Rhetoric Review ISSN: 0735-0198 (Print) 1532-7981 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hrhr20 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. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 156 View Crossmark data 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 Alan Turing 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 Andrew Hodges’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 Turing Machine. 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,