OuNuPo/ocr/output_alice.txt

The computer emerges out of the history of weaving the process so often said to be the quintessence of women's work. The loom is the vanguard site of software development. Indeed it is from the loom or rather the process of weaving that this paper takes another cue. Perhaps it is an instance of this process as well for tales and texts are woven as surely as threads and fabrics. This paper is a yarn in both senses. It is about weaving women and cybernetics and is also weaving women and cybernetics together. It concerns the looms of the past and also the future which looms over the patriarchal present and threatens the end of human history.

Ada Lovelace may have been the first encounter between woman and computer but the association between women and software throws back into the mythical origins of history. For Freud weaving imitates the concealment of the womb: the Greek hystera; the Latin matrix. Weaving is woman's compensation for the absence of the penis the void the woman of whom as he famously insists there is nothing to be seen Woman is veiled as Ada was in the passage above she weaves as Irigaray comments to sustain the disavowal of her sex Yet the development of the computer and the cybernetic machine as which it operates might even be described in terms of the introduction of increasing speed miniaturization and complexity to the process of weaving. These are the tendencies which converge in the global webs of data and the nets of communication by which cyberspace or the matrix are understood

Today both woman and the computer screen the matrix which also makes its appearance as the veils and screens on which its operations are displayed This is the virtual reality which is also the absence of the penis and its power but already more than the void The matrix emerges as the processes of an abstract weaving which produces or fabricates what man knows as nature his materials the fabrics the screens on which he projects his own identity

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. Even the drawloom which is often dated back to the China of 1000 BC involves sophisticated orderings of warp and weft if it is to produce the complex designs common in the silks of this period. This means that 'information is needed in large amounts for the weaving of a complex ornamental pattern. Even the most ancient Chinese examples required that about 1500 different warp threads be lifted in various combinations as the weaving proceeded' (Morrison and Morrison 1961: xxxiv). With pedals and shuttles the loom becomes what one historian refers to as the most complex human engine of them all a machine which 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 The weaver was integrated into the machinery bound up with its operations linked limb by limb to the processes. In the Middle Ages and before the artificial memories of the printed page squared paper charts were used to store the information necessary to the accurate development of the design. In early 18th-century Lyons Basyle Bouchon developed a mechanism for the automatic selection of threads using an early example of the punched paper rolls which were much later to allow pianos to play and type to be cast. This design was developed by Falcon a couple of years later who introduced greater complexity with the use of punched cards rather than the roll. And it was this principle on which Jacquard based his own designs for the automated loom which revolutionized the weaving industry when it was introduced in the 1800s and continues to guide its contemporary development. Jacquard's machine strung the punch cards together finally automating the operations of the machine and requiring only a single human hand.Jacquard's system of punch card programs brought the information age to the beginning of the 19th century. His automated loom was the first to store its own information functioning with its own software an early migration of control from weaver to machinery.
The woman at her hand-loom writes Margaret Mead controls the tension of the weft by the feeling in her muscles and the rhythm of her body motion; in the factory she watches the loom and acts at externally stated intervals as the operations of the machine dictate them. When she worked at home she followed her own rhythm and ended an operation when she felt by the resistance against the pounding mallet or the feel between her fingers that the process was complete. In the factory she is asked to adjust her rhythm to that of the rhythm prescribed by the factory; to do things· according to externally set time limits

Mead again provides an insight into the intimacy of the connection between body and process established by weaving and its disruption by the discipline of the factory She is asked to adjust her rhythm to that of the rhythm prescribed by the factory but what is her own rhythm what is the beat by which she wove at home?vWhat is this body to which weaving is so sympathetic? If woman is identified as weaver her rhythms can only be known through its veils. Where are the women? Weaving spinning tangling threads at the fireside. Who are the women? Those who weave. It is weaving by which woman is known; the activity of weaving which defines her. What happens to the woman asks Mead and to the man's relationship with her when she ceases to fulfil her role to fit the picture of womanhood and wifehood? What-happens to the woman? What is woman without the weaving? A computer programmer perhaps? Ada's computer was a complex loom: Ada Lovelace whose lace work took her name into the heart of the military complex dying in agony hooked into gambling swept into the mazes of number and addiction. The point at which weaving women and cybernetics converge in a movement fatal to history.