gut
. of an individual human than there are humans, dead and alive,
: and they pass through six times as many generations during one
lifetime “as people have passed through since they were apes.”
Over the course of an apparendy evolutionary history, multicellular
life forms—fungi, plants, and animals—have emerged; in
many cases, they have come and gone. But “four fifths of the
history of life on Earth has been solely a bacterial phenomenon,”
and the “most salient feature of life has been the stability
of its bacterial mode from the beginning of the fossil record
until today and, with little doubt, into all future time so long as
the earth endures.”
Mitochondria provided the first clues to the onetime independence
of bacterial life. These are vital elements of nucleated
cells: they are “powerhouses” or “tiny intracellular power stations,”
specialized components surrounded by a charged membrane
embedded with enzymes and humming with the flows of
electrons which effectively allow it to breathe and synthesize
adenosine triphosphate, ATP, a molecule which is vital to most
cellular processes. Mitochondria are the bacterial survivors of
the Cambrian explosion, the extraordinary transition from unicellular
to multicellular life. They are the life line which connects
all living organisms not merely to pasts “of their own,”
but also to a bacterial continuum which traverses every species
/##» I new conamons were necessary for what was
wared, Interred or concluded, presently to rise to
9t
Gllles Deleuze and Fdllx Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
erceptible to the naked eye now “blend into a;
idscape in which each dot of paint is also alive,”
what might as well be a world, or a myriad of
s own. “Microbes, and their vectors, recognize
artificial boundaries erected by human beings.”
between kingdoms, species, and individuated orinto
the background as a seething world of intercxobial
vectors emerges from the background into
ms, species, and individuated organisms now fade,
ckness become fragile matters of contingent dedividuated
organism loses its integrity and “be>f
ornately elaborated mosaic of microbes in varisymbiosis,”
an “architectonic compilation of
encies of chimerical cells.” Even fife and death
sed. “With bacteria, unlike organisms which resexually,
birth is not counterbalanced by death,
il cultures grow, the individual bacteria do not
ppear as individuals: where there was only one,
: are two. The molecules of the ‘mother’ are
ixally among her ‘daughters,’ ” so that what
vidual ephemeral in a bacterial population is not
message itself.”
eve 2
Unlike patrilineal modes of transmission in which heredity is
passed on a one-way line of descent from father to son, those
lines designated female run in circles, like the chicken and the
egg. They also move at the imperceptible speeds of virtually
alien life.
Eggs transmit far more than the chromosomes which code
for human life. The cytoplasm of the egg is also the exclusive
carrier of mitochondrial DNA. Males produce only nucleated
cells. While the sperm carries some mitochondria in its tail,
they do not make it into the egg and have no influence over the
embryo that is conceived or the individual that is bom. “As a
result, the inheritance of mitochondrial chromosomes is like die
inheritance of surnames in western Europe and America, except
that they are passed down the female line instead of the
male.”
Unlike nucleated cells, mitochondria change and develop
in their own time, never mixing and matching their DNA with
that of other organisms. Traveling on different female lines,
mitochondrial DNA differs between individuals. But, in principle
at least, the mutations it has undergone can allow all mito-
chondrial DNA to be traced back to a common ancestor, a
particular woman who just happened to carry the particular
mitochondria which found their way into both the men and
women of the whole species. i
This makes it possible to retrospectively crown one par- ;
ticular woman Mitochondrial Eve, “the woman who is the
most recent direct ancestor, in the female line, of every human being
alive today.” All the mitochondria in all the cells of all
living Homo sapiens are said to be descendants of her mitochon­
dria.
If there is, or was, a Mitochondrial Eve, a “Y chromosomes
Adam” would also have had his day. But whereas Mitochondrial
Eve is the ancestor of all X chromosome carriers, Y chromosome
Adam lies in the past only of those who bear a Y. The Y
chromosome and the male gamete which can carry it are a
single-purpose system, concerned with nothing but their reproduction,
passing only one message down only one line. When
they get together, X chromosomes can transmit both human
and mitochondrial DNA.
Not that characterizations of Mitochondrial Eve as some
source of a supposed female line are particularly helpful. Even
the notion of a line misleads: mitochondria survive on networks
of their own which confound all organic conceptions of evolutionary
time. This female route is not a “downward” line of
descent or a forward progress through time, and neither Mitochondrial
Eve, her contemporaries, nor her predecessors were
originators or organizers of the bacterial processes which have
hitched a ride with the double X and its eggs. If mitochondria
can indeed be traced back to a single woman, she is already in
the middle of a line which runs back to Precambrian bacterial
life and passes through vast swathes of human, organic, inorganic,
and newly synthesized molecular life.
pottering
By the mid-nineteenth century it had become “a well-established
dictum that the study of botany would keep women
I virtuous and passive.” They thought this was a fitting discipline
for those in need of innocent and moderate intellectual stimulation.
Women were not to be trusted with experiments on social
animals: plants were most appropriate. Sketching flowers and
collecting specimens in chaperoned country meadows seemed
I innocuous enough, and soon the association was so strong that
it was “even considered ‘unmanly’ in some circles for men to
take an interest in plants.” They were safe, passive, and aesthetit
cally pleasing, and already equated with women by the poets
and the philosophers. Hegel granted her “ideas, taste, and elegance,”
but insisted that she does not have “the ideal. The
difference between men and women,” he explained, “is like
that between animals and plants; men correspond to animals,
while women correspond to plants because they are more of a
placid unfolding, the principle of which is the undetermined
unity of feeling.”
Botany was to remain one of the few scientific enquiries
hospitable to women, many of whom developed a particular
WfiThe occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands
lupon fabric woven by a Jacquard loom.
|| r “These hands consist of tendons, tissue, Jointed bone.
Wlhrough quiet processes of time and Information, threads
the human cells have woven themselves Into a
fwoman.”
I William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine
interest in the ferns, lichens, and algae which were later to
become so crucial to research on the emergence of multicellular}
life. Skilled at sketching and pressing their specimens, the female
botanists were also ahead of the game when it came to the use
of shadowgraphs, daguerreotypes, and other early photographic^
techniques. The first photographically illustrated book was British
Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, published by the botanist Anna
Atkins in 1843.
Later botanists included Beatrix Potter, who between her ,
mid teens and the age of thirty, kept a secret diary: 200,000
words of coded text, a secret alphabet, a private language which}.
was not deciphered until the 1950s. Her interest in plants and
fungi is developed in these pages, and photography had an:
enormous impact on her work as well. When she first used a
camera, the journal “is suddenly full of boulders and screes and
speculations about strata—still in cipher, as though the subject,; like
everything else that interested her, must be kept secret.”
Like many of her predecessors, Potter developed a taste for “the
precise and the minute, for the fine details of a plant, mosses
under the microscope, the fabric of a mouse’s nest, the eye of a squirrel,”
with “no twig too small for her attention.” Potter’s'
theories about the propagation of molds, her interest in the. •
continuities between geological and biological life, and her notion
that lichens were dual organisms living in symbiosis with ;
algae were all dismissed by experts at Kew. Although her pains- t
taking research was presented to the Linnean Society (not by
her, of course: women were not allowed to speak at such eminent
gatherings) she received little encouragement for such .
work and diverted her interests into the fictional syntheses of ■!
human and animal for which she became so well known.
If Potter’s work was ignored and her taste for synergetic ?
systems channeled into the adventures of Peter Rabbit and Mrs.
'Tiggywinkle, symbiotic evolutionary processes have since become
crucial to research in microbiology, genetics, and machine
intelligence itself. But while a female interest in botany
has been tolerated by the modern scientific establishment, both
female botanists and their ill-defined, molecular objects of study
have been suppressed by the “grossly zoocentric” interests of
disciplines devoted to the study of tightly organized, highly
structured, multicellular organic life. Algae, bacteria, and
lichens He in a fuzzy border zone between organisms and inorganic
matter which has rarely been considered important to the
proper business of biological research. Produced from a combination
of fungi and cyanobacteria, lichens are multilayered organisms.
Their top face turns toward the sun, is “composed of
fungal cells, and . . . forms a protective outer coat” for a sec.
ond “algal layer, where the photosynthetic activity takes place.
Below this is the medulla, a storage area formed by scattered
fungal hyphae. The lowest layer . . . forms structures like root
: hairs that attach to the substrate.” Such symbioses were anathema
to the clear orders of speciated life demarcated by the
modern disciplines. “People take symbiosis seriously in lichens,
«biit then they dismiss lichens as unimportant.” But if lichens are
■ unusually overt examples of symbiotic activity, they are hardly
unique. All land plants can be seen as “complex overgrown
lichens with no dear distinction between phycobiont and
mycobiont.” This is only the beginning of a symbiotic line
which passes through the most complex forms of animal life.
Between lichens, plants, and animals there may be vast differences
of complexity and scale, but in bacterial terms these are
matters of degree.
* Bacteria have neither sexes nor sex in any sense familiar to
their hosts, and are “so genetically open, that the very concept
of species falsifies their character as a unique life form.” They
are described as parthenogenetic, asexual, or even omnisexual,C
replicating and mutating by way of “fluid genetic transfers” atjj
extraordinary speeds. They replicate and mutate without regards
for any individuation, promiscuously transmitting genetic infor-d
mation across multicellular species and generations vrithouij
even noticing the barriers (hey cross. To take them into account!!
is to scramble modem conceptions of individuated life. “The*
body can no longer be seen as single, unitary,” writes Sagan..;
“We are all multiphTbeings? ’ It LTalso tocomplicate life andl|
death. “With bacteria, unlike organisms which reproduce only; |
sexually, birth is not counterbalanced by death. When bacterial; !
cultures grow, the individual bacteria do not die. They disap-; \
pear as individuals: where there was only one, suddenly there.; j
are two. The molecules of the ‘mother’ are distributed equally \
among ‘daughters.’ ” This is sex as simple Software EXchangen !
“without identifiable terms, without accounts, without end |
. . . Without additions and accumulations, one plus one, I
woman after woman . . . Without sequence or number.
Without standard or yardstick.”
Bacteria indulge in fluid, lateral exchanges which exceed
all reproductive demands and slide between elements as confused
and contiguous as Wittig’s Lesbian Body. And, just as the ;
emergent activity of these female sexes can no longer be so
easily dismissed or disciplined by the biological sciences, those
who have defined female sexuality in a passive and impoverished
relation to the proper activities of the male are now having
to come to terms with sexes and sexualities far in excess of these ;
reproductive lives. After the first, the seconds, thirds . . . “To
be woman, she does not have to be mother, unless she wants to
set a limit to her growth . . . Motherhood is only one specific
way to fulfill the operation: giving birth. Which is never one,
unique, and definitive. Except from the male standpoint.”
‘Terry had Insisted that If they were parthenogenetlc they’d
be as alike as so many ants or aphids; he urged their visible
differences as proof that there must be men—somewhere.
“But when we asked them, In our later, more Intimate
conversations, how they accounted for so much divergence
without cross-fertilization, they attributed It partly to the
careful education, which followed each slight tendency to differ,
and partly to the law of mutation. This they had found In
their work with plants, and fully proven In their own case."
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
lap.
B; . Replicants are neither copies nor originals, natural facts
Ror artificial constructions. They are duplicates of something
jfthat was never at square one, had no starting point, and no first
place. Regardless of the stuff of which they are made, replicants
Iseiae every opportunity to insinuate and replicate themselves
irothin any reproductive system which lets them in. Treading
pome very fine lines between too much and too little of such
|activities, organisms, species, and the slow, steady progress of
Mheir evolutionary development have all survived by learning to
^contain them and keep the threat at bay. If they appear immutaIble
and fixed, this is because they are indeed long-standing,
- entrenched, and sophisticated systems which have grown very
good at protecting and perpetuating their own lines. But they
do not represent the laws and orders of a “nature” which stands
for everything excepting man, his history, his inventions and
discoveries. And the fact that they are so well ensconced does
not mean they cannot be changed.
mutants
“Joan explained how she had been taught to record and classify ■"
the arrangement of leaves on plants by following them upwards'
round the stem, counting the number of leaves and the numberof
the turns made before returning to a leaf directly above thestarting
point.” Turing had “always enjoyed examining plants when
on his walks and runs, and now he began a more serious*;
collection of wild flowers from the Cheshire countryside, looking
them up in his battered British Flora, pressing them into i
scrapbooks, marking their locations in large scale maps, and
making measurements. The natural world was overflowing with ;
examples of pattern; it was like codebreaking, with millions of :
messages waiting to be decrypted.”
Turing had died by the time the integrated circuit was
developed, and while he lived to see the discovery of the DNA
double helix in 1953, it was the convergence of these apparendy
distinct developments which would have fascinated him the
most. They triggered processes which would lead to the emergence
of self-replicating “artificial” lives, bacterial processors,
genetic algorithms; a convergence of organic and nonorganic
lives, bodies, machines, and brains which had once seemed so
absolutely separate. Any remaining distinctions between users
and used, man and his tools, nature, culture, and technology
collapsed into the microprocessings of soft machines spiraling
into increasing proximity: molecular lives downloading themselves
into software systems, intermingling with the microprocessors
and the bugs in the systems of machine code, finding
new networks on which to transmit their instructions and
■codes, parasites and their hosts learning from each other, pickling
up tricks, swapping information.
BM"':' Guided by the frantic attempt to keep microbial activities
■it bay, the Human Genome Project is now busily patenting,
■sequencing, freezing every strand of molecular life it can detect.
■As is the case with A.I., this internationally coordinated project
■holds archaic rear-view mirrors to the work it undertakes and
Hsets itself up as another final frontier of the quest to guarantee
■the security of the definitions and the boundaries surrounding
■ man. Holding out the possibility of organisms purged of their
■ aberrations and mutations, wayward genes or peculiarities, and
■ instead governed by the operations of “good” genes from
■‘which eugenics gets its name, this attempt to sequence a geH
nome which is defined as specifically human tends to overlook
k the fact that the overwhelming majority of genetic code at work
i- in the human body is merely passing through or hiding out with
I a total lack of regard for the organisms which are hosting it.
fe Only some 10 percent of the mass of genetic activity in the
I. human body is specifically human at all.
1 If genetic engineering is driven by a drive for security, it is
also repheating the techniques of bacterial replication. When
I they infect bacteria with “a slender but subversive strand” of
I DNA, viruses usurp the bacterium’s genetic controls and use it
I to replicate their own code. The bacterial hosts are often killed
| in the process, but they may also use the viruses to pass on
I chunks of their own genes, getting viral replication to replicate
I them too. E. coli, the lab rat of the bacterial world, engineers
I; with a precision assumed to be only the tip of an iceberg of the
I molecular intelligence now detectable. E. coli has developed
I* means of disarming the viral code which comes hunting for it
I by producing a protein, a restriction enzyme, which can home
in on a specific string of viral DNA with extraordinary accu-
racy. It knows where this particular strand is located and, even '
more to the point, that its disarmament will neutralize the virus:'
Its proteins are capable of reading the code of their viral invaders,
identifying their Achilles’ heel, and splicing the code in two
by inserting a chunk of themselves. The accuracy of this opera-:
tion stems in part from its two-fold mechanism: as with the i
second chance,offered by some “delete” instructions on a computer,
“the enzyme cuts one strand of the DNA helix, then s
stops for one fortieth of a second to ask itself if it should cut
through the second strand and make the deed irrevocable.” 51
This gene-splicing technique has not only become crucial.
to genetic engineering, it is genetic engineering, a process
which not only predates the scientific endeavor of the same/
name, but even multicellular life itself. And if E. colt can splice
genes with the precision of one error in ten million operations,: |
what engineering skills might be lurking in the swathes of so-;
called junk DNA which is said to be “leftover from the merging: j
of stranger bacteria”?
The last two decades of the twentieth century have been
marked by a vast range of emergent microbial activities, bacte- j
rial and viral, many of which defy all the categorizations and I
some of the most sacrosanct principles of modern biological's
science. Lassa, Ebola, HIV ... it is pointless even to begin a ;
list, not least because so many of these new activities cannot ;
even be named as distinct syndromes or species of bacteria or
viruses, but have instead to be considered as “quasispecies,”
“swarms,” or “consensus sequences.” Many of them shift so
slowly that it may be many years before their presence can be
detected at all. Microbial populations can be thrown into activities
fatal to their organized hosts by the tiniest of triggers, and
any and every “individual alteration can change an entire system;
each systemic shift can propel an interlaced network in a
B radical new direction.” Using reverse transcriptase to copy its
IRNA code into the DNA of its hosts, HIV and its animal
I equivalents have broken the most fundamental tenets of modern
I biology and developed “the ability to outwit or manipulate the
I one microbial-sensing system Homo sapiens possess: our immune
I systems.”
I “We form a rhizome with our viruses, or rather our viI
ruses cause us to form a rhizome with other animals.” And as
f even the possibility of living with HIV begins to pick up a
* thread which once led only to fatality, the shifting symbionts
j. who compose what was once defined as an absolutely fixed,
f immutable, and secure species called humanity begin to notice
I the extent to which they have always been—and are increas};
ingly—interwoven with the microprocesses once blankedy de‘
scribed as nature, the outside world, the rest of reality beyond
man. When it comes to living with the new liveliness of the
networks which compose them, humans cannot afford to wield
\ the heavy hand of modern disciplinary action, the long arms of
t biological law and supposedly natural order. Just as neural nets
have emerged both in spite and because of attempts to suppress
I them, so molecular biotic activity has aroused itself even in the
! midst of postwar attempts to secure immunity by means of the
overkill applications of antibiotic drugs. It is not taking its reft
venge, but simply struggling to survive among systems which
; are left with no choice but to become rather more cooperative
I with the microprocesses which compose them.
wetware
“Ufe Is not life, but rock rearranging Itself under the sun
Do rion Sagan
The microbiotic continuum extends from the earliest forms ofj
oceanic life. Irigaray’s Marine Lover longs to “think of the se^
from afar, to eye her from a distance, to use her to fashion his?,
higher reveries, to weave his dreams of her, and spread his sails;
while remaining safe in port.” But the oceans “have far more toij|
them than the mere capacity to dazzle an observer in outerij
space.” They cover two thirds of planet Earth—or sea—and?
support at least “half of the mass of living matter in the world.’:’And
whereas life “on the land is for the most part two-dimen-il
sional, held by gravity to the solid surface,” submarine living is?i;
an immersive, multidimensional process. When they first crept
onto the land, “terrestrial organisms had to build for themselves 1
structures and components that could perform the environment J
tal services that marine organisms can take for granted.” On 1
land, “direct physical connections become essential.” Water is; |
no longer ambient, the medium in which life is immersed, but
instead an irrigation system which connects and passes through,
all land life. Now the “biota has had to find ways to carry die. |
sea within it and, moreover, to construct watery conduits from |
‘node’ to ‘node.’ ” Land life is literally pleated and plied, com- I
plex. It has effectively “taken the sea beyond the sea and folded j
it back inside of itself,” assembling itself as a network of molec- |
ular arteries and veins, a hydraulic system keeping life afloat. |
1
■pActing over evolutionary time as a rising tide, the land biota
Hjiterally carries the sea and its distinctive solutes over the surface
■of the land” forming a “terrestrial sea” of “coundess and interconnected
conduits” which “expands with every increase in the
Volume of tissues and sap and lymph of the creatures that constitute
it.”
»; The notion that blood is seawater has long faded into
■disuse. But suggestions that land-based life is the epiphenomeBnon
of fluid transmissions within and between all organisms is a
■disturbing twist in a modern tale devoted to the dry solidities of
I land and its territorial claims. There are hints that “the appeargf
ance of complex life on land was a major event in which a kind
I of mutant sea invaded the land surface. It was as if the nimble
I offspring of the old sea had learned how to slosh and slop up
Rlonto land, with the tissues and vascular systems of land organitisms
acting as a complex, water-retaining sponge. Cuticle and
pskin took the functional place of the surface tension of water
K where sea meets air.”
1 “The land biota represents not simply life from the sea, but
I avariation_of the sea itself.” and living, land-based fluids “are
te not a mere remnant or analog of the sea; they ate actually a new
grtypeofsea ormanneTnvironment: Hypersea.” This continuity
j| of ocean and land is supported by the fuzzy zones between
|i plants and less complex forms of life: bacteria, algae, fungi,
I lichens. “Trees are neither found nor needed in the sea,” which
| continues to be “numerically dominated by tiny single-celled
I protista, including algae and protozoa.” And “from the first ap|-
pearance of marine bacteria in the fossil record, which appar|
ently formed conspicuous scums or mats on the substrate,” it
| seems that “the earliest terrestrial communities probably also
I formed microbial mats and crusts on moist surfaces.” Consisting
dryware
Modernity’s new man was a landlubber. He charted the.
oceans but set up camp on “an island, enclosed by nature it-,
self within unalterable limits. It is the land of truth—enchanting
name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean,>
the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and;
many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance!
of further shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer.” There;
is plenty beyond its shores: madness, fate, die ship of fools;'
But nihil ulterius is inscribed “on those Pillars of Hercules
which nature herself has erected in order that the voyage of
our reason may be extended no further than the continuous
coastline of experience itself reaches.”
He needs the illusions of the ocean, whose groundless
appearances ground his truths. “If a man wants to delude himself,
the sea will always lend him the sails to fit his fortune.” But
even the most single-minded of modernity’s colonial adventures
was destined to backfire. Navigation always “delivers man to the
uncertainty of fate,” and he never quite loses his fears of the
ocean, its Siren sounds. “One thing at least is certain: water and
madness have long been linked in the dreams of European
man.” He is always haunted by the fear that things might slip
back into “the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its
of “highly flattened fronds, sheets and circlets,” these microbial*
mats are “composed of numerous slender segments quilted toJ|
gether,” microscopic threads interwoven to form cooperative*
carpets of bacterial life. >3§
silicon
"Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not?
Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of
silicon, see? Sure, It's Just a tailored hallucination we att
agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who Jacks In knows,
fucking knows It’s a whole universe."
William Gibson, Neuromancer
The late twentieth century finds itself aflood, awash, at sea,
swamped by an irresistible ocean of molecular activity which
can only be surfed, catching a wave like a sample of sound, a few
grabbed bytes from the new seascape. From the middle of the
island, it almost seemed that the oceanic was taking its revenge,
an enormous surge of repressed return, a turning of the tables
and the tides. But it is not a simple question of reversing roles,
swapping terra jirma for fluidity. It is always on the edge, the inbetween
strands, in the lines between the ocean and the land
that the mutations begin to occur and new activities start to
emerge. Drops of water, grains of sand, oceans and deserts, the
very wet and the very dry, make connections of their own.
■thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to every-
pthing.”
“If only the sea did not exist. If they could just create her
pin dreams.” All they really want to do is mop the oceans up,
itsplidify the unfortunate fluidity with which they are confused.
pWhich is why “they long for ice. To go further north than
north. And to rest on ice. To float in the calm of mirrors. And
I. deep dry.”
"Fez smiled. ‘It also has to do with fractals. Take a line, bend
It In half. Then bend each half In half. Then bend all die segments
In half, ad Infinitum. You get fantasy snowflakes and
baroque seacoasts—'
" ‘—and great paisleys/ murmured Adrian.
“ ‘—and If you look several levels down Into a fractal,
you’ll find that a larger pattern's been duplicated. Which
means that the fractal several levels down from the area of
the fractal you're looking Into contains all the Information of
the larger fractal. Worlds within worlds.’
“Rosa laughed a little. ‘You're approaching my threshold
for that klnda talk. I’m a hacker, not a philosopher.’ ”
Pat Cadigan, Synnere
Not that this is any obstacle to her. Philosophers may have
thought about it, but hackers have “made capacity where there
technically wasn’t any by using the virtual spaces between bits,
and then the spaces between those bits, and the spaces between
those.”
“How long is the coast of Britain?” When Mandelbrot
had tried to measure it in the 1970s, the length turned out to be
dependent on the scale at which he worked. The finer the
detail, the longer the line. And inside the discrepancies between
the scales there were patterns repeating themselves, recursive
arrangements, spirals and whorls, patterns leading into the line,
as if down through the crack, opening the boundary into worlds
of its own. Mountains, leaves, horizons: any deceptively straight
edge will do. There are fractal patterns inside them all. But
Mandelbrot’s example of the coast was a peculiarly well-chosen
line. Whichever way this border is drawn, .the break between
the land and the sea is always more than a single edge. Like
every thread, this strand is also a folded fold, a pleated pleat, a
zone of replication and duplicity which both connects and separates
the land and the sea. To one side of this borderline there is
a beach: not a stable boundary but a fine-grained line of shifting
sand, a hazy border, and a multiplicity. The breakers of the surf
which he on the other side of the borderline is a seething,
heaving, and momentary tract, repeating die patterns and
rhythms of tides.
These amphibian zones assemble “midway between the
fluid and the solid,” forming an interface of parting and connectivity
which is continually reengineered, sieved and filtered
by an ocean which continually sifts the sand. It is on this edge
that both the ocean and the land fuse into beaches, strands of
silicon. The digital age which allowed Mandelbrot to simulate
his fractal coastline is an age of bacteria, an age of fluidity, and
also an “age of sand.” Ninety-five percent of the volume of die
Earth’s crust is composed of silicates, which are vital to the
processes by which soil and plants are nourished. In humans,
silicon functions in the cells of connective tissues and contributes
to the growth of bones and nails, and it is also present in
bacteria, animals, and some plants such as reeds and bamboos.
Five hundred years of modernity fades when the weaving of
bamboo mats converges with the manufacture of computer
games in the streets of Bangkok, Taipei, and Shanghai. The
silicon links were already there.
quanta
“In the hard wind of Images, Angie watches the evolution of
machine Intelligence: stone circles, clocks, steanHlrlven
looms, a clicking brass forest of pawls and escapements, vac-
uum caught In Mown glass, electronic hearthglow through*
hairline filaments, vast arrays of tubes ami switches, decoding
messages encrypted by other machines ... The fragile,.
short-lived tubes compact themselves, become transistors;
circuits Integrate, compact themselves Into silicon . . . ■■
“Silicon approaches certain functional limits—" A
William Gibson, Mona Uaa Overdrive;
For all their sophistication, current configurations of computing ’
have enormous limitations which they are approaching fast. If it)
is to continue chasing the ever-smaller microprocessings and ever-faster
speeds at the exponential rates to which it has been?
accustomed since the emergence of the silicon chip, computing
needs to undergo a transition of such enormity that all the.
changes effected to date will appear to be minor precursors to
the revolutions still to come.
The digital revolution has unfolded in parallel with cyber-.
netics, chaos theory, complexity, connectionism, and a wide
variety of nonlinear modes of engineering arid conceptions of
reality. These are all developments which have left Newtonian
mechanics standing. But it is, quite literally, still standing. And
for all the complexities they facilitate, computers are still running
on these old mechanical lines.
One of the many implications of quantum mechanics is
that an atomic particle can effectively be in two places at one
time. This suggests that particles can be separated in space but so
intimately entangled that they can only be considered together.
They are neither one nor two things, but interactive elements.
Like Prigogine and Stengers’s molecules, these are instantly
telecommunicating particles working at scales and speeds which
allow them to have instantaneous effects on each other, with
|any changes to one of them changing the other one as well.
|Einstein called their abilities “ghostly action at a distance.”
j Contemporary mechanics talk in terms of voodoo when they
^describe the potential of quantum phenomena for the future of
fcomputingrTEese relations of entanglement exercise a kind of
sympathetic magic, in which apparently distant particles are
coextensive, mutually dependent, resonant, and interactive. .
Neither one nor two; just keeping in touch.
If Turing’s universal machine was built in an effort to
disprove the universality of logic, quantum computing was first
proposed to challenge Turing’s ostensibly universal machine.
With exacdy the same ambivalence that marks the Turing machine,
the fact that quantum computers are now being built
; both proves and disproves their mechanics’ point. Miniaturization
and speed continue on their exponential ways in the direction
of superconductors and optical transistors; logic gates can
be composed of ion traps, and pulsing electrons make the on-off
switch. But if computing continues, in becoming quantum it
also passes through an unknown and indeterminable phase
change of its own.
Machine code has been enough to allow sound, images,
calculations, and texts to interact on an unprecedented plane of
equivalence and mutual consistency. What were once discreet
media and separable senses have become promiscuous and entwined.
New modes of communication, even little bits of other
senses, have already emerged from the multimedia, multisensory
interactions digitization has provoked. And if all this has run on
machines still ruled by the laws of an old Euclidean world, the
subatomic scales of quantum computing will allow all levels,
scales, and modes of communication to converge with those of
subatomic particles and make the electronic pulses and bits of
information seem extraordinarily unwieldy. If electronic com-;!
munications facilitate intimate connectivities between once in*!
dividuated and incompatible entities, these will now be the)
starting points for their quantum successors.
casting off
Ada was strangely attuned to the molecular complexities, ;
speeds, and connectivities inherent in the man-size tissues of her ;
world. Her “little bit of another sense” even led her to consider s
some “further extension” of reality similar “to the Geometry of j
Three Dimensions & that again perhaps to a further extension in 5
some unknown region & so ad-infinitum possibly.” She knew |
her work might have some influence inconceivable to her own |j
time: “Perhaps none of us can estimate how great,” she wrote, f
“Who can calculate to what it might lead; if we look beyond 1
the present condition especially?” And when she reflected on her I
own footnotes, she was “thunderstruck by the power of the 1
writing. It is especially unlike a woman’s style surely,” she wrote,
“but neither can I compare it with any man’s exactly.” It was
instead a code for the numbers to come. i
“A Newton for the Molecular Universe Is a crying ward; but,
the nature of the subject renders this desideratum of Improb- ,
able fulfilment. Such a discovery (If possible at all), couHd only f
be made thro’ very Indirect methods;—& would demand a
mind that should unite habits of matter of fact reasoning and:)
observation, with the highest Imagination, a union unlikely bi
Itself”
Ada Lovelace, undated fragment- .>
i
m
ada ■ ' . ■v
?
Ada’s letters to Babbage are in the British Library, London, and the letters
between her and her mother are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Ada’s translation
and notes to Menabrea’s paper, “Notes to Sketch of the Analytical Engine
invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military
Engineers,” are published in Philip and Emily Morrison, eds., Charles Babbage and
his Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage and others. Quotations
from Ada’s letters and papers used in Zeros and Ones also appear in one or more of
the following books: Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers; Dorothy
Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy; and Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of
Lovelace.
p. 5 “as a friend . . Lady Byron, quoted in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The
Enchantress of Numbers, p. 56.
p. 5 “We both went to see . . Lady Byron, quoted in Doris Langley
Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, pp. 43-44.
p. 5 “young as she was . . .” Sophia Freud, quoted in ibid., p. 44.
p. 5 “making machinery to compute . . .” Charles Babbage, Passages from
the Life of a Philosopher, p. 31.
P»t«8
p. 5 “in the year 1833 . . Sir H. Nicolas, quoted in ibid., p. 64.
p. 6 “Having, in the meanwhile . . .” Sir H. Nicolas, quoted in ibid., p. 65.
p. 6 “were essentially different . . .” ibid., p. 69.
p. 7 “You are a brave man,” Ada Lovelace, September 1843, quoted in Betty ;
A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 264.
■ ii
p. 7 “knows what almost awful energy & power . . .’’ Ada Lovelace, July i
1843, quoted in ibid., p. 203. j
p. 7 “Countess of Lovelace informed me . . .” Charles Babbage, Passages
from the Life of a Philosopher, p. 102.
i
p. 8 “I never can or will support you . . .” Ada Lovelace, August 1843,
quoted in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 218.
p. 8 “can you,” ibid., p. 227.
p. 8 “very much afraid as yet of exciting the powers . . .” Ada Lovelace, ■:
September 1843, quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p.
126.
p. 8 “It is not my wish to proclaim who has written it”, Ada Lovelace, undated,
quoted in ibid., p. 123.
matrices
p. 10 “The frontiers of a book . . .” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of
Knowledge, p. 23.
p. 10 “treatment of an irregular . . .” George Landow, Hypertext, p. 123.
p. 11 “It must be evident how multifarious . . .” Ada Lovelace, Notes to
Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F.
Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, Note D.
tensions
p. 12 “does not begin with writing . . s” Philip and Emily Morrison, eds.
Charles Babbage and his Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles
Babbage and others, p. xxxiii.
p. 13 William Gibson’s “bright lattices of logic . . .” Neuromancer, p. 5.
tin the cards
p. 14 “two or three weeks . . Philip and Emily Morrison, eds, Charles
Babbage and his Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage
and others, p. xxxiv.
p. 14 “Jacquard devised the plans . . . ” ibid., p. 233.
p. 15 “effectively withdrew control . . Manuel de Landa, War in the Age of
Intelligent Machines, p. 168.
p. 15 “By the adoption of one species . . .” Humphrey Jennings, Pandemonium
The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, p. 132.
p. 16 “The Analytical Engine consists of two parts . . .” Charles Babbage,
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, p. 89.
p. 16 “It is a known fact . . .” ibid., p. 88.
p. 16 “sheet of woven silk . . .” ibid., p. 127.
p. 16 “generally supposed that the Difference Engine . . .” and following
quotations, Ada Lovelace, Notes to Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented
by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military
Engineers, Note A.
p. 17 "a machine of the most general nature . . .” Charles Babbage, Passages
from the Life of a Philosopher, p. 89.
p. 18 “science of operations.” Ada Lovelace, Notes to Sketch of the Analytical
Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin,
Officer of the Military Engineers, Note A.
second sight
p. 18 “be desirable to all who are engaged . . .” S. H. Hollingdale and G. C.
Tootill, Electronic Computers, p. 39.
p. 18 “by means of which you alone . . .” ibid., p. 35.
p. 18 “the introduction of the principle which Jacquard devised . . .” and
following quotations, Ada Lovelace, Notes to Sketch of the Analytical
Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin,
Officer of the Military Engineers, Note A.
p. 20 “eating its own tail . . Philip and Emily Morrison, eds. Charles Babbage
and his Calculating Engines: Selected Writings by Charles Babbage ani^
others, p. xx.
p. 20 “intellect was beginning to become deranged . . Charles Babbage,
Passages from the life of a Philosopher, p. 87.
p. 20 “I do not think you possess half m y forethought” Ada Lovelace, July
1843, quoted in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 214.
p. 20 “will not ultimately result in this generation’s . . .” Ada Lovelace, :
Notes to Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By '
L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers, Note A.
p. 22 “for the reciprocal benefit of that art” ibid., Note C.
anna 1
p. 23 “to those of you who are women . . .” Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,”:
in Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, pp. 145-
69.
p. 25 “an overconscious idiot . . .” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p. 32.
p. 25 “Because the path it traces is invisible . . .” Gilles Deleuze, Difference
and Repetition, pp. 119-20.
p. 25 “specialized in reversals . . .” Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, p.
382.
p. 26 “victories in advance, as if acquired on credits . . .” Guy Debord, Comments
on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 86.
p. 26 “the technique of beginning at the end . . .” Marshall McLuhan, The
Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 276.
p. 26 “did everything topsy-turvy” Ada Lovelace, September 1843 quoted in
Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, pp. 264-65.
p. 26 “1 intend to incorporate with one department of my labours . . .” Ada
Lovelace, July 1843, quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A life and a Legacy,
p. 129.
p. 28 “I now read Mathematics every day . . .” Ada Lovelace, November
1835, quoted in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 83.
p. 29 “Heaven knows what intense suffering & agony I have gone thro’ . .
Ada Lovelace, undated, quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a
Legacy, p. 168.
p. 29 “No more laudanum has been taken as yet” Ada Lovelace, undated,
quoted in Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, pp. 211-12.
p, 29 “not for ever . . .” ibid., p. 212.
p. 30 “a remarkable effect on my eyes, seeming to free them, & to make them
open &cool." ibid., p. 214.
01
1 gambling on the future
[ip. 27 “That you are a peculiar—very peculiar—specimen . . .” quoted in
K - : D o r i s Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p. 202.
B p. 27 “The*woman brushed aside . . .” William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,
Is. The Difference Engine, p. 89.
|sp. 27 “There is at least some amusement . . Ada Lovelace, July 1845,
if quoted in Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p. 185.
|s p. 27 "She is the Queen of Engines . . .” William Gibson and Bruce SterI
ling. The Difference Engine, p. 93.
| p. 28 “adieu to your old companion Ada Byron . . .” Lady Byron, June
I 1835, quoted in Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p. 69.
| p. 28 “irksome duties Sc nothing more” Ada Lovelace, December 1840,
I quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 66.
jk p. 28 “to tell the honest truth . . .” Ada Lovelace, December 1840, quoted
S;. in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 128.
iy;.
| p. 28 “my chosen pet” Ada Lovelace, November 1844, quoted in Doris Langley
Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p. 219.
p. 28 “a mortal husband” Ada Lovelace, February 1845, quoted in Dorothy
Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 182.
p. 28 “No man would suit me . . .” Ada Lovelace, January 1845, quoted in
Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p. 229,
p. 30 “a very deep and extensive ulceration of the womb . . Dr. Locock,
quoted in Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, pp. 292-93.
p. 30 “the womb, though it be so stricdy attached . . .” quoted in Michel
Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, p. 44.
p. 30 “There is in my nervous system” Ada Lovelace, December 1842, quoted
in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 191.
p. 31 “vast mass of useless & irritating POWER OF EXPRESSION . . .”
Ada Lovelace, undated, quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a
Legacy, p. 167.
p. 31 “there is no pleasure in way of exercise . . .” Ada Lovelace, April 1835,
quoted in ibid., p. 51.
p. 31 “I play 4 & 5 hours generally, & never less than. 3” Ada Lovelace, June
1837, quoted in ibid., p. 164.
p. 31 “Clearly the only one which directs my Hysteria . . .” Ada Lovelace,
undated, quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 166.
p. 31 “I never would look to the excellence of mere representation . . .”
Ada Lovelace, undated, quoted in ibid., p. 167.
p. 31 “peculiar & artificial excitements . . .” Dr. Locock, quoted in ibid., p.
167.
p. 31 “a hungry look about them . . Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady,
p. 134.
p. 31 “what they desire is precisely nothing . . .” Luce Irigaray, This Sex
Which Is Not One, p. 30.
p. 32 "Many causes have contributed to produce the past derangements . . .”
Ada Lovelace, December 1841, quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life
and a Legacy, p. 81.
p. 32 “I am proceeding on a track . . .” Ada Lovelace, November 1844,
quoted in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 295.
p. 32 “1 mean to do what I mean to do" Ada Lovelace, quoted in ibid., p. 221.
p. 32 “nothing but very close Sc intense application . . .” Ada Lovelace,
March 1834, quoted in ibid., p. 53.
p. 32 “dropping the thread of science. Mathematics &c.” Ada Lovelace, December
1842, quoted in ibid., p. 191.
binaries
p. 35 "nothing you can see,” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 47.
p. 35 “functions as a hole" ibid., p. 71.
p. 35 “a nothing—that is a nothing the same . . .” ibid., p. 50.
p. 35 “There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things” Juliet Mitchell,
and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan and the
Ecole Freudienne, p. 144.
p. 35 “other than the place of the Other . . .” ibid., p. 147.
supporting evidence
p. 36 “all the main avenues of life marked ‘male’ . . Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Women and Economics, p. 53.
p. 36 “an ‘infrastructure’ unrecognized as such . . Luce Irigaray, This Sex
Which Is Not One, p. 84.
p. 36 “It does strike me . . .” William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference
Engine, p. 103.
genderquake
p. 40 “a revolution without marches or manifestos . . .” Sally Solo, quoted
in John Naisbitt, Megatrends Asia, p. 190.
p. 42 “politics is all talk and no action . . .” Helen Wilkinson, No Turning
Back,p. 41.
p. 42 “better prepared, culturally and psychologically” ibid., p. 13.
_p. 44 “the sex organs of the machine world” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media, p. 56.
nets
p. 48 “a trail ... of interest through the maze of materials available” Vannevar
Bush, quoted in George Landow, Hypertext, p. 17.
p. 49 “an irresistible revolutionary calling . . .” Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 387.
p. 50 “the faculty which distinguishes parts . . .” Gilles Deleuze, Difference
and Repetition, p. 36.
p. 50 “demonic rather than divine . . .” ibid., p. 37.
digits
p. 51 “essential to all who wish to be calculators . . .’’.Brahmagupta, quoted
in S. H.. Hollingdale and G. C. Tootill, Electronic Computers, p. 23.
p. 52 “It is India that gave us the ingenious method . . .” Leibniz, quoted in
ibid., p. 26.
p. 53 “Numeration is the representation of numbers by figures” ibid., p. 25.
holes
p. 55 “Zero is something” Augustus De Morgan, quoted in Dorothy Stein,
Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 72.
p. 56 “occult principle of change” Menabrea Sketch of the Analytical Engine
invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the
Military Engineers, in Philip and Emily Morrison, eds. Charles Babbage '
and his Calculating Engines, p. 240.
p. 57 “to say that intense and moving particles . . .” Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 32.
cyborg manifestos
p. 58 “with a view to winning back their own organism . . .” Gilles Deleuze
and F61ix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276.
p. 58 “men and women . . .” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 687.
p. 59 “By the late twentieth century . . Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg
Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century,” p. 150.
p. 59 “The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix” VNS Matrix, billboard.
p. 59 “different veils according to the historic period . . .” Luce Irigaray,
Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 118.
p. 59 “original attributes and epithets were so numerous . . .” J. G. Frazer,
The Golden Bough, p. 503.
p. 59 “the future is unmanned . . .” VNS Matrix, billboard.
p. 59 “let those who call for a new language . . Monique Wittig, Les
Guerilleres, p. 85.
p. 59 “if machines . . . why not women?” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the
Other Woman, p. 232.
programming language
p. 60 “in honour of an obscure . . Carol L. James and Duncan E. Morrill,
“The Real Ada; Countess of Lovelace.” Accessible at http://
www.cdrom.com/pub/ada/alpo/docs/flyers/naming.htm.
shuttle systems
p. 60 “our material—for some incomprehensible reason” Sigmund Freud, On
Sexuality, p. 320.
p. 61 “taking the world to human will and ingenuity” Elizabeth Wayland
Barber, Women’s Work, p. 45.
p. 63 “Neolithic women were investing large amounts . . .” ibid., p. 90.
p. 63 “machines for spinning, weaving, twisting hemp . . W. English, The
Textile Industry, p. 6.
p. 63 “in the sense that his‘machines’ . . Serge Bramly, Leonardo, the Artist
and the Man, p. 272.
p. 63 “Like the most humble cultural assets . . .” Fernand Braudel, Capitalism
and Material Life, p. 237.
p. 64 “inventions in both spinning and weaving . . Asa Briggs, The Ageofj,
Invention, pp. 21-22.
p. 64 “I was surprised at the place but more so at the people” Francis D. 1
Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, p. 12. ;
p. 64 “most complex human engine of them all” Fernand Braudel, Capitalisms
and Material Life, p. 247.
p. 65 “a woman working on a pillow . . .” W. English, The Textile Industry,f
p. 130. „7
p. 65 “a fabric which was an exact imitation” ibid., p. 132. ,1
p. 65 “the women of prehistoric Europe” Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s '!•
Work, p. 86. ' 'i
p. 65 “used to mark or announce information” ibid., p. 149. |
p. 66 “The weaver chose warp threads . . .” ibid., pp. 159-60. .J
p. 67 “These lozenges, usually with litde curly hooks” ibid., p. 62. ;j
casting on
p. 69 “a perilous craft” Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The *|
Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, pp. 45-46. I
•7*|
p. 70 “The voices of the accused” Carlo Ginzberg, Ecstasies, p. 10. |
p. 70 “have implicidy or explicidy derived . . .” ibid., p. 13. a
p. 70 “with very few exceptions” ibid., p. 2. |
p. 70 “clearly . . . the supposed sexual fantasies” Mary Daly, Cyn/Ecology, j
p. 180. ‘ I
:J
p. 70 “projection screens for these hallucinations” ibid., p. 181. f
p. 70 “declining to restrict himself” Carlo Ginzberg, Ecstasies, p. 13. |
p. 71 “Hence—for anyone unresigned to writing history” ibid., p. 10. j
p. 71 “the existence of an actual sect of female and male witches . . .’’ibid.,
p. 1.
p. 71 “a greater number of witches” Henrich Kramer and James Sprenger,
Malleus Maleficarum, p. 112.
flight
gpi; 71 “addiction to witchcraft” ibid., p. 116.
|p: 71 “weak memories . . .” ibid., p. 119.
n. 71 “It cannot be admitted as true . . .” ibid., p. 234.
i'
|p. 72 “innumerable multitude of women . . .” ibid., p. 224.
rp; 72 “imagination and illusion . . .” ibid., p. 241.
r-p. 73 “Think what a delight” Ada Lovelace, November 1844, quoted in Betty
If A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, pp. 302—3.
p. 73 “writing a book of Flyology” Ada Lovelace, February 1828, quoted in
ibid., p. 32.
p. 73 “a thing in the shape of a horse . . .” Ada Lovelace, April 1828, quoted
in ibid., p. 34.
virtual aliens
p. 74 “overwhelming majority of electronics assembly jobs . . .” Peter
Dicken, Global Shift, p. 346.
p. 74 “assembly, the bonding of hair-thin wires . . L. Siegal, quoted in
ibid., p. 347.
p. 74 “On the west coast” A. Fuentes and B. Ehrenreich, quoted in ibid., p.
347.
p. 76 “we have combated from its incipiency . . in Elizabeth Faulkner
■ Baker, Technology and Women's Work, p. 34.
cocoons
p. 77 “only in relation to the intermingling! they make” Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 90.
p. 78 “patient and monotonous efforts . . .” Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and
Material Life, p. 244.
p. 78 “a collection of recipes . . ibid., p. 321.
p. 78 “the essence of femininity” Muntz, quoted in Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo
da Vinci,” Art and Literature, p. 201.
p. 79 “alien interest—in experimentation” ibid., p. 154.
p. 79 “work of the ‘perspectors’ . . Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern
Condition, p. 44.
p. 79 “eccentric science . . Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand i
Plateaus, p. 361.
p. 80 “determined in such a way as to follow a flow” ibid., p. 409. .f
diagrams
p. 83 “It can imitate anything . . .” Karl Sigmund, Games of Life, p. 20.
p. 84 “something almost equally miraculous . . .” Andrew Hodges, Alan
Turing: The Enigma, p. 109. ,:
p. 85 “the mystery that woman represents . . .” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the .
Other Woman, p. 26.
eve 1
p. 85 “uncovered female figures of silver” Charles Babbage, Passages from the '
Life of a Philosopher, p. 274.
p. 86 “Why not build a woman who should be . . .” Villiers de l’lsle Adam,
L’eve future, p. 77.
p. 87 “electro-human creature” ibid., p. 103.
masterpieces
p. 88 “We like to believe” Alan Turing, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan
Turing: The Enigma, p. 444.
p. 88 “the intention in constructing these machines” ibid., p. 356.
p. 88 “masters who are liable to get replaced” ibid., p. 357.
p. 89 “is to be regarded as nothing” ibid., pp. 377-78.
p. 89 “to copy the conscious mental processes” Hans Moravec, Mind Children,
p. 16.
Kp. 90 “the part of B” was “taken by a man" Alan Turing, “On Computational
If Numbers,” p. 422.
n$,
Lp. 90 “Answering questions with questions” Fah-Chun Cheong, Internet
k Agents, p. 278.
|’p. 91 “the appatent appropriateness and insight” Raymond Kurzweil, The Age
E' of Intelligent Machines, p. 16.
p. 91 “User:.‘Men are all alike,’ ” this and many other dialogues can be
found—and conducted—on the Net.
p. 92 “is considered an improvement” Fah-Chun Cheong, Internet Agents, p.
253.
p. 92 “an agent more interesting than Eliza” ibid., p. 274.
p. 92 “adept at detecting and deflecting sexual advances” Sherry Turkle, Life
on the Screen, p. 90.
p. 93 “it’s not entirely clear to me” Leonard Foner, reference downloaded
from the Net.
errors
p. 94 “If only you could see” Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, 1982.
p. 95 “computing machines can only carry” Alan Hiring, quoted in Andrew
Hodges, Alan Turing, The Enigma, p. 358.
p. 95 “the more it schizophrenizes” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus,
p. 151.
eve 8
pp. All quotations from Eve of Destruction, directed by Quncan Gibbon^,
•95-97 1991.
case study dj
p. 98 “The examination” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 191.
p. 98 “Discipline is a political anatomy of detail . . ibid., p. 139. §
p. 98 “organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power . . ibid., ')
p. 177. -f
p. 99 “an explosion of numerous . . Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality,
Volume 1, p. 140. '»
p. 99 “lays down for each individual . . .” Michel Foucault, Discipline and 8
Punish, p. 197.
p. 99 “meticulous observation of detail” Michel Foucault, Discipline ana Punish,
p. 141.
p. 99 “gradually learning what it meant . . .” Michel Foucault, History of
Sexuality, Volume 1, p. 142.
what eve 8 next
p. 100 “the minute, I mean the nanosecond” William Gibson, Neuromancer, p.
132. - ;
p. 100 “a reaction of this kind”, Alan Turing, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan
Turing: The Enigma, p. 357.
p. 101 “l am bothbound” ibid., p. 473. 1
p. 101 “Went down to Sherborne" ibid., p. 484.
p. 102 “By the side of the bed” ibid., p. 488.
monster 1
p. 102 “Many and long were the conversations . . .” Mary Shelley, Preface to
Frankenstein.
robotics
p. 103 “The signs on the office walls . . .” The Economist, Sept. 30, 1995, p.
107.
>p. 104 “The problem is, of course, that it isn’t a man” The Economist, May 18,
1996, p. 105.
learning curves
p. 104 “was every individual Man to divulge . . Mary Montagu, quoted in
Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, p. 76.
pv 105 Mary Astell, quoted in ibid., p. 63.
p. 105 “First as a mother” Comte, quoted in Michele le Doentt, Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis, p. 190.
p. 105 “The transient trade we think evil” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women
and Economics, p. 64.
p. 105 “Women—the deal. For—the game” Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 82.
p. 106 “And if you ask them insistently . . . ” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is
Not One, p. 29.
p. 106 “Her mind is a matrix . . .” Misha, “Wire Movement #9,” p. 113.
p. 106 “A good woman does not have to be told . . .” Veronica Beechey and
Elizabeth Whitelegg, eds. Women in Britain Today, p. 27.
p. 107 “Commodities, as we all know . . .” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is
Not One, p. 84.
p. 107 “if women are such good mimics” ibid., p. 76.
p. 107 “what if these 'commodities’ refused to go to ‘market’?’’ Luce Irigaray, This
Sex Which Is Not One, p. 196.
p. 107 “They are all involved . . .” Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, p. 102.
p. 107 “Products are becoming digital” Donald Tapscott, The Digital Economy,
p. 11.
p. 108 “It would be out of the question” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not
One, p. 110.
p. 108 “I learned fast” quoted in Cecilie Hoigard and Liv Finstad, Backstreets:
Prostitution, Money and Love, p. 83.
p. 109 “ ‘fluid’ character” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 109.
multiples
p. 113 “His responses had long since ceased to be a masquerade” Allucquere
Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the
Mechanical Age, p. 76.
switches
p. 114 “letters and telegrams are delivered with improbable despatch” Clive
Leatherall, Dracula, p. 222.
anna o M
p. 109 “ ‘hysterical’ had become almost interchangeable” Elaine Showalter, Them
Female Malady, p. 129.
p. 109 “the devil . . . ’’JosefBreuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria,,p.M
332. I
p. 110 “gaps in the memory” Sigmund Freud, Case Histories 1, 'Dora' and
Hans, ’ pp.46—47. -3
■ ;f|
p. 110 “would complain ofhaving ‘lost’ some time” Josef Breuer and Sigmund 3
Freud, Studies onHysteria, p. 76. M
p. 110 “each of her momentary ‘absences’ ” ibid., p. 318. *1
p. 110 “While everyone thought she was attending” ibid., p. 74. ||
p. 110 “Social circumstances often necessitate” ibid., p. 313. -|
p. Ill “Throughout the entire illness" ibid., p. 100. 1
p. Ill “the clearest intellect” ibid., p. 64. .1
p. Ill “an unusual degree of education and intelligence” ibid.,p. 104. , /
p. Ill “bubbling over with intellectual vitality” ibid., p. 74. |
p. Ill “an excess of efficiency” ibid., p. 313. 1
p. Ill “The overflowing productivity of their minds” ibid., p. 321.
p. Ill “double conscience” ibid., p. 64.
p. Ill “a whole number of activities” ibid., p. 313.
secrets
p. 122 “girl-less, cuss-less” Almon B. Strowger, quotes in W. A. Atherton,
- From Compass to Computer, p. 106.
H&114 “Swan prepared some particularly fine thread . . W. A. Atherton,
Kj From Compass to Computer: A History of Electrical and Electronics EngineerRf
ing, p. 132.
115 “The news that the great experiment” Leonard de Vries, Victorian InvenH|
tions, pp. 87-88.
Speed queens
Kf. 117 “which adds, subtracts, multiplies . . .” in Elizabeth Faulkner Baker,
K Technology and Woman’s Work, p. 213.
■I'Kp. 117 “She adds the yards of the comptometer . . .” Heidi I. Hartmann et al.,
K Computer Chips and Paper Clips, p. 73.
ip. 117 “was approaching 2,000,000” Elizabeth Faulkner Baker, Technology and
k Woman’s Work, p. 215.
Bp. 118 “1 don’t know about the wodd . . .” quoted in ibid., p. 71.
Ip. 118 “An English lady who demonstrated this machine” Leonard de Vries,
■ Victorian Inventions, p. 166.
Bp. 119 “I have one in my office . . .” quoted in Heidi I. Hartmann et al.,
I Computer Chips and Paper Clips, p. 26.
I p. 119 “provided opportunity for a large number” ibid., p. 27.
I p. 119 “earliest telephone companies” Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, p.
I 12‘
I p. 120 “Basically, you, Miss Luthor” ibid., p. 29.
I p. 120 “leads a very clear-cut” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
| Plateaus, p.195.
I p. 120 “the object of information” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.
I 200.
t
j p. 120 “The girl at the head of the line . . .” Elizabeth Faulkner Baker, Techt
nology and Woman’s Work, p. 215.
p. 122 “contain moving parts that wear out . . Tom Duncan, Electronics fori
Today and Tomorrow, p. 195. J
p. 123 “The specialized nature of their work . . Ehzabeth Faulkner Baker,- Technology
and Woman’s Work, p. 227. T
p. 123 “a permanent inventiveness . . .” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p. 214.
p. 123 “In several exchanges reading clubs . . .” Ehzabeth Faulkner Baker,
Technology and Woman’s Work, p. 70.
''!
grass
p. 124 “A rhizome has no beginning” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p. 25.
p. 124 “Even when they have roots” ibid., p. 11. •
p. 124 “Trees may correspond to a rhizome” ibid., p. 17. •<
p. 125 “no points or positions” ibid., p. 8.
p. 125 “Any point of a rhizome” ibid., p. 7.
p. 125 “may be broken” ibid., p. 9.
p. 125 “neither subject nor object” ibid., p. 8.
automata
p. 126 “A rich couple comes . . .” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, p. 195.
p. 126 “extension of ear and voice . . ." Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book, p.
283.
p. 126 “invisible voices conducted . . .” ibid., pp. 301-2.
p. 126 “a fingertip mastery . . .” Elizabeth Faulkner Baker, Technology and
Woman’s Work, p. 242.
p. 126 “Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times . . . ” Bruce
Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, p. 30.
pugs
p.>127 “If computers are the power looms . . Economist, Oct. 29, 1994, p.
146.
:p. 127 “There are a lot of cords down there . . .” Bruce Sterling, The Hacker
Crackdown, p. 29.
p. 128 “working on behalf of their masters” Economist, The World in 1995, p.
143.
p. 128 “Computers can bring mathematical abstractions . . .” Hans Moravec,
Mind Children, p. 133.
p. 128 “Agents are objects that don’t wait to be told . . .” Economist, The
World in 1995, p. 143.
p. 128 “with unknown consequences . . .” Fah-Chun Cheong, Internet
Agents, p. 123.
p. 128 “of course all of this is quite abstract . . .” ibid., p. 122.
p. 129 “crawled through the network . . .” Richard B. Levin, The Computer
Virus Handbook, p. 270.
p. 130 “spontaneously evolved, quite abstract . . .” Hans Moravec, Mind Children,
p. 135.
disorders
p. 131 “My different personalities . . .” Anna Freud, quoted in Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud, p. 86.
p. 131 “battles and bargains . . .” ibid., p. 461.
p. 131 “Perhaps in the night I am a murderer” ibid., p. 58.
p. 132 “it irrupts in me, somehow . . .” ibid., p. 57.
p. 132 “lived as I did in the time . . .” ibid,, p. 135.
p. 132 “no knowledge of each other or of the third . . .” Morton Prince,
quoted in Roy Porter, ed. The Faber Book of Madness, p. 390.
p_. 133 “ ‘The woman’ who is Truddi Chase” Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols.
Available at http://dhalgren.enghsh.washington.edu/~steve/doom.html
p.134 “promoted by suggestion” Paul R. McHugh, “Multiple Personality Disorders.”
Available at http://www.psycom.het/mchugh ,j
p. 134 “You ate ‘She,’ I said . . .” Morton Prince, quoted in Roy Porter, ed. :
The Faber Book of Madness, p. 390.
p. 134 “if there is such a high degree of suggestive specificity . . .” Frank W.
Putnam, debate with Paul R. McHugh- Available at http://www.
asarian.org/nastrae/mpcjitml/debate.html
p. 135 “a closed box, a unique entity, shut off horn the others” Steven Shaviro,
Doom Patrols. Available at http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/
~steve/doom.html
p. 135 “One of the things we hear from people . . .” Faith Christophe, “Can
Selves Die?” Available at http://www.asarian.org/~astraea/household/
p. 137 “marriage-law lays it down” Herodotus, The History of Herodotus, Book
IV, translated by George Rawlinson, Internet Classics Archive. Available
at http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.html
p. 138 “The military art has no mystery” Mary Montagu, quoted in Dale
Spender, Women of Ideas, p. 81.
p. 138 “The objective is not to gain ground” Monique Wittig, Les Gutrillfres,
p. 95.
p. 138 “a Stateless woman-people” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, p. 355.
p. 138 “fleshy passivity” Camille Pagha, Sexual Personae, pp. 75-77 passim.
p. 139 “come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext . . .” Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 353.
p. 139 “could not tell what to make of the attack upon them” Herodotus, The
History of Herodotus, Book IV. Available at http://classics.mit.edu/
Herodotus/history.html
amazone
beginning again
p. 140 “Woman’s desire . . Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 25.
p. 140 “of what materials my regiments are to consist . . Ada Lovelace, October
1851, Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 401.
p. 141 “Hysteria is silent and at the same time it mimes” Luce Irigaray, This Sex
Which Is Not One, p. 137.
p. 141 “ ‘she’ says something . . .” ibid., p. 103.
p. 141 “deep-going functional disorganization . . .” Josef Breuer and
Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, pp. 78-79.
p. 142 “When they could thus understand one another” Herodotus, The
History of Herodotus, Book IV. Available at http://classics.mit.edu/
Herodotus/history.html
p. 143 “but ‘within herself,’ she never signs up” Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover, p.
90.
enigmas
p. 145 “A modern battleship” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 276.
p. 146 “close-up of the printer” reference downloaded from the Web.
p. 147 “the brains of Bletchley Park” F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp, eds.
Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, p. 65,
p. 147 “one of several ‘men of the Professor type’ ” quoted in Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing: The Enigma, p. 206.
p. 147 “as far as making a pair of gloves” ibid., p. 207.
p. 147 “At this time” F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp, eds. Codebreakers: The
Inside Story of Bletchley Park, p. 164.
p. 148 “gready speeded up the routine solutions” ibid., p. 117.
p. 148 “Inevitably . . .” ibid., p. 115.
p. 148 “arrived at Bletchley Park . . .” ibid., p. 68.
p. 148 “life at sea, with the romantic idea . . ibid., p. 132.
p. 149 “twenty-two of us were drafted . . ibid., p. 1:33.
p. 149 “intricate complications of running the machines” ibid., p. 134.
p. 149 “a complicated drawing of numbers and letters” ibid., p. 136.
p. 150 “to put on to cards, with correct page references” ibid., p. 304.
p. 150 “I had buried this part of my life so completely” ibid,, p. 137.
I
monster 2
p. 152 “I wanted to keep my software and use it over again” Grace Murray
Hopper, quoted in Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines,
p. 179.
I
spelling
p. 153 “originate anything” Ada Lovelace, notes to Sketch of the Analytical Engine j
invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the 3
Military Engineers, Note G.
p. 153 “curious, mysterious, marvellous, electrical, etc.” Ada Lovelace, letter to 1
Lady Byron, 1841, quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. j
132. I
,:f
p. 153 “unsensed forces” that “surround and influence us” Ada Lovelace, review
of an “Abstract of‘Researches on Magnetism and on certain allied
subjects,’ including a supposed new Imponderable by Baron von Reich- f
enbach,” quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 152. 1
p. 153 “microscopical structure” Ada Lovelace, August 1843, quoted in Betty A.
Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 227.
p. 153 “to test certain points experimentally” Ada Lovelace, quoted in Dorothy
Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 143.
p.154 “I must be a most skillful practical manipulator . . Ada Lovelace, November
1844, quoted in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers,
p. 295.
p. 154 “Could you ask the secretary . . .” Ada Lovelace, December 1844,
quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 149.
p: 154 “I am a Fairy you know” Ada Lovelace, January 1845, quoted in Betty
A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers, p. 313.
hysteresis
p. 154 “Whether we examine distances travelled” Alvin Tbffler, Future Shock,
p. 33.
p. 154 “the advent of the telegraph” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, .
p. 99.
p. 155 “Speed is the computer’s secret weapon” T. R. Reid, Microchip, the story
of a revolution and die men who made it, p. 21.
p. 155 “not at the target” Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 5.
p. 156 “Feedbacks of this general type” ibid., p. 113.
cybernetics
p. 156 “older machines, and in particular” Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of
Human Beings, pp. 22-23.
p. 157 “effectively coupled to the external world” Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
p. 42.
p. 157 “keeps the engine from running wild . . .” Norbert Wiener, The Human
Use of Human Beings, p. 152.
p. 157 “the first homeostatic machine in human history” Otto Mayr, The Origins
of Feedback, p. 49.
p. 157 “the first nonliving object” Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, p. 113.
p. 158 “are precisely parallel” Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings,
p. 95.
p. 158 “the theory of the message” ibid., p. 27.
p: 158 “local and temporary islands” ibid., p. 36.
p. 158 “Life is an island here and now” ibid., p. 95.
p. 159 “It seems almost as if progress itself’ ibid., pp. 46-47.
p. 159 “not yet spectators at the last stages of the world’s death” ibid., p. 31.
sea change
p. 165 “For a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or noise” Ilya
Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, p. 141.
p. 165 “How does a flow cross the boundary . . .’’James Gleik, Chaos, p. 127.
p. 165 “The particles of cigarette smoke rise as one, for a while” ibid., p. 124..
p. 165 “fluctuations upon fluctuations, whorls upon whorls” ibid., p. 162.
p. 166 “A rope has been stretching” ibid., p. 127.
p. 166 “entities and variables” ibid., p. 108.
P- 159 “Consider this principle of constancy” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Isq
Not One, p. 115.
p. 160 “involves sensory members” Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human .
Beings, p. 25.
p. 160 “No system is closed. The outside always seeps in . . .” Luce Irigaray,
This..SeX- Which ls Not One, p. 116.
p. 160 “several possible sorts of behaviour” Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature,
p. 107.
p. 160 “positive gain, variously called escalating or vicious circles” ibid., p. 105.
p. 161 “Every intensity controls” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
p. 330. '
p. 161 “the hint of death is present in every biological circuit” Gregory Bateson,
Mind and Nature, p. 126.
p. 162 “If the open system is determined by anything” Antony Wilden, System
and Structure, pp. 367-69.
p. 163 “feedback tends to oppose what the system is already doing” ibid., pp.
368—69.
p. 163 “once this exponential process” ibid., p. 367.
p. 163 “When the ecosystem is subjected” ibid., p. 75.
p. 163 “Any system-environment relationship” ibid., p. 369.
p. 164 “I always feel in a manner as if I had died” Ada Lovelace, March 1841,
quoted in Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p. 98.
scattered brains
p. 166 “It does not appear to me that cerebral matter . . Ada Lovelace,
November 1844, quoted in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress of
Numbers, p. 296.
p.,167 “Thought is not arborescent” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p. 15.
p. 168 “one concept will ‘activate’ another” Richard J. Eiser, Attitudes, Chaos
and the Connectionist Mind, p. 30.
p. 168 “ ‘aha-experience’ and the sudden ‘insight’ ” Klaus Mainzer, Thinking in
Complexity, p. 152.
p. 168 “Unlike a contact between two transistors” Christopher Wills, The Runaway
Brain, p. 261.
p. 168 “When an axon of cell A” Donald Hebb, quoted in Klaus Mainzer,
Thinking in Complexity, p. 126.
p. 169 “may be compared to an unnavigable river” Sigmund Freud, Case Histories
1, pp. 45-46.
p. 170 “in hysteria there is” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 138.
p. 170 “determinateness, direct logical analysis” Daniel McNeil and Paul Freiberger,
Fuzzy Logic, p. 135.
p. 171 “overwork portions of their brains” Economist, Feb. 24, 1996, p. 124.
neurotics
p. 171 “at the end of the century” Alan Turing, quoted in Andrew Hodges,
Alan Turing, The Enigma, p. 422.
p. 171 “the expert system market” Maureen Caudill and Charles Butler, Naturally
Intelligent Systems, p. 26.
p. 172 “Victory seemed assured for the artificial sister” Raymond Kurzweil,
The Age of Intelligent Machines, p. 149.
p. 173 “not only challenges” Economist, July 1, 1995, Internet survey.
p. 174 “achieved only limited success” Kevin Kelly, Out of Control, p. 296.
p. 174 “Parallel software is a tangled web” ibid., p. 308. vi
p. 174 “We are faced with a system” Richard J. Eiser, Attitudes, Chaos and the' *1
Connectionist Mind, p. 192. ,
p. 175 “arborescent and centralized” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p. 16.
:1
p. 175 “transition machines” Andy Clark, Associative Engines, pp. 145-46. 1
intuition
p. 176 “I believe myself to possess almost singular combination of quail- .
ties . . .” Ada Lovelace, quoted in Betty A. Toole, Ada, The Enchantress
of Numbers, p. 144.
p, 176 “On die human scale” T. R. Reid, Microchip, p. 21.
cave man
p. 177 “When men talk about virtual reality” Brenda Laurel, quoted in Susie
Bright’s Sexual Reality: A Virtual Sex World Reader, p. 67.
p. 178 “if we are ever to have pure knowledge” Plato, The Last Days of Socrates,
pp. 110-12.
p. 178 “a metaphor of the inner space” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other
Woman, p. 243.
p. 179 “Illusion no longer has the fteedom of the city” Luce Irigaray, Marine
Lover, p. 99.
p. 179 “thus cuts himself off from the bedrock” Luce Irigaray, Speculum of die
Other Woman, p. 133.
p. 179 “protection-projection screen” Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 87.
p. 179 “horror of nature is magicked away” ibid., p. 99.
p. 179 “you won’t go wrong” Plato, The Republic, p. 517b.
p. 180 “a freedom that is limited only” Catherine Richards, “Virtual Bodies,”
p. 35.
p. 181 “you can lay Cleopatra” William Burroughs, The Adding Machine, p. 86.
| p. 182 “the future will be a larger or greatly unproved version of the immediate
! post," Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, p. 272.
li p. 182 “Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets” William
I Burroughs, Naked Lunch, p. 43.
| hooked
| p. 182 “All the forms of auxiliary apparatus” Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon
| the Mystic Writing Pad,” On Metapsychology, p. 430.
| p. 183 “living organism in its most simplified possible form” Sigmund Freud,
I “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” On Metapsychology, pp. 295-99.
j'< p. 184 “And as they advance deeper out into the waves” Luce Irigaray, Marine
Lover, p. 48.
tact
p. 185 “begins to be evident that ‘touch’ ” Marshall McLuhan and Quentin
Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, p. 71.
p. 185 “the extreme and pervasive tactility of the new electric environment”
ibid., p. 77.
p. 185 “extraordinary technological clothing” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding
Media, p. 159.
p. 185 “some kind of actual space” Larry McCaffrey, “Interview with William
Gibson,” quoted in Larry McCaffrey, ed. Storming the Reality Studio, p.
85.
p. 186 “the unclean promiscuity of everything” Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of
Communication, p. 27.
p. 186 “touch of the unknown” Elias Canetti. Crowds and Power, tu 15.
p. 186 “from a rhythmically pulsating environment” Lawrence K. Frank, “Tactile
Communication,” p. 202.
p. 186 “the weapon which lay nearest to hand” Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power,
p. 248.
p. 186 “He wants to see what is reaching” ibid., p. 15.
p. 187 “One can picture the touch receptor” Ashley Montagu, Touching Thet
Human Significance of the Skin, p. 84. .^
p. 187 “Grooming the skin” Lawrence K. Frank, “Tactile Communication,” p:t«
207.
p. 188 “possibility of distinguishing what is touching” Luce Irigatay, This Sex '
Which Is Not One, p. 26. ■"
p. 188 “As in the case of taboo, the principal prohibition” Sigmund Freud, The'
Origins of Religion, p. 80.
p. 188 “When women talk about V.R.” Brenda Laurel, quoted in Susie Bright’s ;
Sexual Reality: A Virtual Sex World Reader, p. 67. ,
p. 188 “the obstacle that separates thought from itself’ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema,f j
Volume 2, p. 189.
p. 188 “It is an entity so plugged in” Catherine Richards, “Virtual Bodies,” p. j
39. ' ’;
p. 189 “elsewhere: another case of the persistence of ‘matter’ ” Luce Irigatay,1 J
This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 125. 1
p. 189 “in what she says” ibid., p. 29. ' \
p. 189 “tends to put the torch to fetish word” ibid., p. 79. |
p. 189 “the human female” Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance |
of the Skin, p. 181. |
1
p. 190 “have always turned . . Manon Regimbald, “The Borden of Tex- i|
tiles,” p. 149. 1
I
p. 190 “Women have always spun” ibid., p. 147. |
p. 190 “the computer as an electronic loom” Esther Parada, quoted in Trisha
Ziff, “Taking new ideas back to the old world: talking to Esther Parada, 1
Hector Mendez Caratini and Pedro Meyer,” p. 132.
p. 190 “Until recently the computer” Cynthia Schira, “Powerful Creative
Tools,” p. 124.
p. 191 “are not only visual but also tactile” Louise Lemieux-Berube, “Textiles
and New Technologies: a Common Language,” p. 112.
cyberflesh
p. 192 “So I started to make a virtual body with a virtual wound” Linda
Dement, “Screen Bodies,” p. 9.
p, 193 “to conduct their dance” Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memary,
Practice, p. 170.
mona lisa overdrive
p. 194 “the most perfect representation” Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, p.
200.
p. 196 “hints that human activities once took place” Mary Rose Storey, Mona
Lisas, p. 13.
p. 196 “From the start, he witnessed the harnessing of artistry to skilled engineering”
Serge Bramly, Leonardo, the Artist and the Man, p. 71.
p. 196 “the application of many glazes” Mary Rose Storey, Mona Lisas, p. 14.
p. 197 “Her instincts of conquest” Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci,” Art
and Literature, p. 201.
p. 197 “a sentence we may think his own” Serge Bramly, Leonardo, the Artist
and the Man, p. 272.
p. 197 “often copying out word for word long passages" ibid., p. 270.
p. 197 “was much copied, in toto and in detail” ibid., p. 458n.
p. 198 “copying an existing machine” ibid., p. 271.
runaway
p. 199 “Her lover had asked her if she had come . . .” Linda Grant, Sexingthe
Millennium, p. 121,
p. 199 “Freud was right . . .” Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 6.
p. 199 “orgasms on one’s own terms” ibid., p. 18.
p. 200 “Male orgasm had signified self-containment . . .” Donna Haraway,
Primate Visions, p. 359.
p. 200 “universalistic claims made for human liberty . . Thomas Laquer,
Making Sex, p. 150.
p. 200 “You will be organized” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, p. 159.
p. 200 “most medical writers . . .” Donna Haraway, Primate Visions, p. 356.
p. 201 “ten years old, of delicate complexion . . .” Demetrius Zambaco,
“Case History,” p. 25.
p. 201 “cold showets . . .” ibid., p. 29.
p. 201 “Pubic belt, strait jacket . . .” ibid., p. 36.
p. 202 “To the analyst, any breakdown . . .” Roy Porter, The Faber Book of
Madness, p. 488.
p. 203 “apologia for orgasm made by the Reichians .'. .” Michel Foucault,
quoted in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 373.
p. 203 “I dismembered your body . . .” Alfonso Lingis, “Carnival in Rio,” p.
61.
p. 203 “make of one’s body . . .” Michel Foucault, quoted in James Miller,
The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 269.
p. 203 “the organic body, organized with survival as its goal” Jean-Fran^ois
Lyotard, Ubidinal Economy, p. 2.
p. 203 “Flows of intensity . . .” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, p. 162.
p. 204 “acentered systems . . .” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus,
p. 17.
p. 204 “we too are flows of matter and energy . . .” Manuel de Landa, “Nonorganic
Life,” p. 153.
p. 204 “Perforations occur in your body . . .” Monique Wittig, The Lesbian
Body, p. 108.
p. 204 “Open-the so-called body . . .” Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard, Ubidinal Econ-
2p.
204 “imply a multiplicity . . .” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, p. 213.
p. 204 “inside every solitary living creature . . Kevin Kelly, Out of Control,
p. 45.
p. 205 “As long as they do not threaten him” Elias Canetd, Crowds and Power,
p. 420. ~~
p. 205 “Do you know it is to me quite delightful . . .” Ada Lovelace, November
1844, quoted in Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p.
218.
p. 205 “nonhuman sex” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p.
294.
p. 206 “does not take as its object” ibid., p. 292.
p. 206 “Not the clitoris or the vagina” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not
One, pp. 63-64.
p. 206 “a touching of at least two (lips)” ibid., p. 26.
p. 206 “the glans of the clitoris” Monique Wittig, Les Guer Uteres, p. 23.
p. 207 “making bits of bodies” Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, p. 182.
p. 207 “question of ‘passivity’ is not the question of slavery” Jean-Franfois
Lyotard, Uhidinal Economy, p. 260.
p. 207 “USE ME . . . what does she want” ibid., p. 66.
p. 207 “What interests the practitioners” Michel Foucault, “Sexual Choice,
Sexual Act: Foucault and Homosexuality,” p. 299.
p. 207 "has sex organs . . . ” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 28.
p. 208 “exultation of a kind of autonomy . . .” Michel Foucault, quoted in
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 274.
p. 208 “Use me” Jean-Fran^ois Lyotard, Ubidinal Economy, p. 65.
p. 208 “sado-masochistic bond . . .” ibid., p. 63.
p. 208 “something ‘unnameable,’ ‘useless’ . . .” Michel Foucault, quoted in
James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 274.
p. 208 “as though the watchman over our mental life . . .” Sigmund Freud,
“The Economic Problem of Masochism,” On Metapsychology, p. 413.
p. 208 “I stripped the will and the person . . .” Alfonso Lingis, “Carnival in
Bio,” p. 61.
chemicals
p. 214 “tendency of biological research . . Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da
Vinci,” in Art and Literature, p. 231.
p. 214 “characterized by its cyclic hormonal regulation . . Nelly Oud-.
shoorn. Beyond the Natural Body: an archeology of sex hormones, p. 146.
p. 215 “The causes are not yet defined . . Birmingham Post, Mar. 8,1996, p.
10.
p. 216 “didn’t kill the roosters . . .” Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and
John Peterson Myers, Our Stolen Future, p. 199.
p. 216 “plastics are not inert . . .” ibid., pp. 233-34.
p. 216 “These ubiquitous metal cans attached to electrical poles . . .’’ibid., p.
92.
p. 216 “a striking inverse correlation . . .” ibid., p. 175.
p. 217 “consorts so readily with foreigners . . .” ibid., p. 70.
p. 217 “The body responds to the impostors . . .” ibid., p. 205.
p. 217 “impersonate them . . .” ibid., p. 204.
p. 217 “chemicals interfering with hormonal messages . . .” ibid., p. 195.
p. 217 “Without these testosterone signals . . .” ibid., p. 83.
p. 218 “not only on what the mother takes . . .” ibid., p. 212.
p. 218 “By disrupting hormones and development . . .” ibid., p. 197.
p. 218 “undermine the ways in which humans interact . . .” ibid., p. 207.
p. 218 “alter the characteristics that make us uniquely human . . .” ibid., p.
234.
p. 218 “the legacy of our species . . .” ibid., p. 238.
xyz
p. 218 “Sex is not a necessary condition for life . . .” Francois Jacob, The Logic
of Life, p. 356.
p. 219 “frozen accident” Steven Levy, Artificial Life: The Quest far a New Creation,
p. 198.
p. 220 “it would be a small matter for dandelions to sprout butterfly wings”
Dorion Sagan, “Metametazoa,” p. 378.
the peahen’s tale
p. 223 “preservation offavourable variations and the rejection ofinjurious variations”
Charles Darwin, quoted in Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life, p.
170.
p. 223 “It may be said that natural selection” Charles Darwin, quoted in ibid.,
p. 171.
p. 223 “is a game with its own rules” ibid., p. 296.
p. 224 “When the males and females ofany animal have the same general habits
of life” ibid., p. 172.
p. 225 “virility tests designed to get most males” Economist, Dec. 23,1995-Jan.
5, 1996, p. 121.
p. 226 “is not profited personally'by his mane” Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Women and Economics, p. 33.
p. 226 “resembles artificial breeding” Karl Sigmund, Games of Life, p. 126.
p. 227 “the further development of the plumage character” R. A. Fisher, The
Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, p. 152.
p. 227 “rides, like a surfer, on a wave of ever-increasing tail lengths sweeping
through the population” Karl Sigmund, Games of life, p. 131.
p. 227 “The two characteristics affected by such a process” R. A. Fisher, The
Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, p. 152.
p. 228 “Where one function is carried to unnatural excess” Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Women and Economics, p. 72.
p. 228 “All morbid conditions tend to extinction” ibid.
p. 228 “So it was. -female choice which caused the' males’ long tails” Karl
Sigmund, Games of life, p. 126.
p. 228 “in many species, females had a large say” Matt Ridley, The Red Queen,
p. 133.
loops
p. 230 “the egg uses the messages passed on” Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Next
Millennium, p. 212.
p. 230 “Eggs are computers to the simple floppy discs of sperm" Economist,
Sept. 3, 1994, p. 91.
p. 230 “are not organizers, but mere inductors” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat- ■
tari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 91.
p. 230 “Doubdess one can believe that, in the beginning (?)” ibid., p. 92.
p. 231 “these machines have to be built first. For this, a blueprint is required”
Karl Sigmund, Games of Life, p. 73.
p. 232 “numerous and daring experiments in parthenogenesis” Simone de
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 34.
p. 232 “The geneticists first realized that F.D. was unusual” New Scientist, Oct.
7, 1995, p. 17.
symbionts
p. 234 “the greatest pollution crisis the earth has ever known” Dorion Sagan,
“Metametazoa: Biology and Multiplicity,” p. 367.
p. 234 “each eukaryodc ‘animal’ cell . . .” Dorion Sagan, “Metametazoa,”
p. 363.
p.235 “biochemically and metabolically far more diverse . . .” Dorion Sagan,
“Metametazoa,” p. 377.
p. 235 “as people have passed through since they were apes,” Matt Ridley, 7he
Red Queen, p. 64.
p. 235 “four fifths of the history of life on Earth has been solely a bacterial
phenomenon” Dorion Sagan, “Metametazoa,” p. 377.
p.235 “most salient feature . . .” Stephen Jay Gould, “The Evolution of Life
on the Earth,” p. 65.
p. 236 “blend into a pointillist landscape” Dorion Sagan. “Metametazoa,” p.
^363r'
p. 236 “With bacteria, unlike organisms . . Francois Jacob, The Logic' of
Life, p. 297.
eve 2
p. 237 “As a result, the inheritance of mitochondrial chromosomes” Christopher
Wills, Runaway Brain, p. 23.
p. 238 “the woman who is the most recent direct ancestor” Daniel Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 97.
pottering
p. 239 “a well-established dictum . . Margaret Alic, Hypatia's Heritage, p.
111.
p. 239 “ideas, taste, and elegance” Hegel, quoted in Michele Le DoeufF, “Philosophy
and Psychoanalysis,” pp. 189-90.
p. 240 “is suddenly full of boulders and screes and speculations about strata”
Margaret Lane, The Tale of Beatrix Potter, p. 41.
p. 240 “the precise and the minute” ibid., p. 40.
p. 241 “composed of fungal cells” Mark McMenamin and Dianna McMenamin,
Hypersea, p. 68.
p. 241 “People take symbiosis seriously in lichens” Lynn Margulis, quoted in
ibid., p. 67.
p. 241 “complex overgrown lichens” ibid., p. 171.
p. 241 “so genetically open” Dorion Sagan, “Metametazoa,” p. 378.
p. 242 “fluid genetic transfers” ibid., p. 363.
p. 242 “without identifiable terms, without accounts” Luce Irigaray, This Sex
Which Is Not One, p. 197.
p. 242 “The body can no longer . . .” Dorion Sagan, “Metametazoa,” p.
368.
p.242 “With bacteria . . .” Franfois Jacob, The Logic of Life, p. 297.
p. 242 “To be woman, she does not have to be mother”’ Luce Irigaray, Marine
Lover, p. 86.
mutants
p. 244 “Joan explained how she had been taught” Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing,
The Enigma, p. 208.
p. 244 “always enjoyed examining plants” ibid., p. 434.
p. 245 “a slender but subversive strand” Stephen S. Hall, Mapping the Next
Millennium, p. 216.
p. 246 “the enzyme cuts one strand of the DNA helix” ibid., p. 232.
p. 246 “leftover from the merging of stranger bacteria” Dorion Sagan,
“Metametazoa,” p. 378.
p. 246 “quasispecies,” “swarms,” or “consensus sequences” Laurie Garrett,
The Coming Plague, p. 579.
p. 246 “individual alteration can change an entire system . . .” ibid., p. 619.
p. 247 “the ability to outwit or manipulate” ibid., p. 618.
p. 247 “Vtfe form a rhizome with our viruses” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus, p. 10.
wetware 1
p. 248 “think of the sea from afar” Luce Irigaray. Marine Lover, p. 51.
p. 248 “have far more to them . . .” James Lovelock, Gaia, p. 78.
p. 248 “on the land is for the most part two-dimensional . . .” ibid., p. 87.
p. 248 “terrestrial organisms had to build for themselves . . Mark McMenamin
andJDianna McMenamin, Hypersea, p. 4.
p. 248 “biota has had to find ways to carry the sea within it” ibid., p. 5.
p. 249 “Acting over evolutionary time as a rising tide . . .” p. 25.
p. 249 “terrestrial sea . . .” ibid., p. 93.
p. 249 “the appearance of complex life on land was a major event” ibid., p. 25.
p. 249 “Trees are neither found nor needed in the sea . . .” James Lovelock,
Gaia, p. 87.
p.249 "numerically dominated by tiny single-celled protista . . . ” ibid., p. 88.
p. 249 “from the first appearance of marine bacteria . . Mark McMenamin
and Dianna McMenamin, Hypersea, p. 73.
p. 250 “highly flattened fronds, sheets and circlets” Stephen Jay Gould, Scientific
American, October 1994, p. 67.
dryware
p. 250 “an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits” Immanuel
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 257.
p. 250 “If a man wants to delude himself’ Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 46.
p. 250 “delivers man to the uncertainty of fate” Michel Foucault, Madness and
Civilization, pp. 10-12.
2
g p. 250
4
p. 250
“One thing at least is certain” ibid., p. 18.
“the river with its thousand arms” pp. 10-12.
p. 251 “If only the sea did not exist” Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover, p. 51.
quanta
p. 252 "made capacity where there technically wasn’t any” Pat Cadigan, Synners,
p. 174.
p. 253 “midway between the fluid and the solid” Elias Canetd, Crowds and
Power, p. 101.
p. 253 “age of sand" Donald Tapscott, Digital Economy, Promise and Peril in the
Age of Networked Intelligence, p. 48.
casting off
p. 256 “little bit of another sense . . Ada Lovelace, March 1841, quoted
Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p. 98.
p. 256 “further extension” Ada Lovelace, September 1841, quoted in-Dorothy
Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 79.
p. 256 “Perhaps none of us can estimate . . Ada Lovelace, February 1840,
quoted in Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, p. 96.
p. 256 “thunderstruck by the power of the writing . . .” Ada Lovelace, July
1843, quoted in Dorothy Stein, Ada, A Life and a Legacy, p. 110.
I