that the li,es of cornmunication bctwcc. its various aspccrs arc opc,.
The open communication encourages an attitude of respcct f.. th.
many within us and the many within others.
The historian and cultural theorist Donna Haraway equares a
'tplit and contradictory self" with a "knowing sel[,, She is optimistic
about its possibilities: "The knowing self is partial in all its g,rir.r,
never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always con_
structed and stitched together imperfectly; and thereforeable to join
with another, to see together without claiming to be another.,,
To come full circle, I see MUDs and other experiences on the
Internet as a context for constructions and reconstructions ofidentity
and as a conrexr for the deconstruction of the meaning of id.entity as
"one." These new experiences are the cultural context th"t ,uppo.t.
some beginning efforts in American psychoana.lysis to reach fo, th.o_
ries of healthy identiry whose flexibiliry resilience, and capaciry for
joy comes from having access ro its many aspects of serf. For exampre,
in the writing of contemporary theorist philip Bromberg, .,good p".enting" is not helping a child creare a sense ofa core selfor unitary
identiry. Rather, the good parenr helps the child learn how to negoti
ate fluid transitions between self states.
In the fall of 1995,I attended a conference at which Bromberg
presented these ideas ro a group of psychoanalytic colleagues. I was
struck by the fact that their most common objection had much in
common with the objections raised to the notion of multiple identities on the Internet. in both cases, I heard the same anxiery: .W{hat
n2l
about the body which pulls us back to a sense ofoneness, ofauthen_
ticiry of accountabiliry? \ff4rat will happen to self-knowledge if it is
recast in terms of selves-knowledge? \7e are all walking on untesred
ground. Donna Haraway has written of irony that it is "abour conrradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes . . . about the tension
of holding incompatible things together because both or all are neces'sary and true." The same might be said of the Freudian contribution
to contemporary psychological culture. \7e may be at the end of the
Freudian cenrury, but our need for a practical philosophy ofselfknowledge rhat allows for irony, complexiry, ambivalence, and multi_
plicity has never been greater as we struggle to make meaning from
our lives on the screen.
THr FuruRE Lootuls
Weaving Women and CYbernetics
Sadie Plant
Aon LovrlncE FI RST WrRves WomrN AND
CvsTRNETICS ToeerHER IN THE 1,840s
It takes another hundred years for this association ro cross its runaway
threshold, and then theret no stopping them. After the war games of
the 1940s, women and machines escaPe the simple service of man to
program their own designs and organize themselves; leaking from the
reciprocal isolatio.ns of home and office, they melt their networks
together in the 1990s.
CveTRNETICS Is AlwaYS AHEAD 0r Irselr
This convergence of woman and machine is reinforced by cyberfeminism, a perspective indebted in this text to the figures of Ada
Lovelace and a few ideas from Luce Irigaray, but already running
beyond anyone's work and appearing as if from elsewhere, beyond
the fabrications of social securiry systems and patrilineal traditions
with which it already collides. The matrix no longer transmits from
the past: cyber-feminism is received from the future.
The computer emerges out of the history of weaving, a Process
often said to be the quintessence of women's work. The loom is.the
vanguard site of software development, and if Ada Lovelace makes
.r.ly encounter between woman and computer, the association be".,
tween women and software throws back into the mythical origins of
history. For Freud, weaving imitates the concealment of the womb:
'W'eaving
is womant comPensathe Greek hystera;the Latin matrix.
tion for the absence of the penis, the woman of whom, as he famously insists, there is "nothing to be seen." The technique is disdained
with her. Yet the development of the computer might itself be de-
scribed in terms of the introduction of increasing speed, miniatutization, and complexiry to the process of weaving, which threads its way
to convergence in the global data webs and communication nets of
the late rwentieth century.
lnt
Srrlic l'larrt
This is the virtual reality which is also the absence of the penis
and its power, and already more than the void. The matrix emerges
as the processes ofan abstract weaving which produces, or fabricates,
what man knows as "nature": his materials, the fabrics, the screens on
which he projects his own idendry and behind them the abstract matter which comes from the future with cyber-feminism. The matrix
makes its own appearance as the surfaces and veils on which its operations are displayed; the impossible elsewhere of cyberspace; the impossible realiry of woman.
0urrN oF Eruerrurs
fu well as his screens, and as his screens, the computer also becomes
the medium of mans communication, carrying his messages like
woman once again. fu Charles Babbage worked on his computing
machines, Ada Lovelace dispersed the codes, conveying his ideas and,
the first abstract machine. Means of
communication already turning each other on.
Babbage displayed his Difference Engine to the public in 1833,
and "Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw
as if incidentally, programming
the great beauty of the invention."' Ada had a passion for mathematics at an early age. She was admired and was gready encouraged by
Mary Somerville, a prominent figure in the scientific community
with whom she corresponded and, in 1835, attended a series of lectures on Babbagek work at the Mechanics' Institute. Ada was fascinated by the engine and wrote many letters to Babbage imploring him
to take advantage of what she considered her brilliant mind. Eventually, and quite unsolicited, she translated a paper by Menabrea on
Babbaget Analltical Engine, later adding her own notes at Babbaget
suggestion. Babbage was enormously impressed with the translation
and, once she had made him promise to "give your mind wholly and
undividedly, as a primary object that no engagement is to interfere
1,241
I
with, to the consideration of all those matters in which I shall at
tim.s require your intellectual assistance & supervision," and not to
"slur & hurry things over; or to mislay & allow confusion & mistakes
to enter into documents &c,"'Ada began to work with him on the
machinet development.
Babbaget tendency to flit between obsessions left many of his
projects incomplete, but there were also more pressing technical rea-
his computing machine was
sons for rhe unfinished state in which
this extraordinary
abandoned for a hundred years' It is nevertheless
\Tilliam Gibson to explore
time lag which inspires Bruce Sterling and
in a Victorian England aheady
an alternative story, in which Ada lives
Difference Engine uses her
running on the software she designed' The
saw: the real
takes her into a middle age she never
m"id.r,".r"*e and
woman, Ada Lovelace, died in 1852 while
she was still in her thirties'
Thewomanbrushedasideherveil,withaswiftgestureof
of her face'
habit, and Mallory caught his first proper glimpse
the Prime Minister' Lady
She was Ada Byron, thJ daughter of
Byron, the Queen of Engines''
Adas letters-
The real woman? Cyberpunk is only one confusion:
with suspicions of her
and indeed her scientific paPers-are scattered
of her thwarted admirown strange relation to humanity' \7hen one
peculiar-specimen of
ers declared: "That you are a peculiar-very
he could only have been
the feminine race, you 're yourstlf a*are"'n
admirin$ly-had of
confirming an opinion she already-and rather
peculiar & my own' I beherself. "I""- p-"..ding in a track quite
was always trapped and
lieve," she wrote in $42, andalthough she
dutiful' she was often consometimes defeated by the dury to be
mathematician' Indeed' she
vinced of her own immortal gt"it" " a
attributes which
worked with a mixrure of .ofn.r, and confidence;
and megalomaniacal
often extended to terrible losses of self-esteem
is something more
mine
of
delight in her own brilliance' "That Brain
wrote' "Before ten years
thari merely mortal; as time will show"'5 she
sucked out some of the life blood
are over, the Devilt in it if I havent
that no purely mortal
from the mysteries of this universe' in a way
lips or brains could do'".
her dreams of immorAda died in opiated agony in 1852' but
ft"lt" intimary with death' It was inher a strange
taliry gave
""J
had to struggle' "I mean
stead the constraints of tift *itt' which she
her confinement to
to do what I mean to do," she declared' defying
of countless "female disthe familiar roles of wife, mother' and victim
children' of whom she later
orders." By the age of 24 she had three
nothing more'"' One adwrote: "They are to me irksome duties &
To another' she
mirer called her "wayward, wandering ' ' ' deluded'"
for the company of her chilconfided "not only her present distaste
her husband' indeed to men
dren but also her g,o*it'g indifference to
lrzr
illr
S,rrli. l'l,rrrt
in general."'As a teenager she was lreing trcrrtcd firr hysteria (alrerdy
the warvard marrix, the wandering womb, but it was not until the
1850s that the diagnosis was cancer of the womb), and when she
married she was told to bid "adieu to your old companion Ada Byron
with all her peculiarities, caprices, and self-seeking; determined that as
A.K.youwillliveforothers."'Butsheneverdid'scorningpublic
opinion, she nevertheless gambled, took drugs, and flirted to excess'
But what she did best was compurer programming-the mathematics
of the unfamiliar.
Ada Lovelace immediately saw rhe profound significance of the
Analytical Engine, and she went to great lengths to conYey the remarkable extent of its capacities in her writing. Although the Analytical Engine had its own limits, it was nevertheless a machine vastly
different from the Difference Engine, which can "do nothing but add;
and any other processes, nor excepring 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."'o \rith the Analytical Engine, however, Babbage had set out to develop a machine
capable not merely of adding, but performing the "whole of arithmetic." Such an undertaking required the mechanization not merely
of each marhematical operation, but the systematic bases of their
functioning, and. it was this imperative to transcribe the rules of the
game itself which made the Analltical Engine a universal machine.
Babbage was a little more modest, describing the Engine as
"a ma-
chine of the most general nature,"l1 but the undedying point remains:
the Analytical Engine would not merely synthesize the data provided
by its operator, as the Difference Engine had done, but would incarnate what Ada Lovelace described as the very "science of operations."
In her notes on Menabreds paper, this is the point she stresses most:
L26
,
|
'
the Engine, she argues, is the very machinery of analysis, so that
..there
is no finite line of demarcation which limits the powers" or
the applications of the Analytical Engine'r'
The Difference Engine was "founded on the principle of successive orders of differences,",'while the "distinctive characteristic of the
Analytical Engine, and that which has rendered it possible to endow
mechanism with such exrensive faculties as bid fair to make this engine the execurive right-hand ofabstract algebra, is the introduction
of the principle which Jacquard devised for regulating, by means of
tUltlRt
l00Mfl
in the fhbrication of
punched cards, the most complicated patterns
to be the
tro."d.d stuffs." Indeed, Ada considered Jacquard's cards
and the Analytical
crucial difference between the Difference Engine
"that the Analltical
Engine. "'We may say most aptly," she continued'
loom weaves
Err[i.r. weaves Algebraical Patterns' just as the Jacquard
of origimore
much
resides
floir.., and leaves. Here, it setms to us'
claim'"'a
entitled to
naliry than the Difference Engine can be fairly
a metaphor: the
than
more
is
loom
Adds reference to the Jacquard
operating'
loom'
the
Analytical Engine did indeed weave "just as"
in a sense, as the abstracted process ofweaving'
Brrs oF Flurr
development' per\Teaving has always been a vanguard of machinic
is one of comprocess
the
h"p, b.I"rrr. even in its most basic form'
of several threads into
pl.*ity, always involving the weaving together
divinities
i.,i.gr"t.d cloth. It is no coincidence that those Egyptian
"all
".,
since
intelligence'
of
associated with weaving are also the spirits
intercrossing ofsensations
data recorded in the brain results from the
just
as the threads are
perceived by means ofour sense organs'
Even in the China of 1000 B'c'' complex
..orr.d in weaving."ts
warP threads be lifted in
designs "..quiredihat about 1,500 different
\7ith pedals and
various combinations as the weaving proceeded'"'u
shuttles,theloombecomeswhatonehistorianreferstoasthe..moit
which "reduced
complex human engine of them all"' a machine
of the feet
the warp and then the
worked tie pedals, raising half the threads of
the thread of the
other, while the hands th"w the shuttle carcying
bound up
The weaver was integrated into the machinery'
.,r..ithirrg to simple actions: the alternate movement
woof."'7
processes' In the
with its operations and linkeJ [mb-byJimb to the
printed page'
the
of
Middle Age., and before the artificial memories
information necessary to
squared p"p., .h".a, were used to store the
paper.rolls
development of the design' and the punched
,h.
"..rrr*
the
developed
and cards ofthe eighteenth-century French weavers
for the automatprinciples on which Jacquard based his own.designs
textiles indus.d too- which revolutionized the nineteenth-century
try and continues to guide its contemporary development' Jacquard's
automating the
machine strung the punch cards together' finally
human hand'
a
single
operations of the m"chine and requiring only
Itzt
IIlE I.UIURE I.OOMS
Sadie Plant
saw in this migraIt was of course "bitterly oPPosed by workers who
being transferred to the
tion of control a piece of tntf bodies literally
machine."'u
out
But this was already the second phase of a migration
toman-andmachine-madefabrics.Theintroductionofmanufac.
turedclothdisruptedthemaritalandfamiliarrelationshipsofevery
"the man had to leave
traditional sociery on which it impacted' Now
fo' his wife" who' moreover' "had
to buy
home to
-ottty
"loth
^"k.
a wife""' In China it was said
ceased to fit the traditional picture of
that if "the old loom must be discarded' then
100 other things must
bediscardedwithit,fortherearesomehownoadequatesubstitutes'"'o
question of female
\Teaving is always already entangled with the
idendry,"r,amtt"gt'ofit'mechanizationbringinevitabledisruption
woman apPears as the
to the familiat prtiidustri'l scenes in which
weaver.C..tri.'lyFreudfindsacloseassociation'"Itseems"'hewrites'
"thatwomenh"ttt'*dtfewcontributionstothediscoveriesand
inventionsinthehistoryofcivilization;thereis,however'onetechof plaiting and weaving'"
nique which they may have invented-that
characteristiNot content *itl, thi. observation, Freud is of course
cally
"tempted to guess the unconscious motive for the achievement'
have given the model
'would seem to
Nature herself," hl
"'ggt"''
of
imitates by causing the growth at maturiry
which this
""hi.],t*tii
to
remained
that
The step
the pubic hair that conceals the genitals'
to one another' while on
adhere
threads
making the
be taken lay in
only matted together'"
the body they stick i"L the skin and are
lecture on femiThis patsage comes out of the blue in Freud's
himself: "If you reiect
ninity. He .,,t" ftt-' surprised at the thought
"and regard my belief in the influence
this idea as fantastic," ht
'dd''
ofalackofapenisontheconfigurationoffemininityasaniddefixe'
not least
I am of courr. d.f.rrr.l.rr."" H. is indeed defenseless,
because his suggestion that weaving is
..the
12 8
||
womens only contribution to
discoverii"".rd inventions in the history of civilization'
gives an
himself to be dismissing
incred.ible power to the feminine he imagines
and
For weaving is the fabric of every other discovery
""..1-"4.
of Freudian analysis itself. The dream
;;Lr,,
.ro, th.l.asithose
workofcondensationisaprocessof..interweaving,,,asFreudexplains
inhisanalysisofthe"D"""'oftheBotanicalMonograph"'adream
sufficientlycomplextoserveas,anillustrationoftheintricateoverde.
"we find
results. "Here"' he writes'
termination in which this weaving
"\Teaver's
where' as in Goethe's
ourselves in a factory of thought';
thou'"nd threads" and "over and
Masterpiece," "one treadle 'tii' "
what a contribution to have made!
und.er shoots the shuttle.,,,, Yes,
of software' which is per\tr"",rirrg has been the art and the science
than its virtual termi-
h"p. l.rl a contribution to Freudt civilization
of his world' weaving threads
nation. Hidden in history as the fabric
nets of artificial memory and
t;; ;-, from squared p"pt' to the data
machine intelligence'
as "a beautiful woven porBabbage o-*rr.d what Ada described
24'000 cards were retr"it of Jacqlard, in the fabrication of which
1'000 threads to the inch' its incred;;i;J;;+."en in silk at about abiliry to store and process inforible detail was due to the new looms
volume' \fhen he began work
mation at unprecedented speed and
strings of punch cards on
on the Analytical Engine, it *"' ;"tqt'"rd's
iniroducing the possibiliry of repeatg"bb"g.
b"r.J his designs'
"was technically designated backi^g ,fr. .rrdr,"o. what, as Ad" *'ott'
to certain laws' The object
i.r! th. cards in certain groups according
*h,.h
of this extension is to "]"t"t'tht possibility
of bringing any particular
cardorsetofcardsintouse"'yt"""bttoftimessuccessivelyinthe of
an unprecedented simulation
solution of one problem'"'a This was
by the machine as it needed them
cards *t
memory. The
"lttttd
system' allowing the machine to
and effectively functioned as a filing
store and' draw on irs own information'
a possibiliry so that the
The Jacquard cards made memory
of its own""t but Babbage
Analytical Engine could "possess a library
hadbecomeconvincedthat..nothingbutteachingtheEnginetofore.
the
that foresight could ever lead me to
see and then to act uPon
b1 a library to which the machine
object I desired,"'6 ""a tf i' had to
future operations' The p"":1
could refer both as to its past and its
with the abiliry to process inforcards endowed the A-ttalyiical Engine
and Babbage 'had
mation from the f"t"tt of i" o*i f"'"tio"ing'
to memory"' as well as.'bther
devised mechanical means equivalent
that the Engine itself could act
means equivalent to foresight'
on this foresight'"'7
"'d
foresight can be ascribed
There is more than one sense in which
imperatives of war brought Loveto the Analytical Engine' V4ren the
of the Allied military
lace's and Babbage's i"otk to the attentions
lrzs
IIII
FIJTI,,RF, I.OOIVIE
Sr<lic l)larrt
machine, their impact was immense. Her software runs on his hardware to this day. In 1944, Howard Aiken developed Mark 1, what he
thought was the first programmable computer, although he had really
been beaten by a German civil engineer, Konrad Zuse, who had in fact
built such a machine, the Z'3, in l94l . Quite remarkably, in retrospect, the Germans saw little importance in his work, and although
the most advanced of his design s, the Z-\1, is still in use to this day'
the American computer had the greatest impact. Mark 1, or the IBM
Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, was based on Babbage's
designs and itself programmed by another woman, Captain Grace
Mrr.."y Hopper, often described as the 'Ada Lovelace" of Mark 1 and
its successors. She wrote the first highJevel language compiler, was
instrumental in the develoPment of the computer language COBOL'
and even introduced the term "bug" to describe soft- or hardware
glitches after she found a dead moth interrupting the smooth circuits
of Mark 1.'Woman as the programmer again.
Rut'tRwRv CIncUITS
Cybernetics, the term coined by Norbert \Tiener for the study of
control and communication in animal and machine, was integral to
these wartime computers. Governors and thermostats are basic examples of cybernetic devices which, unlike the linear operations of less
.o-pI." machines, respond to their environments by looping their
own information back on themselves. Postwar cybernetics was the science of this abstract procedure, a nonlinear approach to systems of
every scale and variety of hard- and software which nevertheless perpetuated the modernist myrh of human control and wanted only the
negarive feedback of controlled equilibrium. At the end of the century cyber-feminismt man is inside, not in charge oi circuits which
are not so well-behaved; runaway mutations which guide his history
13o
l
to its own termination. Matrix cybernetics runs with the positive
feedback of the new world disorder.
The computer is always heading toward the abstract machinery
of its own operations and running beyond its intended constraints.
Emerging from attempts to produce or reproduce the performance of
specific functions, such as addition, it leads to a machinery which can
simulate the operations of any machine and also itself; abstract ma-
to anything. The Analytical
chines which can rurn their abstract hands
it had
E"gt* was not yet this advanced; as Ada Lovelace recognized'
do whatever we
".rJp..t.nrions whatever to originate anything' It can
It was an abstract machine' but its
know how to order it to perform'"'u
processing capacities: what
autonomous abilities *.r. "o.fi.r.d to its
industry' calls the mill' as
U"UU"g., with terminology from the textiles
and enters the machinery'
opporJd to the store. Cot'i'ol is dispersed
of the entire machine'
Ur'r, i, ao., not extend to the operations
is there a further shift onto the
Not until the Tirring -"hit"
store begin to work together'
software plane so that the"mill and the
"proirr*s that change themselves could be written'"" An un-
".rd
p..*i.#a
trol back to
still brings con-
dispersal of tontrol, the Tirring machine
the introits master program, and it is only really after
flow of control
duction of silicon in the t"96Os that the decentralized
"control is
which
in
for systems
becomes an issue, eventually allowing
condiits
production happens to have
captured by *h"ttut'
"t,r"r,
The abstract matio.r, ,"tirfi.d by the current workspace contents'"3n
a network of "independent
chine begins at this point to function as
communication
,ofr*".. obj.cts," running on horizontal lines of
reference'
of
without the necessity of dominant points
has led:
is the strange world to which Adas programming
This
systems of control
self-organizing .yr,.rnl, self-arousing machines;
of some central
commands
e"ceedit'ithe
,nd ,y"ntheticlntelligence
will
,n ,r.rf",,ili"r agency which has no need of a central
,,rtho.ity;
and has already bypassed a subject position'
Pnsr CRntrue
of the drive to resist preHuman history is the self-narrating story
carnal passions to self-control
cisely this move. It pulls itself up from
i. lorr.n.y f.orn tht strange flt'idititt of the material to the self"
guided missiles'
ide.,tifi.adon of the soul. Siealth bombers and
satellites epitomize this
telecommunications systems and orbiting
either too inert
flight. Matter, the womb, is merely an encumbrance;
subject' the agent
autonomous being' Not that she is left behind;
ori".tg.rotrrly active; woman has never been the
of this history, the
to function as the
carefully.o.t"."l.d, she nevertheless continues
agency' and selfg.otrnj".td possibiliry of his quests for identitlz'
lrrr
Srtrlic l'lrrrt
control. She wears "different veils according to the historic period.":t
\foman has been the natural resource for mant own cultural development. She has provided a mirror for man, his servants and accommodation, his tools and his means of communication, his spectacles and
commodities, the possibiliry of the reproduction of his species and his
world. If the repression of the matrix, the veiling of the womb, is
integral to this flight, the cybernetic systems which bring the matrix
into human history are equally the consequences of a drive for domination and autonomy. Still confident of his own indisputable mastery,
man continues to excite and turn these systems on. In so doing he
merely encourages his own destruction. Every software development
is a migration of control away from man, in whom it has been exercised only as domination, and into the matrix, or cyberspace, "the
broad electronic net in which virtual realities are spun.""
The matrix weaves itself in a future which has no place for historical man: his agency was always a figment of its loop. Like woman,
software systems are used as man's tools, his media, and his weapons;
all are developed in the interests of man, but all are poised to betray
him. At the peak of his triumph, the culmination of his machinic
erections, man confronts his systems of social security and finds them
female and dangerous.
This will indeed seem a strange twist to history to those who
believe that it runs in straight lines. But as Irigaray asks: "If machines,
even machines of theory, can be aroused all by themselves, may
woman not do likewise?"33
The computer is a machine which can simulate its own operations and those of any other machine; like woman, it is both the
appearance and the possibiliry of simulation. "Tiuth and appearance,
according to his will of the moment, his appetite of the instant."
I
132
|'
\7oman cannot be anything, but she can imitate anything valued by
man: intelligence, autonomy, beauty . . . perhaps the very possibility
of mimesis, the one who weaves her own disguises. The veil is her
oppression, but "she may sdll draw from it what she needs to mark
the folds, seams, and dressmaking of her garments and dissimulations."3a These mimetic abilities throw woman into a universality
unknown and unknowable to the one who knows who he is: she fits
any bill, but in so doing, she is already more than that which she imitates. \(/oman, like the computer, appears at different times as what-
ever man requires of her' She
learns how to imitate; she learns
simu-
lation.And,likethecomputer,shebecomesverygoodatit'so-good'
mimic any function' As Irigaray
in fact, that she too, in p'it'tiplt' can
isshe
''
,;;;.r;r, "Tiuth "'d "ppt*'^"ces' and reality' Power ' living
founda-
;:o,,gh her inexhaustiblt "ptitt'dt for 1imicry-the
tion flr the whole staging of the world'"35
role' she is no longer its
But if this i, ,r',ppoJtd to be her only
comes on stream' the computer
o.rty f.rfo...ter. Now th"t tht digital
it too is merely the imitation of
is cast in precisely the same light:
capaciry for man' and
nature, providing assistance "id "dditio"al
but it too can do this only insofar as
more of the things in his world'
of simulation' If
it is already hooked uP to the very machinery
lead him to a lan;.*d, .p..,rlrtio"' "to"t tht otigit" of weaving
results in
flaw' i"ts technical development
guage of compensation and
and'
nothing'
for
compensate
I priii*",i.n of pi"elltd screens which
spaces and global networks .
behind them, the emergence of digital
together with flawless preciwhich are even now *tl"t'i"g themselves
sion.
screens as well: it too has a
Software, in other words' has its
and for it' as for woman' this is
user-friendly face it turns to man'
only its camouflage'
in the late 1960s'
The screen is the face it began to present
in its design' It appears as the
when the TV screen *"' it'"otpJ'ated
seen' and also func,f.".*f., the visual display of th"t *L':h:1" be
like Irigaray's woman' it is both
tions as th. irrt.tf""t, tht *t"t^gtr;
the possibiliry of his communication'
displayed for man and becomes
It too operates as the rypewriter' the c"ltulator'
the decoder' display-
of man' These'
as an instrument in the service
ing itself on the screen
of some existing function; and indeed'
however, are merely imitations
reproduction of the same that both
;;;;;"t
-""hitruy for the
first sell themselves' Even in
women and information tethnology
"the dense information environment
1968, Mcluhan argued that
still concealed from it by a
created by the computer is at present
of antiquated activities that are now
complex screen or mosaic quiit
that
the computer."36'while this is all
advertised as the new fi.rd ior
travel in the information flows are
apPears before man, those who
streams beyond his conbeyond the screens and into data
iori.tg far
ceptions of realiry' On this other
side run all the fluid energies
denied
I rl
--I
Sirtlic l'lrrrt
by the patrilineal demand fbr thc rcplocluction of thc satrrc. livctr
when the computer appears in this guise and simulates this function,
it is always the site of replication, an engine for making diffbrence'
The same is merely one of the things it can be.
"They go beyond all simulation," writes higaray of women.37
Perhaps it was always the crack, the slit, which marked them out, but
what they have missed is not the identiry of the masculine but their
own connection to the virtual, the repressed dynamic of matter' Misogyny and technophobia are equally displays of man's fear of the
matrix, the virtual machinery which subtends his world and lies on
the other side of every patriarchal culturet veils. At the end of the
twentieth century, women are no longer the only reminder of this
other side. Nor are they containable as child-bearers, fit for only one
thing. No longer the adding machines, they are past caring; with the
computer, as abstract machine, there is nothing they cannot do.
The computer was always a simulation of weaving; threads of
ones and zeros riding the carpets and simulating silk screens in the
perpetual motions of cyberspace. It too presents the screens, the
clothing of the matrix, already displaying the virtual machinery of
which nature and culture are the subprograms, and joins women on
and as the interface between man and matte! identity and difference,
the actual and the virtual. Cybernetic systems are fatal to his culture;
they invade as a return ofthe repressed, but what returns is no longer
the same: cybernetics transforms woman and nature, but they do not
1'34
I
|'
return from mant past, as his origins. Instead they come wheeling
around from his future, the virtual system to which he has always
been heading. For the last 50 years, as his war machine has begun to
gain intelligence in readiness for his last stand, women and computers
have unleashed a proliferation of screens, intelligences, lines of communication, media, and simulations with which to hack it down. No
longer the void, the gap, or the absence, the veils are already cybernetic; an interface taking off into its own unmanned futures.
Ada refused to publish her commentaries on Menabreds papers
for what appear to have been spurious confusions around publishing
contracts. In translating Menabrea's work from French, she nevertheless provided footnotes more detailed and substantial-three times as
long, in fact-than the text itself and became the worldt first computer programmer.
Footnotes have often been the marginal zones occupied by
arld claborati<ltl: .utsidc
wot.r-lcrl writcrs.'l'r.^nslatio., tra,scripti..,
woven their influence
body of the text, women have nevertheless
the
between the lines.
\While Adds writing was Presented in this form and
was the name which survived her death:
simply 'A.A'L',' hers
Defense Department
ir"r".ognition of her work, the United States
;;;.i
ADA' and today her name
named its primary programming language
*anuals' Neither her married
shouts from the ,pl,"t of " tho*"t'J
who lives on' in her own
nor her maiden name: it is Ada herself
software of the military machine'
name, her footnotes secreted in the