Process and data

In Zeros and Ones, Sadie Plant lays bare the discrepancy between data and process, between male and female. First, she shows that women are woven through the history of the modern computer. Then, in a breathtaking expansion of focus, she redefines the female role in society. Working through the Freudian analysis of femininity and showing the parallels between Anna Freud and Lady Lovelace, Plant disposes with the idea of women as empty shells. She then begins to discuss the problem of the binary.

She points out the parallels between the "ancient logical codes which make the difference between on and off... light and dark... male and female." But she rejects the Lacanian conclusion that zero only exists in relation to one -- that women exist only "as excluded by the nature of things." She shows that women have historically been the processors who made male actions possible and draws the parallel between women and computers: "When computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female. Hardware, software, wetware -- before their beginnings and beyond their ends, women have been the simulators, assemblers, and programmers of the digital machines." She continues on to show "eggs are computers to the simple floppy discs of sperm."

I find the scope of Plant's argument wonderful and strange. By drawing a very concrete parallel between the female and the computer, a host of implications flow into her interrogation. The corollary of process as female is data as male. A computer without data is empty structure, just as data without process or perception is meaningless. Taking the parallel further, matter has no consequence without energy. And energy, process, and computation have eluded theorists in ways similar to those in which femininity eluded Freud.

Plant's arguments pertain to the social history and biological implications of gender, as well as the essence of computation, matter and energy, and binary complements in general. But I am less convinced that her claims apply to the social present of gender. In a sense some Americans, at least, have been degendered by the last few decades. Traditional roles have been inverted, traditional sexuality subverted... people are, for the most part, people these days. But then where to place the truths of Plants argument? How can we claim to be genderless while accepting the essential differences of sex? How can we ascribe gender to abstract lenses with which we make sense of reality, while claiming that we, the observers, have lost that same sense of gender? When we call a thing female or male, what do the terms mean? Are they biological? Or do they pertain more deeply to essential process or essential data underlying the described?