found Plant’s connections between women, weaving, and the rise of computer technology and the Net extremely engrossing, particularly as her writing style so conscientiously weaves an enticing web around the reader, drawing connections between things much like her telephone operators connecting message ‘senders’ and ‘receivers.’ Her text becomes an active agent of her argument, convincingly embodying her proposition that women and networks conceive of information differently than men and linear text: like her book, “hypertext programs and the Net are webs of footnotes without central points, organizing principles, hierarchies.” (10) With no clearly defined thesis, labeled center, or linear organization, it sets off an explosion of mental tangents, that frustrated by my training in de-tangling and responding with linear arguments.
Several times I found Plant’s recursive writing pattern developing interesting permutations in her various lines of thought. For example, Plant’s portrayal of women as infrastructure in a male-dominated world gets turned on its head: initially the female operator is “kept in a cage or a booth, under the strict supervision…Like Foucault’s prisoners, she was ‘the object of information, never a subject in communication.’”(120) Yet, like working around a loom, these pools of ‘connectors’ developed connections among themselves, becoming an entity in and of themselves. I liked the Deleuze and Guattari quote she included: “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.”(123)
Like the threat of artificial intelligence one day overcoming man, women’s very role as infrastructure (and the rise of the computer) has, according to Plant, allowed a ‘genderquake’ without men realizing it’s cause. “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.” (38) I thought this a beautiful iteration of the [central?] concept of hysterisis, “the lagging effects behind their causes.”(26) Ada was coding for a machine that wasn’t built for another century; if women are the second gender it is because they emerge victorious with the end of male dominance; the loom, like writing code, is entirely ‘done’ before it beings to run.
This lack of linear one-ness does not fit into the male perception. Hysteria is man’s misunderstanding of woman and woman’s attempt to escape male-dominated hierarchies. Hysteria, the womb, the matrix, a tactile rather than perceptive relationship with one’s surroundings, rhizomes, multiple identities, and the Internet all come together as ‘female.’ In contrast to Plant’s narrative of the Net and the development of technology as tactile, immersive, and multidimensional, Wiener’s cybernetic theory of technology is comically masculine: technology develops for the creation of appendages to man, extending the human boundary through enhancement.