“If weaving has played such a crucial role in the history of computing, it is also the key to one of the most extraordinary sites of woman-machine interface which short-circuits their prescribed relationship and persists regardless of what man effects and defines as the history of technology.” (Plant, 2000: 331-332)

Weaving and technology are no doubt inextricably connected; for example, the etymological roots of the term “technology” come from the Greek, “techne” that more accurately translates as “art” or “craft”.

Sadie Plant’s Zeroes and Ones was a real eye opener for me on the inter(intra-)relationship between weaving, feminism and technology in general, and unsurprisingly it has acted as a pertinent starting point for a lot of my own diffractive research and practice. I must admit, I had the book sitting on my shelf for a good few years before actually coming around to reading it a few months ago, although this was still before I started weaving myself. In fact, it was only when I was looking at warp patterns and using online pattern generators or graph paper to conceptualise my own patterns that I was reminded of the similarities between weaving and binary code. The book is an overwhelmingly rhetorical account of the transformative networks of techno- and cyber- feminism, and at times it needs to be read with a more critical, or political, lens, but here’s what I found interesting from it:

Notably, and unsurprisingly, weaving has always been associated with women, as told in traditional anthropological accounts (e.g. Marilyn Strathern and Margaret Mead) in which women were represented as weaving in the domestic, private sphere. Weaving, among other activities such as spinning, cooking, and sewing, were understood to be more compatible with childcare and so more convenient for women. This no doubt fed into the gendered division of economic labour, although as Plant points out, for Freud, weaving came about because women felt inclined to matt their pubic hair in order to conceal their LACK of penis (think, see, read: Irigaray). While Freud then went on to claim that weaving was the only technological innovation afforded to women, and while this also may seem to be the case given the LACK of women credited in much tech innovation today, Plant reveals the importance of weaving as a catalyst for the invention of the computer, and correspondingly the industrial revolution. This is because weaving is essentially geometrical patterning that mobilises tacit algebraic thinking. Judy Wajcman has similarly argued that women’s domestic labour would have undoubtedly meant that women had an authority over technologies, such as the sickle and pestle, and moreover that cooking, alongside household economics, reveals women’s intimate relationship with mathematics. Furthermore, let’s not forget that it was spinning and textiles that allowed knotting and netting, vital to all early hunter-gatherer societies.

Weaving, therefore, had most often been done by women, by hand, in the home. However, in 1801 Jean Marie Jacquard invented a mechanized harness that worked according to punched cards, therefore creating an automated machine that was capable of weaving intricate and beautiful patterns that previously could only have been achieved by hand over a long period of time. It did so by processing a binary pattern that was presented on punch cards, whereby there is either a hole or no hole, akin to the patterns I use for my inkle loom today on which 0s and 1s refer to a warp or weft thread. Although the Jacquard loom required 1000s of these punch cards, it was far less time consuming, and therefore more cost effective, than human labour. There is no doubt that this invention revolutionised weaving, and subsequently alienated women from much of their previous work, economic or otherwise. Apparently (dubious), many weavers in France that were angered at losing their work threw their shoes at the mechanised looms as an act of protest, these shoes were called ‘sabot’, and so this is where the word sabotage comes from!

The processes behind the Jacquard Loom were appropriated by Charles Babbage - the guy now thought to be the ‘father of the computer’ (is he though…). Babbage designed an ‘Analytical Engine’ using the same punch card system to perform arithmetics; and fellow mathematician Ada Lovelace is quoted as saying, “We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” This machine then inspired Herman Hollerith to develop similar machines that used punched cards to process the American 1890 census information, and his company now operates as IBM.

Plant’s account of this history is by no means novel, but her specific focus on the relationship between Babbage and Ada Lovelace, is more pertinent. Ada is known to have been the first to recognise the capacities of the Analytical Engine beyond simple arithmetics, and she even wrote the algorithm that powered the machine. Ada’s omission from the history of computing is not surprising, as reiterated by the neglect of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Dorothy Johnson Vaughan (Hidden Figures), or Grace Murray Hopper, who programmed the first computer in the 1940s - as just two examples of many. These omissions, paired with sex stereotyping in education, sexual discrimination in the workforce, and the more insidious normalising of technology as a masculine construct work together to negate women’s participation in science and tech.

“Generally, girls are brought up to avoid interaction with technology. Nevertheless, women’s relationship with machines is more intimate historically than is men’s. Now, for instance, girls grow up with technology: it isn’t new to them. Technophobia is increasingly becoming a myth. I think it’s a shame that a lot of feminist theory buys into this notion of technophobia. It not only buys into it - it’s keen to perpetuate it.” (Plant in Spender, 1995: 230)

Plant’s contribution to techno- or cyber-feminism goes beyond a mere historical account of weaving and Ada Lovelace in the creation of the computer. Instead, she highlights what she believes to be the problematics and failures of 20th century feminism in order to pave the way for a cyberfeminism. She begins by reiterating Irigaray’s claim that women cannot achieve a sense of identity in the androcentric (phallocentric) society as ‘subjectivity’ is itself a masculine construct. Referring back to Freud, Irigaray believes that women will always be the “sex which is not one”, and which lacks the ability to have ‘one’ - that is, as Plant (1996: 327) writes, the “masculine dream of self control, self-identification, self-knowledge, and self-determination.” Resultantly, Plant claims that a feminist politics must rely on the destruction of the subject through self-organising, de-centralised and emerging technology; “a dispersed and distributed emergence composed of links between women, between women and computers, computers and communications links, connections and connectionist nets” (ibid.: 335). Computers, and more specifically ‘the Net’, like women, have evolved with anarchy, and are no longer controllable through the institutions and frameworks that distribute them. Computers and women no longer “function as an object of consumption and exchange”, as they “mutate into complex machines which begin to think and act for themselves” (ibid.: 330 and 328).

What Plant is insinuating, with a lot of help from Irigaray, is that women and computers have no subjectivity or identity, they are ‘not one’, but ‘zero’. The ones and zeroes of binary code do not reflect androcentric dichotomies - zero is not the opposite of one - as zero is the possibility of transformation, multiplication, replication and proliferation. Plant refers back to weaving by emphasising that women identify with the threads of communication and the connections forged through the Net.

“Weaving has always been a vanguard of machinic development, perhaps because, even in its most basic form, the process is one of complexity, always involving the weaving together of several threads into an integrated cloth” (Plant, 1995: 50)

Anyway, it must be noted that Plant was writing in the 90s, and cyberfeminism and technology have come a long way since then. Although technology has changed so much, I’m not entirely convinced that feminism has gained the upper hand just yet, and while Plant’s theoretical arguments are strong, they seem idealistic and abstract in comparison with the insidious use of tech. I’m also particularly sceptical about the heavy reliance on Irigaray… and Freud, and also her ‘feminization’ of technology - it seems paradoxically reductive to the heterogeneity and complexity on which her argument rests.

Today, Ada’s importance to the history of computing is widely recognised, and the United States Department of Defense even named their computer language ADA. More honourable, perhaps, given the sinister and androcentric nature of defense and military computers, Ada is also the name of a journal of new media, technology and gender - and can be found here: https://adanewmedia.org/2018/05/issue13-toupin-spideralex/

Cya.

Useful resources:

VNS Matrix: https://vnsmatrix.net/

in particular their Manifesto for the 21st Century (1991) - https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/the-cyberfeminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century

OBN: https://www.obn.org/inhalt_index.html

Alicia Felberbaum. ‘Holes, Linings, Threads’: http://cds.library.brown.edu/conferences/DAC/abstracts/felberbaum.html or https://www.york.ac.uk/teaching/cws/wws/weavingwomen.html

cyber/technofeminist cross-readings: https://cross.virtualprivateserver.space/cross-readings

Penelope Labs: https://penelope.hypotheses.org/laboratory

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology: https://adanewmedia.org/

Bibliography:

Irigaray, L. (1985). This sex which is not one.

Plant, S. (1995) The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics. Available at: https://monoskop.org/images/1/13/Plant_Sadie_1995_The_Future_Looms_Weaving_Women_and_Cybernetics.pdf

Plant, S. (1996). ‘On the Matrix: cyberfeminist simulations’, in The Cybercultures Reader, eds David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, London: Routledge. Available at: https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Sadie-Plant-On-the-Matrix-Cyberfeminist-Simulations.pdf

Plant, S. (1997). Zeros and Ones. Available at: https://gebseng.com/media_archeology/reading_materials/Sadie_Plant-zeros_and_ones_OCR.pdf

Spender, D. (1995) Nattering on the Net: Women, Power, and Cybersapce.

Images are my own or taken from ‘Weaving Pattern Bands’ by Susan Foulkes.

2020 - Spiders, feminism, weaving and the web.

Posts tagged with sadie-plant

Weaving and technofeminism - an overview according to Sadie Plant.