Sadie Plant
Shuttle Systems//1997
[...] There is always a point at which, as Sigmund Freud admits, 'our material for some incomprehensible reason - becomes far more obscure and full of gaps'?
And, as it happens, Freud's weaving women2 had made rather more than a small
and debatable contribution to his great narrative of inventions and discoveries.
Far more than a big and certain one as well. It is their micro-processes 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 BCE, 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 fibres. 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 fibres 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 BCE in the
southeast regions of Europe, and in Hungary there is evidence that warpweighted looms were producing designs of extraordinary extravagance from at
least 5,000 BCE. Archaeological investigations suggest that from at least the
fourth millennium BCE 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 to completely conceal the warps, were also in use in ancient Egypt where,
long before individual artisans stamped their work with their own signatures,
24//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET
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 cloth 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, cleaning
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, colour 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
onto 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
Plant//Shuttle Systems//25
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 regions ...' 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 pulse 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 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
26//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET
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 needle-workers 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, weaving is often 'used to mark or
announce information' and 'a mnemonic device to record events and other data'.
Textiles do communicate in terms of the images which appear on the right side
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 meaningful 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 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 madeleine, 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 coloured 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,
Plant//Shuttle Systems//27
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
abundantly clear, nothing stops when a particular piece of work has been finished
off. Even when magical connections are not explicitly 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 shuttle, 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 shuttles 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 to 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'.
28//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET
'European folktales are full 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 [his daughter] 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 - glamour - 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
still used matrices as means to their ends, but also repeated the 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. [...]
1
['The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex', 1924.]
2
[In 'Femininity' (1933), Freud discusses the techniques of 'plaiting and weaving' as a historical
contribution to civilization.]
Sadie Plant, extract from Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture (New York: Doubleday,
1997) 60-69 [footnotes not included].
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