Technology: Techno vs. Nomos

Patrick is right on in terms of the text's fragments; these dipping ins and outs, these chaotic patterns of history, theory, and critique. The translation of the book itself into a woman's language where the reader must multi-task, anticipate passages, and create connections on the fly (the tasks of the female) intrigues me. This book emphasizes itself what technology is.

Plant appropriates (or by her definition, takes back what was already stolen from the silent women who manifested it) technology as a feminine characteristic. From the repetitive, process intensive, and laborious nature of needlework to the textile mill, we can see the entire progress of technology from Plant's point of view.

We now speak a feminine language with technology!
"The roundabout, circuitous connections with which woman have always been associated and the information networking at which they have excelled now becomes protocols for everyone" (144).

However, when trying to think of some concrete definitions of this language, my arrival at page 48 and 50 lead me to believe I need to unpack this section in class in order to understand a major point of Plant's- the introduction of the techno vs. the nomos.

On page 48, Plant tells of the US adopting the guerrilla fighting techniques of the Viet Cong (essentially distributed networks) for use with ARPAnet (a govt. sponsored network). Plant then goes on to describe how technology itself is a fusing of these two realms: the techno, or "the faculty that distinguishes parts," and the nomos, a nomad "without property, enclosure or measure."

She then goes on to say that this is the "same ambivalence is inscribed in computer code... the binary and the digital, or the symbols of a logical identity which does not indeed put everything on one hand or the other, and the digits of mathematics, full of intensive potential, which are not counted by the hand but on the fingers and, sure enough, arrange themselves in pieces of eight rather than binary pairs" (50).

These two realms must always co-exist, or exists simultaneously: "The techno and the digital are never perceived to run free of the coordinating eyes and hands of logic and its binary codes. But logic is nothing without their virtual plane. They are the infrastructure and superstructure" (50).

I kept feeling like I was misreading this section, so I wanted to make sure I understand Plant's use of techno, digital, logic, and binary. I understand this "productive" aspect of the nomos, but why still rely on the unified aspect of the techno? Is this what she means by a self-organizing system that constantly changes identity? Why do we need the techno here at all then?

I feel this section relates to our previous discussion of flickering signifiers and I will try to think of another way to map these relations down. I came up with the idea of the loop (from programming languages) as a possible example of this concept- it is so logical (it takes in an input as its function and produces an output after it runs a predetermined algorithm on the input), but it can also become infinite, destroy itself, become recursive, or traverse and morph an entire database (all of these properties which are much more in tune with feminine language). Perhaps her discussion of perceptrons on page 143 could better inform this passage (the inclusion of a self-mutating homeostasis system with no fixed identity)?

This discussions seems like it also feeds into why technology is a destructive force, where "masters who are liable to get replaced" (88) happens in the first place. The domination of women in the new information economy, the success of the east over the west, the failure of those that tried to pioneer this new system (American science and military) to take advantage of it. It really plays against the idea of technology = power = wealth that we read about last week. Why would the privileged destroy themselves in such a way ties back to the techno needing the nomos.