With reference to article by Sadie Plant:
Ada Lovelace is famously known as “Queen of Engines”. Ada Lovelace, with whom the histories of computing and women’s liberation are first directly woven together, is central to this paper. In later decades, both women and computers begin to escape the isolation they share in the home and office establishing their own networks. These, in turn, begin to get in touch with each other in the 1990s. This convergence of
woman and machine is one of the preoccupations of the cybernetic feminism endorsed in this paper, a perspective which owes a good deal to the work of Luce Irigaray who is also important to this discussion. The computer emerges out of the history of weaving, the process so often said to be the quintessence of women’s work. This paper 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.
Today, it is not only woman, but the computer which screens the matrix, which also makes its appearance as the veils and screens on which its operations are displayed.
Ada’s own response was recorded by another woman, who wrote: “While other visitors gazed at the working of the beautiful instrument with a sort of expression, and I dare say the same sort of feeling, that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking glass or hearing a gun... Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working and saw the great beauty of the invention.” Ada had a passion for mathematics at an early age. She was admired and was greatly encouraged by Mary Somerville, herself a prominent figure in the scientific community and author of several scientific texts including the widely praised Connection of the Physical Sciences.
Eventually, and quite unsolicited, she translated a paper by Menabrea on Babbage’s Analytic Engine, later adding her own notes at Babbage’s suggestion. Babbage was enormously impressed with the translation, and Ada began to work with him on the development of the Analytical Engine. Babbage had a tendency to flit between obsessions; a remarkably prolific explorer of the most fascinating questions of science and technology, he nevertheless rarely managed to complete his studies; neither the Difference Engine nor the Analytical Engine were developed to his satisfaction. Ada, on the other hand, was determined to see things through; perhaps her own commitment to Babbage’s machine was greater than his own. Knowing that the Difference Engine had suffered for lack of funding, publicity, and organisation, she was convinced that the Analytical Engine would be better served by her own attentions. She was often annoyed by what she perceived as Babbage’s sloppiness, and after an argument in 1843, she laid down several conditions for the continuation of their collaboration: “can you”, she asked, with undisguised impatience “undertake to give your mind wholly and undividedly, as a primary object that no engagement is to interfere with, to the consideration of all those matters in which I shall at times require your intellectual assistance & supervision; & can you promise not to slur & hurry things over; or to mislay & allow confusion & mistakes to enter into documents &c?” (Ada Lovelace, 14 August, 1843). Babbage signed this agreement, but in spite of Ada’s conditions, ill health and financial crises conspired to prevent the completion of the machine.
Ada Lovelace herself worked with a mixture of coyness and confidence; attributes which often extended to terrible losses of self esteem and megalomaniac delight in her own brilliance. Sometimes she was convinced of her own immortal genius as a mathematician; “I hope to bequeath to future generations a Calculus of
the Nervous System” (Ada Lovelace, 15 November, 1844). “I am proceeding in a track quite peculiar & my own, I believe.” At other times, she lost all confidence, and often wondered whether she should not have pursued her musical abilities. Ada was always trapped by the duty to be dutiful; caught in a cleft stick of moral
obligations she did not understand.
Ada’s letters and indeed her scientific papers are full of suspicions of her own strange relation to humanity. Babbage called her his fairy, because of her dexterous mind and light presence, and this appealed to Ada’s inherited romanticism. “I deny the Faireism to be entirely imaginary,” she wrote: “That Brain of mine is something more than merely mortal.” When one of her thwarted admirers wrote to her: “That you are a peculiar—very peculiar—specimen of the feminine race, you are yourself aware,” he could only have been confirming an opinion she already—and rather admiringly—had of herself. Even of her own writing, she wrote: “I am quite thunderstruck by the power of the writing. It is especially unlike a woman’s style surely but neither can I compare it with any man’s exactly.”
Ada may have been Babbage’s fairy, but she was not allowed to forget that she was also a wife, mother, and victim of countless ‘female disorders’. She had three children by the age of twenty-four, of whom she later wrote: “They are to me irksome duties & nothing more”.
Ada Lovelace considered the greatest achievement of the Analytical Engine to be that “not only the mental and material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other.” Her software already encouraged the convergence of nature and intelligence, which guides the subsequent development of information technology.
The disruption of family relations caused by the introduction of mechanics to any of the household tasks shatters the scenery of female identity: mechanisation saves time and labor, but these were not the issue: if women were not the weavers and water-carriers, who would they be? These labours themselves had been woven into the appearance of woman; weaving was more than an occupation and, like other patriarchal
assignments, functioned as “one of the components of womanhood.”
Like woman, software systems are used as man’s tools, his media, and his weapons; all are developed in the interests of man, but all are poised to betray him. The computer, like woman, is both the appearance and the possibility of simulation. Software, in other words, has its screens as well: it too has a user-friendly face it turns to man, and for it, as for woman, this is only its camouflage. The machines and the women mimic their humanity, but they never simply become it.
“There is nothing like unto women”, writes Irigaray: “They go beyond all simulation.” Perhaps it was always the crack, the slit, which marked her out, but what she has missed is not the identity of the masculine. More than Babbage, still less Menabrea, it was Ada which persisted: in recognition of her work, the United States Defence Department named its primary programming language ADA, and today her name shouts from the spines of a thousand manuals. Indeed, as is rarely the case, it really was her own name which survived in Ada’s case, neither her initials, nor even the names of her husband or her father. It is ADA herself who lives on, in her own name; her footnotes secreted in the software of the military machine.
By
Sunaina Donimath
EE09B037
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