Mimicry, Originality

Stitched between Sadie Plant’s first mention of Alan Turing and her later assessment of the Turing test, the section titled “eve 1” is strategically positioned to complement what follows it in such a way that much of Plant’s decentralized text can be accessed from this node. In discussing the clockwork automata which fascinated a young Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace’s later collaborator, Plant presents a certain logic: “Given that women are ‘not only illusive, but illusions,’ why not ‘supply illusion for illusion’ and ‘spare the woman the trouble of being artificial’?” (86).

It’s a funny coincidence that the name of the author of the novel quoted above contained the name “Adam” and that he wrote of a future “Eve,” the original Judeo-Christian models for a male-female gender binary. Throughout Zeros and Ones, Plant endeavors to expose notions of the original and the unique as nonexistent, as well as to secure an originary position for women in history that proposes that they always already existed in a way that is only becoming easy to understand through the metaphor of the internet. On 122, Plant relates female telephone operators to their "Strowger sisters" (automated switchboard operators), having made the point throughout the text that women have throughout history performed repetitive, clerical (as Licklider might say) tasks. The multiplicity of identity and position that is possible through the internet is one women have enacted throughout time, through multi-tasking, weaving.

Plant’s work resonates with Judith Butler’s suggestion that gender is not essential and does not exist a priori, but is rather constituted through the repetition of stylized gestures. At times Plant’s defense and project to recuperate for women subjectivity as the binary 0 seems to simply group “women” together and then avoid assigning an essence to that category by arguing that the members of that category necessarily explode the idea of the original – which still feels a little too easy.

Plant uses narrative to recover for women the credit for certain technological advancements that are conventionally attributed to men: for example, she suggests that the sight of Anna Freud weaving before her writing father, caused him to write that women wove as a means of obscuring a lack, a failure to be creative (as though weaving itself were not a creative act). A technological advancement like the internet might be easily fit into a narrative of (male) progress; Plant wants us to know that women invented the internet by being, weaving, generating their lives and selves as networks before the Net existed as such.

Back to the Turing test: “The man has to simulate the woman, and the woman has to play herself. Whichever passes as female wins” (90). This simple summary changed the way I’ve been thinking about the Turing test. If the woman wants to pass the test, she might consider exaggerating ideals of femininity to be sure of defeating her male competitor, who participates in the male construction of femininity alluded to by Plant. Again, I thought of Judith Butler, in the sense that performed gestures are imitative and naturalized, and that language performs gender in the Turing test. Later programs (Eliza, Parry, Julia) raised the question: if it talks like a human, is it human? I am also interested in discussing the fear that a facsimile might physically surpass a model (as Edison said, and Turing worried). It is not perhaps a fear of being subsumed by what one has created so much as simply a fear of being shown by one’s creation that notions of reality, humanity, and gender have all been rigorously constructed. Irigaray writes, sardonically, that inferior species always are pure mimicry (83). The fear, apparently, is of realizing that there is nothing but mimicry, that the unity of 1 doesn’t exist.