Rhetoric Review

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Embodying Turing’s Machine: Queer, Embodied Rhetorics in the History of Digital Computation

Patricia Fancher

To cite this article: Patricia Fancher (2018) Embodying Turing’s Machine: Queer, Embodied Rhetorics in the History of Digital Computation, Rhetoric Review, 37:1, 90-104, DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2018.1395268 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2018.1395268

Published online: 26 Dec 2017.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=hrhr20 Rhetoric Review, Vol. 37, No. 1, 90–104, 2018 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2018.1395268

PATRICIA FANCHER University of California, Santa Barbara

Embodying Turing’s Machine: Queer, Embodied Rhetorics in the History of Digital Computation

Although has been cast as a thinker who separates mind and body, this article approaches his technical writing anew through the theoretical lenses of embodied rhetoric and queer rhetoric. Alan Turing’s technical and theoretical writings are shown to be lively with embodied, gendering, and queer rhetoric. This article also argues that queer, embodied experiences ground Turing’s contributions toward early digital computation. Turing’s rheto- ric resists norms in technical communication that expect stable and complete knowledge. Instead, Turing is an outlier who reminds us that queer, embodied rhetorics can complicate and expand our understanding of technical and scientific communication.

“Bodies never quite comply.” — Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter

“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.” —Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”

Alan Turing has been celebrated as a father of digital computation and as a visionary of Artificial Intelligence (AI).1 He earned a “whiz kid” reputation in mathematics for solving the problem of decidability: An abstract axiom that had been puzzled over by the world’s leading mathematicians for decades. In the process, Turing also laid a theoretical foundation for the development of digital computation.2 He was only twenty-four years old at the time. But before he turned forty, his life took a tragic turn: The British government found Turing guilty of “gross indecency” because he was a gay man. He was sentenced to chemical castration and died of an apparent suicide at the age of forty-two. Now, he is both celebrated as an innovator and mourned as a victim. Alan Turing’s theories and inventions helped move computation out of human hands and into computers. He argued that machines—not just humans of flesh and blood—could perform intelli- gence. For these accomplishments he has long been identified as a key figure who continues to widen the chasm between bodies and minds. In different ways, this has been argued by J. David Bolter, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Wendy Chun.

90 Embodying Turing's Machine 91

However, Alan Turing’s technical writing tells a fully embodied story. I argue that Alan Turing’s writing and his theoretical and technical innovations are constituted through embodied rhetoric, and that his embodied rhetoric is the ground upon which his theoretically and technically inventive thinking were based. Additionally, I locate ways in which Turing’s embodied rhetoric is a queer rhetoric not only because Turing was a gay man, but also because Turing’s rhetoric sustains a queer resistance to complete, stable conclusions. Turing is an outlier in technical discourses: His queer rhetorics make visible the significance of bodies, gender, and sexuality within fields that are typically understood as objective, abstract, and purely logical. I find that Alan Turing’s embodied experience and his rhetorical strategies do not comply with the disciplinary conventions for producing and composing knowledge. While Judith Butler’s influential early theories reveal the disciplining that composes gendered performances, she also reminds us that “bodies never quite comply” (2). The disciplined performances of our bodily styles are never perfectly applied or regulated. Alan Turing was surely disciplined into the conventions of mathematics, which enforce disembodied, objective standards for writing. He was also disciplined into a culture of heteronormativity and homophobia. As I will show, Turing’s body, writing, and inventions do not quite comply—not completely. His texts are lively with embodied experience and his arguments leave questions open and prevent conclusive arguments. I will proceed by analyzing two of Turing’s most famous articles: “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” which was published in 1936 and “Computing Machinery and Intelli- gence” from 1950.3 I also relate these texts to Turing’s life by drawing upon ’s extensive biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma. In my analysis of both articles, I locate queer, embodied rhetoric within Turing’s innovative thinking and his technical writing.

Turing’s Dual Legacy: Disembodied Logic or Queer Epistemology Within cultural and media theory, Alan Turing has been placed as a figure who wedges even wider the separation between mind and body through his theories of computation and artificial intelligence. This claim is most extensively argued by Bolter in Turing’s Man, which posits “Turing’s Man” as a way of understanding human bodies and human lives as immaterial, purely logical, and regulated. Bolter’s larger argument is that digital computation has become the primary metaphor for understanding human minds: bodiless, logical, information processors. Hayles also identifies Turing’s article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” as an important “birth” for what she identifies as a posthuman subjectivity:

At the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that “intelligence” becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than an action in the human life-world ...Inthepush to achieve machines that can think, researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at the heart of the Turing test. (xi)

Hayles’s posthuman subject, like Bolter’s “Turing’s Man,” is part of a larger cultural shift in which information loses its material specificity and thinking loses its body (3–4). Kittler and Chun both reinscribe this narrative and focus specifically on Turing’s split between code and machine in the . According to their arguments, this split erased the materiality of technology under the rule of code. 92 Rhetoric Review

This erasure of bodies is consistent with dominant rhetorical conventions in mathematics. G. Mitchell Reyes identifies the norms of mathematical discourse as a contemporary form of “Platonic Realism” (475). Mathematics denies “precisely the Person—who is finite, lives outside of the formal mathematical code” (479). Evelyn Fox Keller argues that mathematics maintains a different relation to knowledge than sciences like chemistry, biology, or physics (39–55). These latter fields locate knowledge within some material, observable reality. Mathematics, on the other hand, is separate from material reality and draws knowledge from abstract proofs. Mathematics—perhaps more than any other field of study—has cultivated a stringent objectivity and a discursive exclusion of the material, embodied sites of knowledge production. Given that Alan Turing was a trained mathematician, we should expect his scientific writing to conform to these conventions. There is, however, another narrative that causes me to look more closely at Alan Turing’s writing and rhetoric. Turing has been re-narrated as a foundational figure in digital computation. This time, the narrative is not of disembodied logic, but rather of queer affect within digital computation. At a time during which England enforced anti-homosexuality laws, Alan Turing was a relatively open gay man. In 1952, he was a victim of homophobic laws, one of the many victims of “gross indecency” laws and punished through chemical castration.4 Several scholars have interpreted Turing’s life and his writing as rich and productive examples of queer affect, queer writing, and queer epistemology (Wilson; King; Clinton; Gaboury). Impor- tantly, all of these scholars, most explicitly Elizabeth Wilson and Alan Clinton, argue queer subjectivity and experience as epistemic: Queer embodiment and subjectivity shape Alan Turing’s thinking. This is not to say that Turing’s inventions and theories are reducible to products of a queer sexuality (although this is what Lassègue posits). Rather, Wilson makes a more nuanced claim that emotions and thinking are “projected into each other. Cognition inhabits and modifies feeling, as feeling inhabits and modifies thinking” (22). Knowledge and thinking are intertwined with a complex network of practices, institutions, and power relations. The co-assembling relationship between affect and thinking is consistent with current rhetorical research regarding embodied rhetoric and queer rhetoric.

Theoretical Frame: Embodied Rhetorics and Queer Rhetorics

We have, as a field, widely theorized the interconnected and interacting relations between embodiment and rhetoric. As Johnson et al.’s “Key Concept Statement” in Peitho opens, “To think about rhetoric, we must think about bodies” (39). Similarly, Dolmage argues, “rhetoric has a body —has bodies” (“Metis” 22). The embodiment of rhetoric includes both discourses about bodies as well as the rhetorical potency of bodies themselves. Our discourses about bodies compose our knowledge, shape our experience, and define how we know bodies. Our bodies give life and energy to our words and shape knowledge. Taking up a similar method as Jennifer Lin LeMesurier, I look for traces of embodiment and embodied experience in Alan Turing’s writing. Embodiment, according to LeMesurier, is rhetori- cally potent even when physical bodies are not seen, felt, or inhabiting physical space. She defines a body:

. . . as a functional, inventional actor and bearer of ideological weight, capable of producing rhetorical influence. This parsing of the moving, sensing, biological body is not an attempt to reaffirm idealist/materialist binaries. Rather, my goal is to perceive how symbolic systems and bodies are always already intertwined so as to better Embodying Turing's Machine 93

understand what embodied and material effects are already present but unaccounted for in rhetorical work. (363)

LeMesurier identifies traces of the rhetorical influence through metaphors of embodied experience. Her theories insist that all texts are shaped by embodied rhetoric because all texts are composed by and for bodies. In addition, I understand embodied rhetoric as epistemic. Jay Dolmage theorizes metis as a form of embodied rhetoric that produces knowledge before and beyond symbolic systems. Dolmage emphasizes the epistemic potency of physical movement, experience, and the particularity of embodied difference (“Breathe Upon Us”). Then he builds on his research into metis as cunning rhetoric to argue that “extraordinary bodies should be the bodies of rhetoric” (“Metis” 8). These “extraordinary bodies,” like those of Metis and Medusa, show us that bodily rhetoric is powerful precisely because of bodily diversity and particularity. Embodied knowledge is produced through life, breath, and movement of unique bodies in the world. Turing’s unique embodied rhetoric is a mode of queer rhetoric, and queerness is in itself epistemic. Queer rhetorics have been theorized for the potential to better integrate LGBTQ people and communities as well as for its potentials to offer alternative theories of rhetoric, including our well-established notions of logos, ethos, and pathos (Alexander and Rhodes). Alexander and Rhodes define queer rhetoric as reliant, first, on identifications of the relationships between sexuality, knowledge, and power. Queer rhetorics also rework “identifications to disrupt and reroute the flows of power, particularly discursive power.” Cox and Faris define queer theory as “a body of work . . . that examines and critiques discourses of sexuality with the goal of transforming society.” Alexander and Rhodes as well as Bessette add that queer rhetoric includes a resistance to normativity, including normative sexual/gender binaries and capitalist normative drives for pro- ductivity and acceptability. Given that queer rhetorics are defined by their anti-normativity, Bessette argues that queer rhetoric shifts as the context of what is “normative” also shifts. By applying rhetorical theory to queer scholarship, Bessette argues that queer scholarship can work historically and imaginatively, while also accounting for material, cultural, and historical contexts. The local contingent relations that Turing is situated in include the details of his texts, his unique embodied experience, and also his relationship with the computers that he produced. Queer embodiments, experiences, and identities shape and produce knowledge. Sedgwick famously claimed: “An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition” (1). Although we accept this broad understanding of queer epistemology, most research on queer rhetorics focus on identity, politics, media, emotions, affect, and activism (Cox and Farris). I am inspired by the rich, anti- normative challenges that this work presents. I seek to further this research by identifying queer epistemology within technical and scientific discourses. However, identifying queer rhetorics in Turing’s archive has its challenges. As Alexander and Rhodes note, the queer archive will always be marked by silence. This is a disciplined silence of a marginalized and oppressed people. This is the silence that accompanies trauma. Likewise, while the Turing archive is robust with documents, drafts, and correspondences, the archive remains relatively silent on the relationship between Turing’s sexuality and his technical work. While Turing was open about his sexuality to close friends, he was publicly guarded due to England’s anti-homosexuality laws. 94 Rhetoric Review

While these laws date back to 1885, post-WWII England saw an era of heightened homophobia, and gay men were especially disciplined (Hodges 500–05). Homosexuality was seen as an affront to the nationalist values of conformity, masculinity, and rigid family roles. After the war, men were returning to work, wives to the home, and life was to go on as it had. In a modern period of scientific progress, homosexuality was less often moralized in religious terms. Instead, social, psychological, and biological sciences were marshaled to define homosexuality as a physical and social ill that had no place in the British state (Hodges 496). In this environment, it is no wonder that we should find silences and gaps in Turing’s archive. In the face of these resounding silences, queer rhetorical research identifies echoes of queer embodiment. I will look to affirm the productive potential of Turing’s queer, embodied experience for his thinking, his writing, and his contributions to developing digital computation.

Embodied Rhetorics in “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”

In 1935, Alan Turing was a recent graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, and unsure of where his life would take him next. He was given a fellowship at Cambridge, granting him a small salary and extensive time for research (Hodges 94–95). Turing made good use of this time by writing “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” which addresses an abstract problem in logical mathematics and makes a theoretical contribution to digital computation. Embodied experiences are Turing’s starting place for solving this abstract theoretical problem and innovating digital computation.

Embodying Computing

In “On Computable Numbers,” Alan Turing demonstrates that mathematics is not a decidable science. To make this conclusion, Turing also theorizes the Turing Machine, which was later attributed as a theoretical foundation for digital computation. In 1900, David Hilbert posed the Entscheidungsproblem, or the problem of decidability, that asked if mathematics was a completely decidable science. Hilbert and the majority of prominent mathematicians assumed that every mathematical question could be solved given precise terms. Turing identified the Halting Problem as an exception to this rule. Copeland stresses that Turing’s argument specifically addresses mathematics through effective method, which is the method of logical and mathematical proof through finite, precise, reproducible instructions (42). In Hodges’s words, this problem asks, “Did there exist a definite method which could, in principle, be applied to any assertion?” (91). Turing demonstrates that mathematics was not capable of deciding or resolving every mathematical problem through effective method. Embodied rhetoric appears when Turing first introduces the computing machine, which at first is a human computer. Turing introduces his Turing Machine by writing, “We may compare a man in the process of computing a real number to a machine” (“On Computable” 59). As he develops this argument, he begins with the embodied practice of computing: “Computing is normally done by writing certain symbols on paper. We may suppose this paper is divided into squares like a child’s arithmetic book” (“On Computable” 75). This computing man would have been familiar to Turing in two different ways: (1) the typical model of a computer would have been a woman’s white-collar work and (2) Turing would have spent many hours performing calculations. Embodying Turing's Machine 95

At the time, a computer was a person who computes. This involved performing tedious calculations. Like secretaries and typists, this work was predominantly considered women’s work.5 Women had been computers since the mid-eighteenth century, and this became an indus- trialized occupation by 1790 when French engineer and mathematician Gaspard de Prony employed and directed a team of women computers (Grier). In large rooms, women would calculate the same formulas over and over again. This women’s work was seen as non-specialized and the women were understood to be replaceable (Hicks). As a young man, Turing would have performed computing tasks for himself. Day in and day out, Turing would have spent his time writing calculations. This familiar human process becomes the model for his Turing Machine. Turing continues to attend to computing as embodied work by accounting for the unique bodily limitations and needs of human computers: “It is always possible for the computer to break off from his work, to go away and forget all about it, and later to come back and go on with it. If he does this, he must leave a note of instructions, written in some standard form” (“On Computable” 79). This computing man was given a very complex calculation, which was typical and tedious. These calculations would take any man a very long time, which means he would have to take breaks. Turing notes, before breaking, the computer would need to write down instructions for him or herself “in some standard form” in order to know what to do next. Then, Turing suggests that this man is especially lazy: “Suppose that the computer works in such a desultory manner that he never does more than one step at a sitting” (“On Computable” 79). This computer has to get up after each step, perhaps to get a drink of water or stretch. Each step of the calculation must therefore be written down in the most basic terms. As Turing’s reasoning continues, obviously, this lazy man writing down instructions would not be an efficient method of solving any mathematical proof. To replace this hypothetical, desultory man, Turing describes a kind of machine that can read an infinitely long tape of paper, mark 0 or 1, and move the tape from right to left. With these simple functions, Turing describes his Turing Machine. In particular, Turing uses the bodily needs of standing up, taking breaks, and performing lazy work habits as an important rhetorical step that helps Turing to separate hardware (human computer) from software (the “standard form” instructions of noting each step of the calculation). These instructions for each step became the prototype for computer programming. Turing’s peers found his “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidung- sproblem” and, in particular, his method of embodying the process of computation to be highly unusual. Hodges noted: “It was not only a matter of abstract mathematics, not only a play of symbols, for it involved thinking about what people did in the physical world” (107). When Turing’s professor of mathematics Max Newman read Turing’s draft, Newman “could hardly believe that so simple and direct an idea as the Turing Machine would answer the Hilbert problem over which many had been laboring for five years since Gödel had disposed of the other Hilbert questions” (Hodges 112). Its originality can be seen most clearly when comparing it to Alonzo Church’s method for solving the problem of decidability, which was published just a few short months before Turing’s article. Church and Turing arrived at the same conclusion. However, Church’s reasoning remains in the realm of abstract mathematical proofs with no connection or application to the material world (Copeland 44–45). In the field broadly, there was very little response to either Turing’s ideas or to his method of embodying computation. Hodges attributes this to disciplinary separation between applied and theoretical mathematics. He explains that while the Turing Test is an application of theoretical mathematics, Turing offers insufficient practical guide- lines and the article most closely addresses a theoretical problem. In the end, it is unlikely that many applied mathematicians would have read Turing’s article (124–25). 96 Rhetoric Review

By starting with the embodied experience of calculation, Turing ties mathematical theory directly to the concrete, embodied process of computing. Hodges describes this article as “the necessary bridge between the world of logic and the world in which people did things” (125). The embodied reasoning has rhetorical effects that ease understanding and allow others to build on Turing’s thinking. By connecting embodied experiences while computing and the hypothetical computing machine, Turing not only solves a longstanding problem of theoretical mathematics (which Church’s method also did), but also outlines important theoretical steps towards developing a digital computer.

Queer Epistemology

Turing’s thinking is more than embodied—it reflects queer ways of knowing. Turing arrives at his conclusion by focusing on the exception to the rule. While his article does mechanize computation, it also identifies contradictions—especially the Halting Problem—that remind us that mechanized computation through definite method is inherently limited. The Halting Problem cannot be solved through effective methods. If a computer (human or machine) were given the Halting Problem, the computer would never reach a conclusion. When Turing replaces a human computer with a machine, then the machine can run infinitely. In the case of the Halting Problem, the computer would run infinitely because the problem would circulate back repetitively, never reaching a conclusion. Turing’s conclusion is the final end to the dream posited by Hilbert and an entire school of mathematics that imagined mathematics as a garden of logic, order, and control. Because of this, Gaboury locates Turing’s work as a queer foundation in the history of digital computation (“On Uncomputable Numbers”). Gaboury defines queerness as a method that opposes productivity, stability, and legibility. Turing’s most famous theoretical work is queer precisely because his ideas resist totalizing, complete answers. In both style and theoretical significance, Turing’s queer, embodied rhetorics can be seen as resistant or non-compliant with dominant, disciplinary conventions. In particular, Turing’s conclusion was resistant to the notion that mathematical progress was inherently stable and knowable, and in the process, he contributed to a paradigm shift in mathematics (Hodges 84–86; Copeland 46–49). Mathematics would always have problems and need creativity, and Turing looked forward to that surprising, creative work. Turing presupposes that mathematics is an embodied, physical process. The embodied foundation of his article allows him to argue that mathematics is not nearly as stable and universal as Hilbert hypothesized. By starting with that embodied process, Turing was able to clear the theoretical air. In the end, an embodied rhetoric and a queer rhetoric that resists stability and productivity allowed Turing to demonstrate the limits of mathematics and also theoretically to develop the Turing Machine.

Embodied Rhetorics in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” The next article that I will analyze, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” published in 1950, is Turing’s most read publication. Compared to “On Computable Numbers,” Turing’s writing style in “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is both surprisingly clear and entertaining for an article by a mathematician. For example, when addressing objections, Turing writes with grace and wit: “We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane. The conditions of our game make these Embodying Turing's Machine 97

disabilities irrelevant” (442). Turing goes on to address common objections that were raised most directly by Geoffrey Jefferson. Turing weaves philosophical, rhetorical, and technical questions that invite readers to consider the potential for machine intelligence. At this time, Alan Turing was in a very different place in his life. During WWII, Turing established his professional and intellectual legacy through his work developing early versions of computers for the British intelligence war efforts. In 1948, Turing became the deputy director of the Computing Laboratory at the . Turing settled in. He purchased a home, cultivated romantic relationships as well as friendships, and engaged in hobbies like running and biking. Importantly, he had the freedom to experiment with the potential of digital computation. Before too long, Turing’s computers were being programmed to sing songs and write poems. Heady with his success and the freedom to explore a range of possibilities for machine intelligence, Turing wrote “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” for the journal Mind. Turing’s friend Robin Gandy read an early draft of this essay and described it as “not so much a penetrating contribution to philosophy but as propaganda. Turing thought the time had come for philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists to take seriously the fact that computers were not merely calculating engines but were capable of behavior which must be accounted as intelligent” (qtd. in Copeland 433). Turing is less interested in marshaling conclusive, watertight arguments. Rather, this article is a provocation for philosophers, scientists and theorists: They must think imaginatively and crea- tively about the future potential for intelligent machines. In this article, Turing introduces what has become known as the Turing Test, oft-cited evaluation computer intelligence. Next I identify how, in his effort to defend the possibility of machine intelligence, Turing actually locates intelligence through a broader set of embodied experiences. What is especially significant here is that when Turing moves to defend machine intelligence, he not only humanizes computing machinery, he also genders computers as feminine. This gendered aspect is far from a tangent—gendered and sexualized performances are integral to Turing’s thinking and to his knowl- edge production.

Gendering Machine Intelligence

The first way that Turing embodies this intelligent machine is with a test of gender identity. Turing opens by replacing the question “[C]an machines think?” with a more specific question that can be tested through an imitation game. To introduce this imitation game, Turing starts with a gendered imitation game:

It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the two is the man and which is the woman. (“Computing Machinery” 441)

The interrogator can ask the man and woman questions, but the interrogator can neither see nor hear the participants. In this game, deception is the rule. In this first test, the woman only needs to be honest while the man seeks to trick the interrogator: “It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification” (441). After establishing this first game of gendered deception, Turing replaces the man with a computer: “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in the game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he 98 Rhetoric Review

does when the game is played between a man and a woman?” (441). Read literally, machine intelligence is like a man pretending to be a woman. This passage is the most obviously queer expression of artificial intelligence. Turing assumes that gender is performative and compares the performance of gender to the performance of intelligence. However, contemporary Turing Tests erase gender (Copeland and Proudfoot; Schnelle; Whitby). Hodges quickly assumes Turing’s use of gender unnecessary to the general concept: Gender is a distracting choice, a red herring (“Computing Machinery” 415). Even Turing erases the gendered aspect of the test in later arguments for mechanical intelligence (“Can Automatic”). The erasure of the gendered performance in this test is one example in which queer rhetorics have been silenced within discourses about AI. However, within queer theory, Alan Turing’s gendered imitation game is of crucial importance for understanding both Alan Turing as well as AI. Clinton explains:

[A] side effect of Turing’s formulation is the implication that “man” and “woman” are already simulations, an accumulation of codes. Who is more apt at producing the “correct” or “convincing” answers may vary more according to the rhetorical skills of the participants than to their biology (or lack thereof). From this moment on, digital technology’s association with gender-bending, its aptitude for queerness, was ineradic- ably grounded. (218)

What is more, as we keep progressing through the article, we find that the queer gendering of machine intelligence is not simply at the beginning of the article and then suppressed. Rather, Turing implicitly codes gendered performances, especially femininity, into the computer. He includes feminizing phrases and metaphors throughout this article. He asks, “Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair? . . . We do not wish to penalize the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions?” (“Computing Machinery” 441–42). Here, Turing humorously imagines how poorly his computer will perform when evaluated for its physical beauty. When considering what qualifies as intelligence, Turing writes a beautiful list of activities that qualify as intelligence but that the machine cannot do:

Fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, make someone fall in love with it, learn from experience, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought, have as much diversity of behavior as a man, do something really new. (“Computing Machinery” 453)

By citing experiences like falling in love and eating strawberries and cream, Turing places bodily experiences central to machine intelligence. He also implicitly feminizes intelligence by including emotions: Falling in love and making someone [or some machine] fall in love with a machine. He seemingly aligns the performance of intelligence with feminized embodied experiences. These embodied experiences are the very ground on which he defends the possibility of machine intelligence. Consider what Turing imagined this machine could do: perform calculations, play chess, write poems, learn languages, and sing songs. In his experience, this machine is doing creative, intelligent work. Some of these tasks, like math and chess, are characterized as masculine activities. Turing himself was an avid chess player and almost exclusively played chess with men. Turing suggested Embodying Turing's Machine 99

that the machine could do things that are associated with femininity, like write poetry and sing songs. The pursuit of these arts, especially by connecting them to the sciences, was a decidedly feminizing move. This brought considerations of taste, emotion, and pleasure into a field that had been dominated by a telos of productivity, efficiency, and rationality. The forms of thinking that are traditionally associated with masculinity—mathematics, rule-based tasks, logical proofs—were tasks that Turing already knew that the machine could do (Hodges 388–89). In order to prove its intelligence, Turing would need to also prove that the machine could perform modes of thinking that have traditionally been gendered feminine. The machine’s access to intelligence hangs on its ability to be gendered feminine. One might expect that Turing would use masculine terms to describe the predominantly male group of engineers, technicians, and scientists. However, he rhetorically feminizes this group with a maternal analogy:

Suppose Mother wants Tommy to call at the cobbler’s every morning on his way to school to see if her shoes are done, she can ask him afresh every morning. Alternatively she can stick up a notice once and for all in the hall which he will see when he leaves for school . . . and also destroy the notice when he comes back if he has the shoes with him. (“Computing Machinery” 445)

Programming is compared to a mother training a child. This work is done in a domestic sphere (the home) and for domestic pursuits (getting shoes fixed). Later, Turing identifies the work of setting up the initial state of mind (either human or machine) as a “birth” (“Computing Machinery” 460). These (male) mothers first birth, then raise and train their “baby” to perform tasks, learn new skills, sing songs, and write poetry. For any technical writing, Turing is unusual, but his use of gender is especially unusual for the time. Feminizing technologies is by no means unusual. Pilots name their planes women’s names. However, Turing’s use of feminizing discursive practices is a criteria for intelligence, not a service or tool. Feminine gendering is a defining quality of Turing’s test of intelligence, thus making the feminization particularly important. Turing’s choice to feminize computers is especially noteworthy given what Brian Easlea’s research demonstrates: When building the technology for nuclear warfare, American engineers and scientists consistently framed themselves as fathers birthing and breeding their masculine nuclear weapons. Easlea is left to conclude, “[O]ur whole culture is basically masculine in character but modern science is its cutting edge” (7). Feminist scholars and gender theory scholars have demonstrated the many ways that computers, weapons, and other technologies were gendered as masculine, thereby becoming technological extensions of masculine strength and power (see Grint and Gill; Seidler; Cockburn). Contrary to this convention, Turing genders both the machine and its inventors as feminine.

Queering Intelligence

In this article, Turing’s rhetoric of embodiment is not only gendered, but it is also queer on multiple levels. First, he describes gender as a performance. Therefore, gender is nothing natural, essential, or even stable. Rather, gender is flexible, an act, and a cunning display of intelligence. This was especially unusual given the rigid gender roles in post-WWII England. His understanding of gender seems to also parallel some of his ideas on intelligence. Original or innate intelligence, 100 Rhetoric Review

Turing argues, is not necessary nor even possible for machines or humans: “There is nothing new under the sun.’ Who can be certain that ‘original work’ that he has done was not simply the growth of the seed planted in him by teaching, or the effect of following well-known general principles” (“Computing Machinery” 455). Turing reminds us that the intelligence of humans and machines are equally shaped by education, ability, and previous experience, even language and culture. The representations of gender as performative and cultural are important traces of Turing’s own embodied experiences that shaped his thinking. As a gay man in a repressive society in which gay men were not only pathologized but also criminalized, Turing would have been familiar with performances of gender and sexuality. He had few friends, but he was open, honest, and unashamed of this sexuality with those friends. Steve Barbone explains, “Turing’s place in homosexual studies is problematic because he neither hid nor proclaimed his sexuality and would likely wonder why it might concern anyone anyway. Perhaps his own inability to grasp why his sexuality should be of interest to others is what makes his an enigma both to those in and out of gay studies” (594). In addition, when Turing was charged with “gross indecency,” he consistently declared his unrepen- tant attitude (Hodges 471). And in so doing, he openly resisted not only the laws, but also the presupposition that he had anything to be defensive about. Turing’s rhetoric is also queer in that he resists conclusive answers and instead explores new potentials. He invites us to relish in the surprises and uncertainties of invention. Like his article “On Computable Numbers,” in which Turing posited that mathematics was not “decidable” but would always have questions, problems, and surprises, his article “Computing Machinery and Intelli- gence” is also an invitation to enjoy the open-ended, surprising potential of computer intelligence. When arguing for the potential of machine intelligence, Turing bluntly states: “Machines take me by surprise with great frequency” (“Computing Machinery” 455). This capacity to surprise is all too familiar for most computer users. Sherry Turkle’s research demonstrates that most users tend to understand our computers as somewhere between inanimate object and animate subject. Turing is not offering a definitive, conclusive definition of machine intelligence. He is asking us to look for and learn from these technological surprises as well.

Embodying Technical Communication

In both of the articles that I have analyzed, Turing invites readers to consider the unstable, surprising, unknowable aspects of mathematics and digital computation. In his first major article “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” Turing challenges mathematical theory that assumes mathematics is pure, abstract, and perfectly decidable. Then, in his most famous article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing invites readers to consider the astonishingly creative work that computing machinery may be able to perform, and thereby challenges us to evaluate how we define intelligence. By extension, Turing’s arguments also dispute the persistent notion that scientific progress is always good, productive, and rational. This challenge is especially significant given the scientific justifications for homophobia that were emerging at the time. Hodges explains that, during and after WWII, scientific rationality replaced religious virtue as a defining quality of the British state. Science and engineering would repair the British Empire and its people, or so was the hope (497–99). David Serlin describes this era as a time in which nationalist pride was enacted on individual bodies and thus creating a surge in technologies that could engineer a more fit and capable body. Along with the push to engineer a more “fit” body, Serlin argues that medical technologies were used to engineer greater degrees of gender conformity. With this rise of scientific progress came the scientific justifications for outright Embodying Turing's Machine 101

violent and demeaning policies towards homosexual people. In particular, hormone therapy— including the chemical castration that Turing was subjected to after being convicted of “gross indecency”—was promoted as a scientific advancement. Its inventors and the judicial system praised themselves for inventing a “cure” for homosexuality, which was physically and psycholo- gically painful and demeaning (Serlin 126–37; Haraway). By resisting the narrative that science, math, and computing were purely logical, rational, and knowable, Turing implicitly places himself at odds with the medical trends that sought to fix, engineer, and replace bodily diversity, in terms of ability, gender, and sexuality. This embodied, queer analysis of Alan Turing’s technical writing demonstrates the importance of embodied rhetoric because no text, no matter how technical, can be truly disembodied, just as no knowledge or logic is ever free of its embodied, cultural, and historical contexts. The interconnec- tions between our lives and our bodies are always there. The traces of the embodied writer/knower are in the text to be found and felt. As I continue my research, I am going back into the Turing archives to more thoroughly analyze the significance of queer rhetoric in context, as Bessette advocates, looking especially to identify the women within Turing’s social network. I will be pursuing the networked approach to understanding the many people who helped to shape the invention of digital computation in England.6 Even within technical and scientific communication, embodied rhetorics are always tied to and even constitutive of knowledge. Turing’s example is instructive because, unlike most mathemati- cians, he made no pretense of objectivity, neutrality, or disinterest. His inventive ideas are whimsical rather than efficient: He compared testing intelligence with testing for gender and his computers sang songs and wrote poetry. As an outlier, Turing’s queer, embodied rhetoric makes visible the ways in which bodies, technologies, and discourses interact to produce new knowledge. Turing’s queer, embodied rhetoric push forward our theories of queer rhetoric and embodied rhetoric by making visible the epistemic power of queer embodiment, even in technical fields. I hope that this article and Turing’s example will open up new lines of research that will further develop queer and embodied rhetorics within technical and scientific rhetorics. We have just begun to study the embodied and queer rhetorics within the rhetoric of science (Milbourne and Hallen- beck; Fountain; and Teston) and technical rhetorics (Frost and Eble; Jones, Moore, and Walton; Fancher). Michael Faris points to the need for queer theory in technical communication with a series of provocative questions: “To what degree is technical communication, implicitly and explicitly, invested in the reproduction of heteronormative culture and politics? . . . Alternatively, where is technical communication implicitly, in unstated and resistant ways, already queer?” Building on these questions, Jones, Moore, and Walton end their antenarrative of technical communication by calling attention to the need for queer rhetorics:

We call for any work at all that acknowledges the need to queer technical communica- tion and resist the binaries that continue to dominate the field. In short, we seek any and all TPC research and pedagogy that embraces perspectives and knowledges that do not necessarily assume an anticultural, Westernized, heteronormative, and patriarchal posi- tionality. (223)

My research on Alan Turing begins to answer that call by demonstrating that queer rhetorics can result in new, rich understanding of historical figures like Alan Turing. Jones et al. identify queer technical communication as that which resists binaries. In Alan Turing’s technical 102 Rhetoric Review

communication, we see this resistance at work as he resists binaries between embodied experience and abstract mathematics. In addition, Turing’s queer technical rhetorics resist stable, conclusive knowledge. Turing maintains that even mathematics is, in some ways unknowable, unpredictable, and delightfully surprising. Of course, queer rhetoric is not confined to historical texts. Rhetorics of bodies and queer rhetorics are located in our contemporary technical communication. If we extend queer and embodied rhetorical analyses into the study of technical and scientific discourses, we can make visible the continued and changing ways that rhetorics of gender, embodiment, and sexuality inform our increasingly technical presents and futures.

Notes 1I owe many thanks to the editor and reviewers of Rhetoric Review, including Elise Verzosa Hurley, Hugh Burns, and the anonymous reviewer whose comments and support significantly improved the clarity of my arguments and encouraged me to see the significance of this research. I am also indebted to Steven B. Katz for his mentoring, guidance, and intellectual generosity in helping me to complete this research, which began as a doctoral dissertation. This article was adapted and revised extensively after graduation with the support and care of a writing group of scholars who embody Anzaldúa’s words, “A woman who writes has power” (33). 2Turing’s status within computer science has been contested. Copeland and Hodges have actively defended Turing’s contribution to the invention of digital computation, especially Turing’s article “On Computable Numbers” as a foundational text that John von Neumann builds upon (see Copeland 21-27). Others have argued that Turing never invented a computer and base these arguments on a strong distinction between theoretical and applied computer science. Turing’s contributions are placed exclusively within theoretical framework, which only later were used to reconstruct a theoretical tradition of computer science (Haigh; Bullynck et al.). 3The original publications can be found at turingarchive.org. “On Computable Numbers” is indexed AMT/B/9. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is indexed AMT/B/19. 4In 2013, the U.K. issued a royal pardon to Alan Turing. In January 2017, the U.K. passed a law that posthumously pardoned all victims of laws criminalizing homosexuality. 5See the recent film Hidden Figures for a popular representation of women computers. 6The popular book Turing’s Cathedral is an excellent example of the social network surrounding Turing in the U.S., which I hope to extend with archival research regarding British digital computation.

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Patricia Fancher is a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she teaches and researches digital media, technical rhetoric, and feminist rhetorics. In addition to her research on digital media, she also designs and produces feminist digital media, which can be found in the Fall 2015 and 2016 issues of Peitho journal. Readers are welcome to contact her at [email protected].