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The punch card imagination: authorship and early machine programming

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The punch card imagination: authorship and early machine programming

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THE PUNCH CARD IMAGINATION:

AUTHORSHIP AND EARLY MACHINE PROGRAMMING

by

Zachary M. Mann

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
ENGLISH

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Zachary M. Mann
ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to first thank my dissertation adviser, Dr. Alice Gambrell, whose guidance,
kindness, and encouragement provided me constant forward momentum over the course of my
research. I am also grateful for support from the rest of my dissertation committee, Drs. Emily
Anderson, Devin Griffiths, and Tara McPherson, the faculty and staff at USC English, and the
rest of the communities at USC that I have stumbled into.
I want to give additional thanks to Dr. Amy Braden and everyone else with the Mellon
Humanities in a Digital World program at USC; to Dr. Jennifer Alexander and the technology
working group at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine; to Dr. Mark
C. Marino and the USC Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab; and to all my fellow USC
English graduate students who exchanged writing with me over the years.
Finally, none of this would have been possible without my wife, Tamar Altebarmakian,
with whom I worked side by side in our tiny apartment throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Her
company and her support made this all worth doing.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………….…………. ii

List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………… iv

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………..… v

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………… 1

Chapter 1: “Vermin of the Age”: Jonathan Swift, Automation, and the
Reckoning Author…………………………………………………………….. 30

Chapter 2: “New Mythological Machinery”: Jacquard-Woven Art and the
Mechanical Reproduction of the Author………………………………...……. 82

Chapter 3: A Poetics of Operations: Ada Lovelace and the Clerical Labor of
Codework…………………………………...………………………………… 126

Chapter 4: Generating @uthors: The Lovelace Test, J. M. Coetzee, and the Future
of Reading…………………………………………………………..………… 180

Bibliography…………………………………………………………….…………………….. 202

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. A la Mémoire de J. M. Jacquard………………………………….…………. 83

Figure 2. Visite de Mgr le Duc d’Aumale a la Croix-Rousse……….….……………… 102

Figure 3. A punch card library at the textile firm Morton, Young, and Borland...……. 112

Figure 4. Ada Lovelace’s Diagram of Operations…….……………….……………… 164

Figure 5. Ada Lovelace’s Famous Error……………………………….……………… 168

Figure 6. Ada Lovelace’s Loop…………...…………………………….……………… 172

v

ABSTRACT

The following dissertation, “The Punch Card Imagination: Authorship and Early Machine
Programming,” traces the development of punch card systems alongside literary history, from the
automated silk looms of the 1720s to the rise of the personal computer in the 1970s. The project
contends that inventions like Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s draw-loom harness, Charles Babbage’s
Analytical Engine, and the pre-digital computer influence and are influenced by changing ideas
around intellectual labor in the production of creative works. Each chapter focuses on one of
these inventions and its programming via punch cards—disposable strips of cardboard which
deliver to the machine coded instructions—and suggests that, for each era, the figure of the
punch card emblematizes the way people imagined machinic or procedural thought: what now
call the algorithmic imagination. Through these histories of technology, I examine literary
representations of human and nonhuman thinking, including: the satires of Jonathan Swift, the
poetry of Romanticism, the computer science of Ada Lovelace, and the literary criticism of J. M.
Coetzee. I argue that these texts, each profoundly representative expressions of their era’s
changing attitudes toward intellectual labor, are evidence that our definitions of authorship have
coevolved with machine programming—and that human authorship is shaped historically by the
rise of its artificial other.
INTRODUCTION

A Literary History of Punch Card Systems
Whether pasteboard or cardboard, multiple feet or mere inches long, singular or sewn together,
every kind of punch card shares certain characteristics; they are disposable, reusable, and store
within their pattern of holes information or instructions to be read by a machine. The specific
function depends on the type of machine. In the eighteenth century, punch cards regulated
weaving patterns for silk looms. In the nineteenth century, they provided numerical values and
activated state changes for Charles Babbage’s imagined calculating engine. By the end of the
century, they delivered multilevel data to Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machines and, in the
twentieth century, complex programs to computers. This history spans the 1720s to the 1970s,
when such systems were superseded by text-based programming languages.
1
In what follows, I
explore the cultural significance of these systems by using the punch card object as a site of idea
exchange between machine programming and literary history. I have studied early automated
looms in museums from London to Berlin, climbed atop jacquard looms for Scottish lace in the
still operating Morton, Young, & Borland textile mill, and browsed through the Smithsonian’s
collection of cards, punchers, and readers from the 1890 U.S. census to the IBM 1401. Through
these histories of technology, I examine concurrent representations of human and nonhuman
thinking, from the satires of Jonathan Swift and poetry of Romanticism to the computer science
of Ada Lovelace and literary criticism of J. M. Coetzee.

1
IBM launched the 1401 in 1959, which used punch cards, and the 7090 in 1960, which used the first high-level
programming language FORTRAN. FORTRAN, short for Formula Translation, was developed by IBM in 1957 and,
like many programming languages, relied on either-or logics and Boolean algebra. Before FORTRAN, computers
were coded directly into hardware with “machine codes” (often sequences of 1’s and 0’s unreadable by humans).
Due to the lack of access to these new machines, throughout the 1960s programmers often used punch cards first.

2
Punch cards tell the story of humanity’s relationship with mechanical thinking. They
rehearse forms of data storage and machine co-authorship long before these processes become
the norm. They speak to the reproducibility of procedures, the mechanization of imagination and,
as Sadie Plant writes of the jacquard loom, the “migration of control from [artist] to machinery.”
2

Each new punch card system was, for its time, the most complex machine ever designed. And
each system took on a larger and more complex share of the human thought process: the loom
became the weaver; the calculating engine became the mathematician; and eventually even the
software program became the software programmer. Unlike the engraver’s plate or photographic
negative, the punch card inscribes and stores not only the finished product but the procedures of
its composition; it reenacts the original thought processes every time it is fed into the machine.
Each pattern of holes is a captured scene of making, a suspended data corpse stored in a “library”
of cards waiting for its future reanimation.
3
Because they are so artefactual, punch cards do more
than mediate; they memorialize, even metonymize the creative process. They are “things” in the
way that objects which exceed their material function are things, totemic of the future, of shifts
in labor organization, even of human frailty.
4
I argue that each new punch card system disrupted
culture-wide assumptions about the capacity of machines to automate types of thinking once
considered exclusively human.
I chose punch cards over other early objects of machine programming—the perforated
paper strips used in player pianos and teletype, the wood or metal cylinders (“drums”) used in
the earliest automata and music boxes—because the punch card, due its marriage of reusability

2
Sadie Plant, “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics,” in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk:
Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (SAGE, 1995), 51.
3
Charles Babbage, “Of the Analytical Engine,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected Writings
by Charles Babbage and Others, edited by P. Morrison and E. Morrison (Dover, 1961), 56. Babbage said that “the
Analytical Engine will possess a library of its own.” When I visited MYB Textiles in 2019, the firm hanged sheets
of punch cards like dry cleaning, waiting to be accessed for their patterns.
4
Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Critical Inquiry Vol. 28 No. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001), 1-22.

3
and low-cost production, became the most important object in machine programming history.
That said, it is not a monolithic history. There have been attempts, in academia and industry-
sponsored retrospectives, to draw a direct line from drawlooms to Babbage’s calculators to the
modern computer. But this is a questionable teleology.
5
(The computer industry was just as likely
born of train ticket stubs, which inspired the record keeping methods of the 1890 U.S. census
that launched Hollerith’s company into becoming IBM.
6
) Rather than relitigate these imperfect
narratives, this project will focus on the history’s liminal periods, when punch card systems are
developing and introduced. Punch cards embodied different things in different eras. They stood
in for algorithmic thinking and creativity at the turn of the nineteenth century but, a century later,
this changed; punch cards began serving as “machine-readable records” at the border between
waste and memory.
7
They also became the engine of biopolitical governmentality in censuses,
segregated societies, and internment camps; in the 1960s, Mario Savio at UC Berkeley protested
the metaphorical “machine” by destroying punch cards in public spaces; and today, you can buy
wreaths made of old IBM punch cards on Etsy for their nostalgic value. In every era, punch cards

5
Sydney Padua notes that “the story of how Charles Babbage […] almost invented the computer in the 1830s has
long been an opening parable in computer science textbooks” (“Picturing Lovelace, Babbage, and the Analytical
Engine: A Cartoonist in Mathematical Biography,” in BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History
of Mathematics Vol. 32, No. 3, 2017, p. 214). Indeed, in my time at archives of the Hagley Library and Smithsonian,
I happened across many issues of Punch Card Annual, IBM trade magazines, and similar publications which retold
the story of computing through the mythos. However, it is just as common for scholars to point this out as fallacy.
As Martin Davis and Virginia Davis write, “A Jacquard loom is no more like a computer than is a player piano”
(“Mistaken Ancestry: The Jacquard and the Computer,” in Textile Vol. 3 No. 1, 2005, p. 81).
6
Lars Heide, Punched-Card Systems and the Early Information Explosion, 1880–1945 (JHU Press, 2009), 1.
Hollerith’s company, which became IBM in 1924, made punch card systems the industry standard for tabulating—
that is, counting and calculating—bookkeeping, and commercial computing. The first commercial computer, the
UNIVAC 1 by EMCC, used tape instead of cards, but because punch cards were so popular EMCC had to adapt the
UNIVAC 1 to use cards, too. Programming languages replaced punch cards by the 1990s, but from 1890 to the
1980s, punch cards were the dominant method of complex machine operation.
7
Margaret O’Neill Adams writes that punch cards—and later, magnetic tape—despite their archival purpose, were
thrown out for space as the machines which once read them went defunct; “Punch Card Records: Precursors of
Electronic Records,” in The American Archivist Vol. 58 No. 2 (1995), 190.

4
became an icon for the alienation between thinking subjects and new technologies—and a way to
conceptualize that thinking subject anew.

The Artist in the Age of Jacquard
At the center of my project is the jacquard loom. Though punch card-programmed looms existed
before the French Revolution—e.g., those constructed by Basile Bouchon, Jean-Baptiste Falcon,
and Jacques de Vaucanson—the 1804 model patented by Joseph-Marie Jacquard revolutionized
the European textile industry. He toured the loom across Europe, leading to copycat inventions
and imports in England.
8
Previously, drawlooms relied on a two-person team to operate: the
weaver, who controlled multiple treadles at their feet, called out instructions to the drawchild,
who in turn lifted the warp (or group of threads). Whether or not the warp was lifted determined
whether the patterning shuttle, triggered by the weaver’s foot, passed between or above a set of
threads. These steps are repeated until the desired pattern is woven. Jacquard’s system replaced
this process by feeding punch cards, preloaded with a binary code—hole or no hole, signalling
whether to lift or not lift the warp—into the loom directly, thus saving the weaver from reading
steps aloud and eliminating the need for a drawchild entirely. By this mechanism, silk designers
could send their patterns to an artist to make the punch cards, thereby concluding the creative
labor of humans in the composition.
9
(My first two chapters trace the evolution of these looms
from the 1720s to the 1840s.) In the ensuing decades, English industrialists found a way to add
steam power to punch card systems and inventors borrowed from Jacquard’s 1804 patent to

8
The earliest surviving English machine-woven silk dates to 1825 (and the earliest design, 1823), but we know from
John Murphy’s Treatise on the Art of Weaving, published in 1827, that the “new French draw loom for superseding
the draw boy” began arriving from France in 1816. Earlier that year in Paisley, an Englishman named James Cross
invented something called the “counterpoise harness,” a failed attempt to supplant the jacquard loom as the industry
standard. John Murphy, A Treatise on the Art of Weaving with Calculations and Tables for the Use of
Manufacturers, from the preface, xii.
9
Charles Babbage, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (original: 1864) (Rutgers University Press, 1994).

5
improve other industries.
10
In one (albeit very European) view, the jacquard loom served as a
kind of vanguard for technological innovation across two centuries.
Thus, if the turn of the nineteenth century was “the origin of everything interesting in our
time,” as W. J. T. Mitchell quips, punch cards must play into “our” story.
11
One of the goals of
this project, by approaching literature through the figure of new technologies, is to counter the
historical microscopism caused by literary periodization.
12
This is not a new strategy, of course.
Lucien Febvre writes that “every epoch has its technology, and this technology has the style of
an epoch.” As John Tresch summarizes in The Romantic Machine (2012), the Enlightenment and
Romantic eras are often divided by material metaphor, “a shift in the image of the machine from
an idea of balanced, inhuman clockwork to a ‘romantic machine’ exemplified by the steam
engine.”
13
Peter Brooks, in Reading for the Plot, identifies the steam engine to be paradigmatic
of nineteenth-century human desire and narrative form, a l’homme moteur distinct from the
previous century’s l’homme machine.
14
But these distinctions, like the arbitrary bracketing of the
Industrial Revolution, have served only to cause new forms of microscopism.
15
What if, instead,

10
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's
Online Pioneers (Phoenix, 1998). The first electronic telegraph borrowed from Jacquard’s 1804 patent.
11
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images,” Critical Inquiry (2001),
169.
12
Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time,” in New Literary History Vol. 42 No. 4 (2011),
746. As Jerome McGann has said, “part of the problem with ‘rethinking romanticism’ in the 1990s was a critical
reluctance to draw the ‘distinction between ‘the romantic period’ (that is, a particular historical epoch) and
‘romanticism’ (that is, a set of cultural/ideological formations that came to prominence during the romantic period)”
(qtd in Tilar J. Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period, University of Pennsylvania Press,
2013, 187). Josie Gill, in “Decolonizing Literature and Science” (Configurations Vol. 26, 2018), notes that when we
think in terms of literary and historical periods, we are beholden to nationalist and western organizations of time.
13
John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago
Press, 2012), 5. Alternately, as Brad Pasanek and Chad Wellmon write in “The Enlightenment Index,” “it was
Romanticism that ultimately repudiated the Index as an ideal and promoted competing practices of indexicality to
control and transcend the excesses of print” (The Eighteenth Century Vol. 56 No. 3 (2015), 361).
14
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Harvard University Press, 1992), 41. See
also: Joseph Drury, “The Novel and the Machine in the Eighteenth Century,” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction Vol. 42
No. 2 (2009), 337. Lewis Mumford argues alternately that “the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key machine of
modern industrial age” (The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America (Courier Corporation, 1955), 16).
15
The history of the industrial revolution was largely constructed in the 1830s and 1840s by William Radcliffe,
Robert Hyde Greg, Karl Marx, and Edward Baines, and Arnold Toynbee generally receives credit for first coining

6
we elevated the punch-card programmed loom above the steam engine or clockwork? The long
tail of jacquard systems combines the intricate mechanisms of the eighteenth century with the
steam power of the nineteenth. It transforms the Enlightenment, Romantic, and Victorian eras
into the stages of technological development, introduction, and adoption. Through such a lens,
how might we think differently about literature from this period?
Consider a figure outside the history of machine programming: William Blake. Blake
opportunes this kind of cross-periodization because he was born artisan class, to parents who
worked in textile production, and made a living as an engraver. He schooled with artists who
worked as patterners to calico printers and for brocade silk in the Spitalfields, thus providing a
missing link between spheres of labor.
16
Famously, his poetry pits medieval modes of production
against his era’s “dark Satanic mills,” the factories filled with “furnaces of affliction” and “cruel
tortures” which dramatize industrial manufacture.
17
For Blake, it was the lone craftsperson in
their workshop that would save the finer arts from industrial logics. In A Descriptive Catalogue
of Pictures, he accuses artists of degrading their profession by using “the Hands of Ignorant
Journeymen” to color and finish details, which he saw as a harbinger “that everything in art shall

the “Industrial Revolution” in 1884. Barbara Hahn writes that “the usual events evoked by the phrase “Industrial
Revolution” took place in a few counties in the British North, between the 1760s and the 1840s, where the local
cloth merchants of a national textile industry were changing how they did business” (Technology in the Industrial
Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 2). The classic brackets of the Industrial Revolution have also
been termed the “Romantic Century,” but that is a move more about expanding the applicability of Romanticism
studies than a counter to the hegemony of certain literary movements over more powerful cultural changes.
16
Tilar J. Mazzeo, “Blake’s Golden String: Jerusalem and the London Textile Industry,” in Studies in Romanticism
Vol. 52 No. 1 (2013), 117-121. Blake’s father was a draper and hosier, and his mother, the widow of a haberdasher.
More recently, he has been studied as a figure not so much opposed to science as someone who had well-informed
opinions on various Enlightenment philosophies. Writing on “the centrality of cloth production in Jerusalem,”
Mazzeo argues that “the boundary line between works printed on paper and works printed on textile is a distinction
that would have seemed less stark to Blake and his contemporaries than it does today.” See also: Stuart
Peterfreund, William Blake in a Newtonian World: Essays on Literature as Art and Science (University of
Oklahoma Press, 1998); Janet Warner, “Blake and English Printed Textiles,” in Blake Newsletter: An Illustrated
Quarterly no. 6 (1973), 84-92; and, forthcoming, my own article “Single-Press Literature: Walladmor, Machine
Optimization, the Production of Authenticity,” in The Wordsworth Circle.
17
William Blake, selected lines from Milton and Jerusalem. If Locke for Blake represented the mechanized loom,
Newton represented the powered mill, the two sides of rationalism become industry.

7
become a Machine”: rationalized and automated.
18
Indeed, after the Great Exhibition of 1851—
which heavily featured jacquard loom innovations—the Arts and Crafts Movement called for a
return to medieval modes of production with Blake as a “cultural god-king.” The luminaries of
the movement, from John Ruskin to William Morris, found in Blake’s poetics “the victory of the
handicraftsman over the division of labor.”
19
Reconsidering Blake’s career and its afterlives
through the rise of machine programming, we might frame this anti-industrial philosophy as a
material response to procedural thinking in composition—the rote repetition taught in art schools
and the broader adoption of industrial shortcuts in creative sectors.
Blake applied this unbroken creative labor to bookmaking. For him, even the separation
of authors and printers was a threat to creative integrity. He believed artists should be capable of
both—as he was. His notebooks include instructions for printing by woodblock and steel-plate,
and his “infernal method”—the use of corrosives to melt away the vagaries of perception—is a
metaphor for his printing process.
20
Famously, he revived medieval techniques of illumination
and invented a way to combine words and images on single engravers’ plates.
21
Through this
technique, Blake circumvents the printing press, collapses multiple steps of bookmaking into
one, and marries form and content to such an extent that even future copies of his work become
meaningfully altered by reapplying those original plates in new ways.
22
Arguably, these methods

18
William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions (J. Blake, 1809). Blake
adds that artists like Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens turn “that which is Soul & Life into a Mill” by
using “numerous Journeymen in manufacturing.” See also: John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from
Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (Yale University Press, 1995), 225.
19
Colin Trodd, “William Blake, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Mythography of Manufacture,” in Art
Versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (edited by Kate
Nichols, Rebecca Wade, and Gabriel Williams, Manchester University Press, 2016), 94-97.
20
Blake, Notebooks, 60. He believed that technical knowhow was the “Chariot of Genius.”
21
In the satirical manuscript fragment “An Island in the Moon,” one of Blake’s characters claims, “I would have all
the writing Engraved instead of Printed.” This parody of a commercial print industry evolves into what he, in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, calls an “infernal method” (An Island in the Moon, edited by Michael Phillips,
Cambridge University Press, 1987), X. Originally produced in 1784.
22
David Bindman, “Introduction,” William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (Thames & Hudson, 2000), 9.
Blake worked as a journeyman engraver from the end of his apprenticeship in 1778. However, Blake was a common

8
are a response to recent improvements in stereotyping, which “took the page itself out of the
realm of skill and art, and made it a mechanical, identical commodity.”
23
Blake’s approach to
bookmaking resembles other returns to craft in the face of standardization, from William Morris
to digital artists like John Maeda and Joanna Drucker. Already, Blake is studied in the digital
humanities for the network logics through which his works form meaning; rather than linear
meaning-making, Blake produced a “vast interlocking network of synapses and relays, both
verbal and visual,” which changes each time it is accessed.
24
I suggest that, like networks, the
jacquard loom provides a lens by which to raise further questions: what if the artist’s entire
process, even their subtlest techniques, can be reenacted entirely without their presence? How
does that change the relationship between form and content?
In the nineteenth century, firms began using jacquard looms to manufacture fine art.
(Examples of jacquard-woven art from the 1840s are discussed at length in my second chapter.)
Then, at the height of the Arts and Crafts Movement, a textile firm in Lyon, France harnessed
Jacquard’s technology to reinvent the book. From 1886-88, hundreds of thousands of punch
cards, sewn together, were fed into a jacquard loom, instructing the loom to weave a 58-page
book of prayers at 400 threads per inch. Like Blake’s plates, each page of the book is produced

surname in the profession. This was noted by Geoffrey Keynes in “Engravers Called Blake,” in The Times Literary
Supplement (Saturday, January 17, 1942). A response to this article, by a Mr. Ruthven Todd, shares a report from
the “Committee of the Society of Arts, &c. together with the Approved Communications and Evidence upon the
Same relative to the Mode of Preventing the Forgery of Bank Notes,” London, 1819. Within is a testimonial from
the Scottish journalist Alexander Tilloch, dated April 5, 1797, the same year that William Blake engraved and
designed the Richard Edwards edition of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. Tilloch had invented a “Specimen of an
Art […] for the purpose of producing Checks to prevent the Forgery of Bank Notes, Bills of Exchange, Drafts, &c.
&c. &c.” A committee, which included William Blake, attested to the statement: “we do not believe that it can be
copied by any of the known arts of Engraving.” These articles were accessed in the Vertical Files at the Harry
Ransom Center, Austin, TX. See also: Mei-Ying Sung, William Blake and the Art of Engraving (Routledge, 2015).
23
Adrian Johns, “The Identity Engine: Printing and Publishing at the Beginning of the Knowledge Economy,” in
The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (edited by L.
Roberts, S. Schaffer and P. Dear, University of Chicago Press, 2007), 408.
24
Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 166.

9
with the words, illustrations, and illumination as a single tableau of black and silver silk.
25
This
vanity project went on to win the top prize at the 1889 Universal Exposition and remains, I
believe, the most complex machine-woven artwork ever produced without a computer. It also
nicely brackets the age of jacquard. It is a pastiche of a medieval prayer book; like Blake’s
infernal plates, the library of punch cards encoded with the book’s image and text can be fed
back into a machine to start the entire process anew. But it is also a marriage of craft and
automation, the pinnacle of a technology that was first introduced in 1725 for rudimentary
pattern weaving. Here, the craftsperson is replaced by a firm and machinery, stored in a set of
binary codes. In other words, the jacquard loom mechanizes the medieval mode of production
that Blake and the Arts and Crafts Movement lionize; it evolved to mimic the unbroken (human)
labor imagined at the heart of individuated authorship. How might we reconsider that author if
we acknowledge that, as that category was being formed, punch card systems were concurrently
rendering it repeatable and artefactual?
It is no coincidence that the end of the eighteenth century marks a redefinition of “fine
art,” or that Romanticism, the period most influential of our conceptions of the modern author,
also marks “the separation of science from literature.”
26
Walter Ong argues that Romanticism

25
[Horae] Livre de Prieres Tisse d’apres les enluminures du XIVe au XVI siècle; in Latin and French, illustrated
book on silk; Lyon, R. P. J. Hervier, designer; J.A. Henry, fabricator, for A. Roux, 1886-1887; 58 pages, small in 40,
43 numbered pages, 6 printed preliminary pages, plus 4 pages front and back of mounted silk, unprinted, text block
168x138mm, one half-page, three full-page illustrations, in addition to carious styles of decorative borders, woven
entirely in silver-gray and black silk. Only 50-60 were ever produced, and an estimated between 200,000-500,000
cards were needed to program it; 400 woof threads per 2.5cm, requiring machine movements of not more than a
tenth of a millimeter. It took two years and 50 trials to accomplish. Each page was glued to a piece of cardboard (for
a page). It was copied from a manuscript entitled Imitation de Jesus-Christ, published by Gruel and Engelmann in
the late 1870s or early 1880s. Source: L.M.C. Randall, “A Nineteenth-Century ‘Medieval’ Prayerbook Woven in
Lyon,” in Art the Ape of Nature. Studies in Honor of H.W. Janson, ed. Moshe Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler
(Harry Abrams, Inc., 1981), 651-668. Additional information: “A Prayerbook Entirely Woven by the Jacquard
Loom: The First Book Produced by a Program, or the First Digitally Produced Book?” History of Information.com
(https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=1549); The Morgan Library, New York, October 2019.
26
Thomas L. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also: Kate Nichols,
Rebecca Wade and Gabriel Williams (eds), Art versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures
in Nineteenth-century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2016). Nichols and Wade write that the separation of

10
and technology “grow out of the same ground” in opposite directions; they are similar in their
conditions but not their expressions.
27
Jeffrey M. Binder notes that the early nineteenth century is
when computation and cultural concerns (like aesthetics or meaning) diverge, leaving literature
at odds with studies of the algorithm.
28
I argue that the relationship between art, literature, and
technology is more of an ongoing negotiation. Examining this history through the punch card—
whether its use in art or industry—not only helps to expand literary categories across time, but
also to repair some of this disciplinary divergence. The following project braids together literary
and machine programming histories from the 1720s to the 1890s (what I am calling “the age of
jacquard”), and from the 1890s to the 1970s (the computing age), drawing on scholarship from
science and technology studies and the digital humanities, to avoid the categorical silos that
histories of authorship fall prey to. Crudely defined, the above silk prayer book is a digital book.
It takes text and image, converts it into zeroes and ones, pushes it through a machine, and then
executes that code to create an object which is so finely woven as to hide the modes of its own
production. You might call it a missing link between what Blake was doing and what digital
libraries are doing today. As N. Katherine Hayles explains regarding the new materialities of
digital literature, changes to the nature of the book also “transform the metaphoric network
structuring the relation of word to world.”
29
The silk-woven book still reads like a book, but the
metaphoric network undergirding its existence is dramatically different. That is, if we consider

the “fine arts” from other crafts “is usually attributed to the eighteenth and early nineteenth century; the foundation
of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768 in particular marked off fine art from the undertakings of the earlier Royal
Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, founded in 1754. The divergent senses of
the term ‘art’ used by these two eighteenth century institutions—in one case to separate practices like painting and
sculpture from other trades and in the other to connect them—both remained in use well into the nineteenth century,
persistently complicating debates about art’s relation to manufacture” (p. 2).
27
Walter Ong, “Romantic Difference and the Poetics of Technology,” in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology;
Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1971), 279.
28
Jeffrey M. Binder, “Romantic Disciplinarity and the Rise of the Algorithm,” in Critical Inquiry Vol. 46 No. 4
(2020): 813-834.
29
N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (MIT Press, 2002), 23.

11
the punch card more central to how we understand literature, we must change everything we
know about “the relation of word to world.”

Media Studies / Literary Studies
The wider “media turn” of the last decade in literary studies has redefined literary periods as
evolving information regimes, historical responses to the “noetic abundance” inaugurated by
eighteenth-century media technologies.
30
Studies in this vein examine works of literature within
larger systems of knowledge production by attending to their format and distribution. In this
view, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), the Encyclopedia Britannica (1768), and Peter Mark
Roget’s Thesaurus (1805) evidence a shift in the structure of knowledge storage from something
linear and narrative to one based on unordered lists
31
; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)
and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) influence the genre and style of scientific discourse; and
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1823) meditates on the difference between abstract information
and its monstrous, material form. Increasingly, we approach fact, truth, and belief as categories
which “depend on many of the same discursive techniques, forms, and assumptions involved in
the making of a literary text.”
32
And more recently, this textual study of everything extends to the
technologies used to produce and disseminate that knowledge. Book History, for instance, has
expanded to study not only the effects of printing and circulation on manuscripts, but also the
platforms through which those manuscripts become book objects; the innovations in stereotypy
that led to a “bibliographic surplus” in the nineteenth century and the powered presses that

30
Clifford Siskin and William Warner, This Is Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Ong, “Romantic
Difference,” 279.
31
In The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), Lev Manovich describes a shift from a culture organized by
narrative to one built on unordered lists—databases and archives.
32
Joseph Drury, “Literature and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions,” in Literature Compass Vol. 14
No. 6 (2017), 1-4.

12
transitioned art into popular culture.
33
This project follows this turn to media technologies while
expanding which technologies are worthy of including.
In many ways, my project falls under the umbrella of media archaeology. In addition to
Tresch’s exploration of electricity and automata as abstract cultural formations, I am inspired by
Markus Krajewski’s Paper Machines (2011), which reconsiders the index card as an early form
of database manipulation.
34
Krajewski treats the index card as a tool for knowledge storage that
more complex technologies later map onto and optimize. It is a view of media technologies—or
“socially realized structures of communication”—as always borrowing from and influencing
earlier forms: the way photography builds on camera obscuras or the way styles of portraiture
shift with the invention of daguerreotype.
35
And it is a view of technological innovation “as
sedimented and layered” within popular culture and across discourse, following the work of Lisa
Gitelman and Anne Balsamo.
36
Arguably, as Andrew Burkett claims in Romantic Mediations,
this recent work in technology history has “scarcely begun to influence literary studies.”
37
In the

33
William R. McKelvy identifies two main printing epochs in “‘This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print’:
Making Literary History in the Age of Steam,” in Bookish Histories (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2009), 62: the
age of the hand-press and the age of the machine press. The latter, which began at the beginning of the nineteenth
century and accelerated in the 1830s, tends to bracket book histories of the Romantic period. Walter Benjamin, The
Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Harvard University
Press, 2008), 217. Most scholarship points to the iron printing press invented by Charles Mahon, Third Earl of
Stanhope, in 1800, which was successfully made steam-powered by Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer for The
Times in London on November 29, 1814. Adrian Johns notes that, “by 1827, The Times was churning out 5,000
copies an hour […] steam facilitated the first bestsellers, the first national daily press…” in “The Identity Engine,”
422. Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age
(University of Chicago Press, 2011).
34
Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines: about Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. Translated by Peter Krapp (MIT Press,
2011), 34. Like another study about a different era, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes (2016), Krajewski,
considers how an invisible tool influences conceptions of authorship and even places the index card in a lineage with
the jacquard loom and electronic punch cards.
35
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 2000).
36
Jussi Parikka, “Imaginary Media: Mapping Weird Objects,” in What is Media Archeology? (John Wiley & Sons,
2013), 3. Lisa Gitelman argues that “media history and literary history share the same groundwater,” in Always
Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT Press, 2006), 253. See also: Anne Balsamo, Designing
Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke University Press, 2011); Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka,
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (University of California Press, 2011); Lisa
Gitelman and Geoffrey Pingree, New Media 1740-1915 (MIT Press, 2003).
37
Andrew Burkett, Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (SUNY Press, 2016), 139.

13
last few years, Burkett and others have shifted studies of Romanticism away from ahistorical
forms (e.g., the period’s perceived affinity with digital media) to actual, emerging nineteenth-
century technologies (e.g., the phonograph or telegraph).
38
Such studies explore the relationship
between the adoption of these technologies in popular culture and Romantic conceptions of
reading, writing, seeing, and imagining. For instance, Celeste Langan argues that Romantic
poetry is conceptualized as a medium between orality and print, and Andrew Stauffer writes on
the designed modularity of Lord Byron’s stanzas.
39
Similar frameworks have shifted the focus of
eighteenth-century and Victorian studies as well.
40

I am interested specifically in the relationship between the emergence of punch card
systems and the history of authorship. Of all the “interesting things” of our time originating at
the turn of the nineteenth century, most scholars seem to agree that the concept of the modern
author is one. For scholars of legal history, the second half of the eighteenth century is defined
by a series of lawsuits and especially the 1774 decision Donaldson v Becket, which made official
a fixed term to copyright and established authors as commodity producers. Old metaphors of
authorship, such as intellectual paternity or divine inspiration, were folded into concepts of

38
Arguably, this shift begins earlier. William Galperin in Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (1993) argues
that early-19th-century visual culture can be studied alongside literature to suggest “cinematic” aesthetics and
technological trends; Gillen D’Arcy Wood in The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760-1860
(2001) relates artistic production in the Romantic period to the rise of “simulation” in contrast to “reality effects”;
Piper in Dreaming in Books (2009) attributes Romanticism to when too many books gives rise to a proliferation of
formats and genres; Peter Otto in Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual
Reality (2011) studies incarnations of the “virtual” in Romanticism, the idea that suspension of belief eclipses the
real in order to “create anew the universe” (13); Julia Carlson in Romantic Marks and Measures: Wordsworth’s
Poetry in Fields of Print (2016) contextualizes Wordsworth’s poetry in relation to British cartography; and many
other scholars should be listed here, including but not limited to Kevis Goodman, Celeste Langan, Maureen
McLane, Clifford Siskin, William Warner, J. Jennifer Jones, Yohei Igarashi, Lauren Neefe, Miranda Burgess,
Margaret Russett, Andrea Henderson, Noel Jackson, and Tom Mole.
39
Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to
British Romantic Poetry, edited by James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
40
Eighteenth-century media scholars include John Bender, Michael McKeon, Mary Poovey, and Siskin and Warner,
et al.; Victorian media scholars include Nancy Armstrong, Jay Clayton, Richard Menke, John Picker, Tom Standage,
and Aaron Worth, et al.

14
private property centered on the author’s time and effort spent.
41
Literary historians agree that
modern authorship begins when cultural production becomes categorized by which individuals
get legal credit—and when that credit becomes based not on their genius or artistry, but on their
personality. As printing methods saturated the market and threatened the intellectual property of
authors, artists formed new ideologies of authorship centered around authenticity, subjectivity,
and originality: this is “the author as an individual, creative personality, a solitary originator of
stylistically consistent ideas.”
42
Joseph Loewenstein argues that these strategies tend to obscure
economic or legacy concerns caused by new forms of cultural storage and transmission.
43
And
this project turns to those new forms.
44
Reconsidering this history through punch card systems
demonstrates how machine programming, by disrupting the possible methods of storage, helped
shape the way authors imagine their labor.
While cultural production is often studied alongside concurrent media technologies, no
studies yet put into conversation literature and punch cards. Punch cards are not exactly a media
technology, but they co-evolve with modes of artistic production that are antithetical to the above

41
Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 1993), 74. The Lockean
approach to intellectual property is discussed in just about every work of scholarship on the history of authorship. I
am relying on Isabella Alexander, “The Genius and the Labourer: Authorship in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century
Copyright Law,” in Copyright and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Critique (edited by Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis,
and Jane C. Ginsburg, Cambridge University Press, 2010), 304-305. This view, inherited from John Locke’s The
Two Treatises of Government (1689), assumed that mental labor produced personal property when mixed with the
state of nature. See also: Fiona Macmillan, “Copyright’s Commodification of Creativity,” in ICFAI Journal of
Intellectual Property Rights 2 (2003); and Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the
History of Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 1994), 27.
42
Anne-Marie Bridy, “Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author,” in Stanford Technology
and Law Review (2012), 4. The famous works of Barthes and Foucault, Bridy writes, “sought to expose” this.
43
Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 5. For instance, it is no accident that
the Copyright Act of 1814 culminates just as powered printing technologies revolutionized the industry. Adrian
Johns writes, vaguely gesturing to industries outside of the book trade: “If there could be a way of reconciling
technology, mundane trade practices and the vast cultural potential of print, then by the 1800s copyright was the
leading contender to achieve that goal” (“The Identity Engine,” 416).
44
Richard A. Grusin asks, if “the discursive logic of electronic authorship simultaneously ascribes agency to and
elides technology, then how are we to make sense of this failure to account for the materiality of electronic
technologies, their imbrication in a multitude of economic, social, and cultural contexts?” “What is an Electronic
Author? Theory and the Technological Fallacy,” in Configurations Vol. 2 No. 3 (1994).

15
myths of authorship. This project argues that innovations in these other spheres of production,
from figured silk to solving equations to coding software, bleed into traditional media—even pen
and paper. To make this case, I create new contexts for the history of machine programming by
examining contemporaneous works of literature as expressions of anxiety around the future of
intellectual and creative labor heralded by these systems. I treat the punch card as an historical
(and even transhistorical) node between the literary and the industrial, most clearly in my writing
on jacquard-woven art (Chapter 2), the Analytical Engine (Chapter 3), and computational textual
analysis (Chapter 4). I also figure punch cards to possess “affinities” with these evolving modes
of creative production
45
; sometimes these affinities occur at the level of theme (e.g., Chapter 1,
on automaticity in Gulliver’s Travels), sometimes at the level of form (e.g., Chapter 2, on the
autonomy of genres or style), and sometimes I use anecdotes to illustrate the reciprocal nature of
these relationships: e.g., when printing and machine programming technologies merge, or when
individuals within textile, mathematical, or computer industries express similar ideologies of
authorship as poets and artists. Ultimately, I argue that our conception of the modern author has
been shaped by a centuries-long negotiation between artistic self-fashioning and the increasing
sophistication of machine programming.

Histories of Technology
There is a replacement for the countless tasks that man performed with an able hand, a
replacement and one with such power and speed […] it was only to be expected that after
the engineer had taken the very symbol of feminine skill [needlework] out of women’s
hands a colleague would come up with the idea of replacing the pen as well, the symbol
of masculine intellectual production, with a machine. — Sigmund Freud
46

45
I am borrowing the word “affinity” from N. Katherine Hayles to describe the interplay between and coevolution
of technology and artistic expression. The usage is akin to the strategy of other media studies scholars: for instance,
Jack Halberstam’s “generic affinity,” Lisa Gitelman’s “same groundwater,” Peter Otto’s “resemblances,” Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s “family likeness,” and Gillian Beer’s “two-way” traffic.
46
Sigmund Freud, quoted in Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford University Press, 1990).

16

This dissertation relies on three areas of technology history: (1) the advancements in textile
manufacture related to the Industrial Revolution and European empires; (2) genealogies of
automatism from theatrical mechanisms to the calculating engine; and (3) the development of
electronic computing and software.
47
The history of mechanization in the textile industry begins
in medieval Europe with fulling, follows with carding and spinning in the eighteenth century,
and becomes powered toward the end of that century, marking the beginning of the industrial
era.
48
Weaving and knitting, due the delicate nature of the work, were the last to be automated
and not widely adopted until the 1830s. Arguably, punch card-regulated drawlooms and stocking
frames combine the economic impetuses of industrialization with histories of automata. (Jacques
de Vaucanson gained fame with mechanical devices inspired by the Book of Ingenious Devices
before designing a drawloom in Lyon, France that would become predecessor to Jacquard’s.)
Adelheid Voskuhl argues that automata were a “useful symbol for human-machine relations in
the industrial age” and, in fact, even shaped the organizational structures of industrial production.
These structures include theories of the factory as automated parts—both machine and human—
working to a single end, and the development of increasingly complex mechanisms designed to
replace or optimize those human laborers.
49
The calculating engine, which becomes an obsession
of philosophers beginning in the seventeenth century, in turn borrows from both automata and

47
I am not including here the history of census-taking, biopolitics, and accounting devices related to Herman
Hollerith and the beginning of IBM. This history, however, will be crucial for a continuation of this project.
48
Gillian Cookson, The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770-1850 (Boydell & Brewer
Limited, 2018), 12. Waterpower was slow to transform the textile industry, but after James Hargreaves, Richard
Arkwright, and Samuel Crompton—to borrow the old “great men of history” narrative—invented the spinning jenny
(1764), water frame (1769), and spinning mule (1779) respectively, cotton mills spread in Yorkshire and Lancashire,
and the first silk mill was established in Kent in 1793. Edmund Cartwright’s power loom would become adopted in
the second decade of the nineteenth century. See: David T. Jenkins, “Cotton,” in The Cambridge History of Western
Textiles Vol. 2 (edited by David T. Jenkins, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 726-727.
49
Adelheid Voskuhl, “The Android and the Machine: Materialism, Mechanicism, and Industrialism in the Early and
Late Modern Ages,” in SubStance Vol. 47 No. 3 (2018), 22; Voskuhl here is commenting on texts such as Andrew
Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) and the thirteenth chapter of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867).

17
looms to automate divisions of mental labor—also adopting punch card systems in the nineteenth
century. Though not directly, from there punch card systems inspire and shape the functionality
of programmable computers and software.
As a category, the term “technology” refers to machines but also knowledge related to
machines and the larger systems within which those machines operate. Eric Schatzberg defines
“technology” as “the set of practices humans use to transform the material world,” broadening it
to include any human behavior related to practical knowledge.
50
Historians like Simon Schaffer
and Steven Shapin have noted the importance of social status in experimentalism (e.g., the air-
pump), while historians like Gillian Cookson have traced the shift toward innovation driven by
economic rather than scientific impetus.
51
Technology can thus be conceptualized as either
applied science or applied economics and, in the latter case, the term expands far beyond the
narratives of “great men” inventors. Barbara Hahn suggests that any study of technology must
include the social and imperial forces upon which its development is contingent.
52
The reality is
that “technology,” before WWII, referred almost entirely to “that branch of knowledge which
deals with the various industrial arts and crafts,” and often involved the need for western states
or companies to supplement their limited local resources with foreign raw materials and labor.
53

Hahn likewise defines “industrialization” as the accelerated processing of raw materials (e.g.,
cotton) due to commercial demand or competition (e.g., calicoes from India), the founding of
new “technologies” of labor organization (e.g., the factory or the slave plantation), and finally

50
Eric Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History of a Concept (Chicago University Press, 2018), 2
51
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton University Press, 2011); Cookson,
The Age of Machinery, 183.
52
Barbara Hahn, “Spinning through the History of Technology: A Methodological Note,” in Textile History Vol. 47
No. 2 (2016), 232.
53
The first quote comes from the 1911 Century Dictionary (qtd in Schatzberg, Technology, 12). The second point
comes from Rajani Sudan, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Colonialism (Fordham
University Press, 2016).

18
the installation of new machines designed to optimize this process (e.g., spinning jennies).
54
My
approach to punch card history covers similarly wide ground, from the objects and the machines
to the circumstances which led to the development of the systems.
There are two approaches to studying how a technology develops: the cultural and the
instrumental. The latter celebrates technology as a neutral tool which merely amplifies culture or,
in some cases, drives it. The cultural approach instead considers technology an expression of
culture itself, one that is induced or foreclosed by economic, political, and cultural formations.
55

My argument follows the latter. I believe that when we engage in technological innovation—and
thus imagine futures of technologized life—we “are engaged in a complex process of meaning-
making whereby both technology and culture are created anew.”
56
Cultural production was never
not derivative or algorithmic to some degree, but it is no accident that copyright law and methods
for mechanizing proceduralism evolve at the same time.
57
Storage and copying, too. Copperplate
printing in the eighteenth century made it possible to mass produce figures on both textiles and
books, and the failure to protect the property rights of the artists in the first case contributed to
writing on the nature of originality in the latter; much of the same language on “imitation” can be
found in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Charles O’Brien’s A
Treatise on Calico Printing (1792), and the literary criticism of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Shelley. This shared aesthetic thus incorporates the economically motivated strategies of calico
artists—a view of the modern author that is arguably indebted to what textile machines cannot

54
Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution, 4.
55
Schatzberg, Technology, 3-5. Schatzberg provides as example the mechanical clock, which “reflected a prior
consciousness of time, rooted in monasteries and medieval towns, that motivated people to invent, improve, and
embrace this new instrument.” The instrumental approach, on the other hand, is summarized best by Langdon
Winner—as “technological somnambulism”; Friedrich Kittler is often considered guilty of ascribing to this
instrumental, in which it is technology that “determines our situation.” Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film,
Typewriter (Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxix.
56
Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture, 7.
57
Bridy, “Coding Creativity,” 5.

19
replicate.
58
Here, global trade, art manufacture, and fashion trends all become insinuated into
constructions of intellectual property via an engraver’s plate.
In addition to Krajewski’s Paper Machines, I consider Matthew L. Jones’s Reckoning
with Matter (2016) to be a model project for my own. Jones examines the history of calculating
engines through evolving definitions of intellectual labor, addressing similar questions from the
position of mathematics. Our projects meet in my third chapter on Babbage’s engines, machines
which embodied new possibilities of human-machine thinking and, if the Analytical Engine had
been built, might have led to a Victorian computing age.
59
Jones argues that such “calculating
machines provided grounds for reflecting upon the originality thought to be distinctive to human
beings” and that “policing the distinction between origination and execution could protect the
creative potential of the creator and isolate originators from mere executors.”
60
This is a more
nuanced view of automation and imagination; unlike the calico example above, here technology
is more than a metonym for proceduralism or copying. Jones’s approach inspires me to parse
how intellectual and creative labor share structural similarities across both machine systems and
poetic practices. I demonstrate how the interplay between these overlapping processes reshapes
technological futures. Inventors of calculating machines believed they were engineering “a

58
Whether through sources of funding, shared technologies, or juxtaposed consumption, textiles, art, and literature
repeatedly overlap. In the second chapter, I focus especially on the tension between good and bad copying, in which
the shift from the “mirror” to the “lamp,” which M. H. Abrams impressed upon the study of Romanticism, might be
considered a response to technology’s capacity to assume the “mirror” role. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the
Lamp, 1953 (Oxford University Press, 1971). Nick Groom notes that Young’s Conjectures is a “reassessment of the
terms of imitation”; “Unoriginal Genius: Plagiarism and the Construction of Romantic Authorship,” in Copyright
and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Critique, ed Lionel Bentley et al. (2010), 287. Edward Young, Conjectures on
Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (A. Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1759).
59
James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford University
Press on Demand, 2007), 8.
60
Matthew L. Jones, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking About Thinking from
Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 214-226. Jones even compares Edward Young’s Night-
Thoughts (1742-45) to Tobias Mayer’s lunar tables (1752), arguing that Romanticism is not always at odds with the
idea that machines could “aid reflection about the nature of thinking.”

20
refined conception of human beings,” based on historical definitions of “the human.”
61
Those
engineering decisions influence future thinking—providing material models of cybernetic co-
authorship which in turn rehearse theories of software and artificial intelligence that become
foundational through the writing of Lovelace or Alan Turing.
Alan Liu argues that postindustrial knowledge production is defined by the separation of
form from content, a “distinction between origination and execution” notably embedded in the
design of calculating engines.
62
Recently, digital humanists have developed methods to study this
phenomenon. This project applies some of those methods transhistorically, reading old emergent
technologies through a presentist lens to better understand the “crisis of a new medium.”
63
For
instance, this project engages in platform studies, investigating “the relationships between the
hardware and software design of computing systems (platforms) and the creative works produced
on those systems.” Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort define “platforms” as anything that can be
programmed, “the abstraction level beneath code,” of which I include punch card systems such
as the jacquard loom, Analytical Engine, and IBM 1401.
64
I examine these systems as cultural
texts which express ideas about form and content. Relatedly, I treat punch cards as an early form
of computer code, following Mark Priestley’s argument that “the history of programming” is

61
Jones, Reckoning with Matter, 214.
62
Alan Liu, “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse,” in
Critical Inquiry Vol. 31 No. 1 (2004). Jones marks the early nineteenth century as “a hardening of the divide
between original creation and creation as combining or agglutination; reinforcing and protecting this divide required
minimizing the salience of earlier influences for original cultural production” (Reckoning with Matter, 214).
63
Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. New Media, 1740-1915 (MIT Press, 2003) xii. As Yohei Igarashi
summarizes, “media archaeologies knowingly expose themselves to the risk of anachronism in order to yield the
payoff of historical insight” (“Keats’s Ways: The Dark Passages of Mediation and Why He Gives Up Hyperion,” in
Studies in Romanticism Vol. 53 No. 2 (2014), 178). Lev Manovich in “Post-Media Aesthetics,” in Transmedia
Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities (Univ. California Press, 2001), describes the analog-digital
break as a “linguistic” one, calling for the use of digital terminology to discuss analog processes to bring history to
bear on the present.
64
Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, “Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers” (2009); Ian Bogost and Nick
Montfort, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (MIT Press).

21
central to “the history of machinery.”
65
As such, this project draws on critical code studies, the
practice of applying critical reading practices to source code and technical writing based on the
premise that anything written or designed by humans has embedded excesses in meaning beyond
their intended function.
66
These methods of media-specific analysis are more broadly termed
software studies—the study of complex (and often) invisible digital technologies at the level of
technical detail while keeping salient the full array of cultural contexts.
67

To put it another way: Software studies pushes back against instrumentalist views of
technology in the digital age. The frontline story of computer history, in which the current mega-
corporations imagine themselves as the next step in a long evolution of machine programming,
either buys into the myth that technology is culturally neutral and/or is complicit in “the regime
of computation,” the transformation of state and corporate control (which punch cards in the
1960s symbolized) into secreted software.
68
This dissertation, by applying new media methods
anachronistically, treats punch card systems as the first steps toward this computational and

65
Mark Priestley, A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic, and the Invention of Programming (Springer, 2011),
2-3. Lisa Gitelman, in Paper Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2014), discusses “documents” as belonging to
three categories: medium, genre, and format. I argue that punch cards function at times across these three categories
as well, most notably as a “genre” in the way that any programming object becomes a genre (and vice versa).
66
Recently there has been a trend of literary scholars studying the computer programming behind historic events—
for instance, Margaret Hamilton’s source code for the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC)— to find previously
unremarked upon cultural expressions. For instance, in the COLOSSUS code for the Apollo 11 command module
and the LUMINARY 099 (nee COMANCHE) code for the lunar module, asides within the code read: “the
philosophy of Guildenstern” and “I hope, hope, hope.”
67
Because anonymity and technology often read as male and white by default, it is important in a project about
authorship to keep difference in mind. Tara McPherson in “Designing for Difference” (Differences Vol. 25 No. 1,
2014) finds that zooming in on the technical aspects of machinery tends to “bracket” culture, blinding the critic to
difference that isn’t expressed on the surface. This project instead hopes to follow the methods of Wendy Hui Kyong
Chun, who in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011) relates the technicity of software to
cultural expression—how code underwrites our society like ideology. See also: Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A
Lexicon (MIT Press, 2008).
68
Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 17. David Golumbia, The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard
University Press, 2009). Computing, as Golumbia points out, models “centralizing, demarcating, and concentrating
power” and “tends to be aligned with relatively authority-seeking, hierarchical, and often politically conservative
forces” (p. 4). Golumbia defines computational thinking as “the view that a great deal, perhaps all, of human and
social experience can be explained via computational processes” (p. 8). Hayles’s “regime” differs from Golumbia’s
logic in that Hayles describes the interplay of the rhetoric of computation and mass computerization, whereas
Golumbia describes the belief in that rhetoric independent of computers.

22
instrumental endgame. Punch cards are essentially pre-digital algorithms; they deliver a set of
instructions to a machine which, when followed prescriptively, produce an output. They are, as
Andrew Goffey and Ed Finn define “algorithms,” “conceptual embodiment[s] of instrumental
rationality within real machines” and, increasingly, “cultural machines”—the unseen framework
of most of our daily experiences.
69
Punch cards thus allow us to unpack the cultural shockwaves
of machine programming before algorithmic thinking becomes codified in software and obscured
from view. In other words, this is a software studies project, a study of platforms and codes and
algorithms which have long encroached on and shaped the nature of artistic expression. But it is
a software studies project that examines the history of these objects before they existed, a bridge
between the digital age and the machines which first helped humans imagine what that age might
look like. It is not a history of computing. It is a history of thinking about machines as extensions
of and models for our intellectual and creative processes.

Overview and Chapters
As mentioned at the top, this project is based in archival research and involves many kinds of
texts: from prose, drama, poetry, literary scholarship, and visual art to science and technical
writing, diagrams, blueprints, machines, punch cards, and weaving treatises. It should be noted
that microhistories, focusing on disparate anecdotes often neglected by main narratives, can end
up as microscopic as forced teleology or literary periodization. William B. Warner and Clifford
Siskin point out that New Historicism, for instance, relies on “tenuous connections between the
objects under study,” forcing the scholar to reduce complex networks into simple patterns—just

69
Andrew Goffey, “Algorithm,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller (MIT Press, 2008), 19.
Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, 2017).

23
as the punch card reduces an artist’s creative labor to a composition algorithm.
70
Alan Liu refers
to the tendency within New Historicism to perform “gestures of incompletion,” a way to avoid
making too-big claims about cultural formations.
71
Jennifer L. Lieberman specifically singles out
literary historians who, when attempting to incorporate histories of technology, attribute too
much importance to objects over their systems. Where science functions as metaphor, technology
often functions as metonym; lightbulbs, transformers, and power lines stand in for “electricity”
while actors and their motives become untold backstory.
72
The danger, Liu argues in The Laws of
Cool (2009), is a return to formalism.
73
This dissertation admittedly relies on metonymy and
some tenuous connections, cobbled together without any intention to present a grand theory of
history. However, as Heather Love argues in “Close but Not Deep” (2010), literary study
remains so stuck on hermeneutics that any attempts to incorporate the methods of the social
sciences is enough to jolt it back to history.
74

Another inspiration for this project is the work of Sadie Plant. Though Plant is guilty of
promoting false teleology in her technology history, she does so to reimagine new possibilities.
Famously, Plant appoints the jacquard loom as “the vanguard site of software development”
75
;
“in and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning
and weaving, […] fiber-optic cables, pixeled screens, telecom lines, the World Wide Web, the
Net, and matrices to come.”
76
Plant’s strategy is to de-masculinize the digital age by highlighting

70
William B. Warner and Clifford Siskin, “Stopping Cultural Studies,” in Profession (2008), 99-101. See also:
Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2007).
71
Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 80.
72
Jennifer L. Lieberman, Power Lines: Electricity in American Life and Letters, 1882-1952 (MIT Press, 2017), 28.
See also: Grusin, “What is an Electronic Author?”
73
Liu, The Laws of Cool, 172-3.
74
Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” in New Literary History Vol. 41
No. 2 (2010), 374-5.
75
Sadie Plant, “The Future Looms,” 46.
76
Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (Fourth Estate, 1997), 12.

24
women’s role in computing’s origins (e.g., Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper) and associating that
history with the mythologically gendered art of weaving.
77
(Autumn Stanley does something
similar in her compendium of women inventors.
78
) While certainly there is truth to Plant’s
revisions, more importantly what she presents is new knowledge through canon formation, what
Tresch calls “alternate modalities.” The ethics and algorithm movement tackles head on current
inequities in technology
79
; Johanna Drucker and other artists counter the Cartesian dualism at the
heart of computing through ambiguous and embodied design aesthetics
80
; and Plant has arguably
accomplished as much by revising software history—imagining a past that is at times historically
suspect but no falser than the one we are taught. I am not so bold as to draw a fresh narrative—
one where literature is so central to punch card history that we must reconsider how machine
programming works. But I do believe studying literary history at the moments of computing’s
development destabilizes that frontline story. At stake, as Jones notes of calculating engines, is
the very definition of “the human.”
81

77
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, when textile production slowly moves from domestic spaces to factory floors,
women arguably labored at fulling, carding, spinning, and weaving more than men. In China, sericulture, the raising
of silkworms, was done by women. We assume that this was always the case, considering that most cultures in the
world associate weaving with a goddess (Neith, Minerva, Athena, Frigg, Holda, Mama Ocllo, Tait, Amaterasu, et
al.). And it has been a persistent theme in literature and folktales, from The Odyssey to Sleeping Beauty. Famously,
Sigmund Freud wrote that “women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of
civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented – that of plaiting and weaving.”
78
Autumn Stanley, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology (Rutgers
University Press, 1995). In her entry for the Jacquard loom, Stanley writes that some “maintain that Mme Jacquard
actually invented the famous loom attributed to her husband in the 1840s” (p. 430).
79
For instance, see: Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York University Press, 2018); Anastasia
Salter and Bridget Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (Springer,
2017); and the social media hashtag #WomenTechLit.
80
Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (University of Chicago
Press, 2009), xiii. Drucker asks: “what is the relation between aesthetic expression and knowledge?”
81
N. Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetic, Literature, and Informatics
(2000), locates the “posthuman” of the computer age in the physical encounters we have with computers to “keep
disembodiment from being rewritten [...] into prevailing concepts of subjectivity” (p. 5). As Zakiyyah Jackson
writes, while Posthumanism has challenged the subject’s autonomy and agency via the consideration of animals,
technology, objects, and environment, the field also “continues to equate humanism with Enlightenment rationality
and its peculiar representation of humanity,” from “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and
Posthumanism,” in Feminist Studies (2013), 673.

25
The question “what is human?” overlaps with the question “what is an author?” in the
figure of the thinking subject. As Hayles argues, our conceptions of subjectivity are formed at
the nexus of technology and literature. As automation further divides human thinking from the
printed word or work of art, the human subject must find its place along that chain of production;
Do we exist only in the before, projecting forward? Do we collapse the entire machinery into our
singular self-image? Or do we disappear into its cog work? As Jean Baudrillard has observed,
we’ve relied a long time on “the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object.”
82
But we
also have a long history of tools becoming more than handmaidens to the artist, from “artifices of
intelligence” such as genres, rhyme schemes, chance operations, and algorithms to machine tools
like typewriters, word processors, and auto complete. The separation of form and content, of
origination and execution, has widened to such an extent that we face a crisis of automated
fictionality, a mediascape of social media bots and natural language processing. This dissertation
is about the long cultural project which evolves in response to this future, one which protects a
certain kind of human creativity from collective, amorphous, or machinic forms of origination. It
is, in a manner of speaking, a critical genealogy of programmed creativity, from the knowledge
machines Swift invents in Gulliver’s Travels to the idea that Samuel Beckett, in Coetzee’s
scholarship, is reducible to an algorithm.
Each chapter brings new context to representations of intellectual labor in literature by
reading works alongside concurrent punch card systems. The first half of the project focuses on
the rise of automation technologies in the European textile industry, the introduction of punch
card-operated looms into England, and those moments when anxieties around these machines
coalesce into expressions of authorship. The first chapter, “‘Vermin of the Age’: Jonathan Swift,

82
Jean Baudrillard, qtd Brown, “Thing Theory.”

26
Automation, and the Reckoning Author,” uses the figurative punch card—as a metonym for
automaticity in textile production—to reframe how we think of the role of proceduralism in the
production of new knowledge during the Enlightenment. This chapter examines science satires,
including the experiments at Lagado in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, while also attending to early
industrial innovation, the first punch card-programmed looms in Lyon, France, and concurrent
experiments in silk production. Focusing on differences between “human” thinking and “mere
reckoning,” I attend closely to the way Swift and others represent various types of mental labor
and programmatic art, keeping in mind that automaticity and even programmability can be
present without technology. In this case, I focus on any resemblances between machines and
metaphorical constructions: for instance, Swift’s tendency to represent overly mechanical
thinking with “vermin” such as flies and spiders. The chapter ultimately demonstrates how Swift
uses these machinic and animalistic metaphors to hierarchize (and thus render subhuman certain
automated) types of intellectual labor.
The second chapter turns to the moment when the punch card begins to embody, through
the jacquard loom, actual automated art production. By the mid-nineteenth century, such looms
could weave silk images so detailed the naked eye could not distinguish them from engravings.
“New Mythological Machinery: Silk-Woven Art and the Mechanical Reproduction of the Artist”
treats such works as proof of concept that the intellectual and creative processes of humans were
replicable, a framework which I then apply to reconsider the tenets of Romanticism. I reframe
contemporaneous concerns around plagiarism and forgery with a study of the logics of prosthesis
prevalent in early theories of industrial innovation (e.g., Babbage’s 1832 book, On the Economy
of Machinery and Manufacture), perform platform studies readings of the jacquard loom, and
close read Byron’s poetry and its afterlives (e.g., Washington Irving’s “An Unwritten Drama of

27
Lord Byron”). I especially examine the capacity of punch cards to store and reactivate patterns of
composition, comparing this to Romantic-era obsessions with reactivating history through relics,
found-manuscripts, and repurposed folklore. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the capacity of
punch cards to reenact the creative process in the absence of the artist contributes to the way
authors as famous as Byron, anticipating their posthumous careers, imagine what kind of storage
and reactivation of their personas might be possible.
The dissertation then turns to more explicit discussions of authorship in view of punch
card technology, arguing that as procedural composition becomes mechanized, punch cards
model the possibility of nonhuman knowledge and art production. The third chapter, “A Poetics
of Operations: Ada Lovelace and the Clerical Labor of Codework,” examines human-machine
co-authorship as it represented by Lovelace in her famous translation of and appendices to L. F.
Menabrea’s “Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.” The notes to this
translation are often described as an urtext for computer science—or, as Lovelace called it, “the
science of operations.” I close read this document, Lovelace’s correspondence with Babbage,
and the Engine itself, as a platform, alongside the histories of calculating engines, software
development, and clerical labor—e.g., contemporary understandings of literary amanuenses,
shorthand reporters, and the future secretarial figure. Using critical code studies, I perform a
close reading of what is today referred to as the “first computer program,” a sequence of steps
that Lovelace adds to her translation’s final Note G as an example of something the punch card
system can do. Ultimately, I argue that the gendered power structures of collaborative work in
Lovelace’s time—and the challenges women authors faced in the nineteenth century more
broadly—influenced computer history, that Lovelace’s representation of the human-machine

28
relationship in the first programmable calculating machine complicates the organizational
structures of both clerical labor and software design.
The fourth chapter shifts perspective to the reader and offers an epilogue, a synthesis, to
the first three chapters. “Generating @uthors: The Lovelace Test, J. M. Coetzee, and the Future
of Reading” uses the Turing Test and proposals for a “Lovelace Test” (an exercise to determine
nonhuman creativity) as a lens through which to discuss the reader’s perception of authors in
procedural artworks. I examine, for instance, early computer-generated poetry, when punch cards
and literature finally collaborate directly, alongside the history of computing at that time. Most of
the chapter focuses on Coetzee’s career as a computer programmer (IBM in 1962; ICT in 1964),
as described in his pseudo-memoir Youth (2002), the computer poems he programmed during off
hours, and the influence this experience had on his time as a doctoral student of literature at the
University of Texas. For his dissertation, Coetzee used punch cards to distant read the prose of
Samuel Beckett, to calculate mathematically Beckett’s prose style and find an equivalent pattern.
I compare Coetzee’s method—computational text analysis—to the Turing tests, and I argue that
Coetzee’s intention to locate Beckett’s author-algorithm, at a time when distant reading gathers
steam and poststructuralist theory treats “the author” as an invention of the text, illustrates how
literary theory and the algorithmic author have continued to coevolve.
Collectively, these chapters provide a prologue to the rise of automated writing—and a
more historically informed way to approach our machine-authored future. Even Coetzee’s time
at Austin can be considered a rehearsal of automated writing and computational humanities. In
the last decade, the creative output of so-called artificial intelligences has ranged from novel
(Alexa and Siri) and interesting (computer poetics and neural network fiction) to increasingly
dangerous (biasedly designed social media bots and auto-generated fake news reportage). It is

29
true, as Hayles observes, that softwares have become co-users, with us, of our language, our
stories, and our truths, forcing us as thinking subjects to reconsider our relation of word to world.
Much of the reading we do daily is of text that has been proceduralized, automated and, like the
jacquard loom, protocoled by encoded artifacts secreted from human inquiry. But now we cannot
even touch the code that protocols our lives.
83

83
But we can, at least, in the latest attempt to hijack the history of machine programming to bolster corporate
identities, purchase “smart” clothing using Google’s “Jacquard platform” (https://atap.google.com/jacquard/).

30
CHAPTER 1

“Vermin of the Age ”: Jonathan Swift, Automation, and the Reckoning Author

Shall we tremble before clothwebs and cobwebs, whether woven in Arkwright looms,
or by the silent Arachnes that weave unrestingly in our Imagination?

— Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 1836
1

Introduction
In 1638, Charles I outlawed the Dutch-engine loom for weaving ribbons. The new machine,
which required fewer people to operate and thus threatened the livelihood of ribbon weavers,
stoked fear that other inventions might eventually replace human labor, too. But there was no
staving off the budding commonplace of industrial innovation. The king’s ban was not enforced.
The stocking frame and the addition of treadles to spinning wheels had already redefined labor
for the textile industry. Reports published in England in the 1660s rang alarms that, in central
Europe, an invention even allowed woven goods to “weave themselves”
2
; the possibility of real
automation—the capacity for machines to operate without humans (beyond mere philosophical
novelty)—had entered popular discourse. Uprisings such as the London Weaver’s Riot of 1675,
during which ribbon weavers sabotaged four “Engine Loomes,” would become a familiar
scandal by the eighteenth century.
3
Meanwhile, the philosopher-inventors at the Royal Society of

1
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 1836 (serialized in Fraser’s Magazine in November 1833 – August 1834), 52.
The novel follows Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, the fictional author of Clothes: Their Origin and Influence.
2
Thomas Powell, in Humane Industry: or A History of the Manual Arts, Deducing the Original, Progress, and
Improvement of Them (London, 1661), tells the story of an invention in Poland that weaved “4 or 5 Webs at a time
without any humane help; it was an Automaton or Engine that moved of itself and would work night and day.” The
inventor was forced to flee to Italy, because his invention “prejudiced the poor people of the Town.”
3
Judith B. Slagle, in “‘A Great Rabble of People’: The Ribbon-Weavers in Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso,” N&Q
36 (September 1989), 351-354, argues that the mob in Shadwell’s play alludes to this 1675 event. Soon such events
became typical of the era; wool weavers in the Spitalfields rioted in 1714, destroying imported textiles. The silk

31
London for Improving Natural Knowledge, chartered in 1662 by Charles II, had begun grappling
with the real-world applications of their scientific experiments and mechanical inventions.
Increasingly, the inventions reported in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
overlapped with the proto-industrial ambitions of the empire, often without care for the human
costs. At the center of the tension between laborers and philosopher-inventors was the machine
that might, in the place of man, weave on its own.
Worker uprisings captured the public imagination more than the looms themselves. The
London Weaver’s Riot of 1675 entered literary history the following year in Thomas Shadwell’s
satirical play The Virtuoso (1676), which opened to great acclaim at Dorset Garden (with Charles
II in attendance). In Shadwell’s play, the character Snarl rouses a group of ribbon weavers to
attack Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, the eponymous “virtuoso” (or philosopher-inventor) who claimed
to have invented a new mechanical loom which would make the weavers obsolete. Gimcrack,
though Shadwell writes that he was denied membership to any scientific community, quickly
became the literary archetype for England’s new inventor class. This chapter will focus mostly
on Jonathan Swift’s prose writings and the 1720s—when the punch card is invented for the
automation of silk weaving—but I wanted to start first with a brief note on Shadwell’s play,
Swift’s clearest literary predecessor not only regarding his satirical treatment of the Royal
Society, but also the use of textile machine innovation to represent and work through anxieties
related to the threat of automation.
Much of the scholarship on The Virtuoso treats the play as an early dialogue between the
literary and the scientific, citing the play alongside Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), Margaret
Cavendish’s Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), Aphra Behn’s The Emperor of

riots, which began in 1769, were famously violent. By the nineteenth century, the regularity of such riots caused
lawmakers to enact draconian laws such as the Spitalfields Acts.

32
the Moon (1687), and Susanna Centlivre’s The Basset-Table (1706).
4
Scholars agree that these
works, while each unique in approach, critique the often impractical nature of experimentalism
and elaborate rhetoric used by philosopher-inventors to legitimize those experiments.
5
Especially
in the wake of Francis Bacon’s distinction between operative and speculative knowledge, the
former, more utilitarian application of science—inventions like the Dutch-engine loom, or what
Cavendish called “more beneficial arts”—found favor over more abstract searches for scientific
knowledge.
6
Shadwell’s Gimcrack embodies the latter: “I care not for the practic. I seldom bring
anything to use; ‘tis not my way. Knowledge is my ultimate end.”
7
He is, in fact, a rank amateur,
whose experiments are as far-fetched as they are impractical: e.g., reading a Geneva bible by the
light of a leg of pork. When confronted by the ribbon weavers at the end of the play, Gimcrack
confesses: “I have never invented an engine in my life. […] We virtuosos never find out any
thing of use, ‘tis not our way.”
8
Recent scholarship regarding The Virtuoso argues that the play
illustrates the purely theatrical nature of such experiments and how philosopher-inventors are
often motivated by personal gain rather than greater good.
9
The same readings might apply to

4
See also: Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator (No. 17), which recounts a young woman who performs
experiments with her microscope in the garden and parlor, to great social and intellectual effect (1744-1746).
5
According to Albert S. Borgman, Claud Lloyd, F. P. Wilson, and others, Shadwell baldly drew his inspiration for
Gimcrack, sometimes verbatim, from Robert Boyle and the Royal Society, the experiments reported in the
Philosophical Transactions, and Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667). The reference was so easily
recognized in its day that William Wotton would later write of the Society: “…no great Things have ever or are ever
likely to be perform’d by the Men of Gresham […] every Man whom they call a Virtuoso, must needs be a Sir
Nicolas Gimcrack.” However, as pointed out by Joseph M. Gilde (“Shadwell and the Royal Society: Satire in The
Virtuoso,” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1970, 475-479), likely the target of
Shadwell’s satire was not the Society or its members but the many amateurs who fashioned themselves scientists
without the Society’s standards for good sense. According to Schaffer and Shapin, “the experimental laboratory was
advertised as a place where practically useful knowledge was produced” (240). One such effort to rationalize the
mechanical arts was the short-lived History of Trades (1660s-1680s).
6
Robert Boyle argued that “luciferous” (enlightening) experiments lead to “fructiferous” (useful) innovations.
However, the Royal Society lost sight of its original cause, giving rise to the Society of Arts (William Shipley,
1754), and other such groupthinks designed to foster advancements of nation and people.
7
Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso (edited by Marjorie Hope Nicholson and David Stuart Rodes, University of
Nebraska Press, 1966), II.ii.303-304; II.ii.85-86.
8
Shadwell, The Virtuoso, V.iii.76-79.
9
John Shanahan (“Theatrical Space and Scientific Space in Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso,” Studies in English
Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 49 No. 3, 2009, 552) argues that while real-life experiments needed theatrical metaphors,

33
Centlivre’s Valeria or Behn’s Boliardo, other literary virtuosi who undermine the legitimacy and
social value of their real-life counterparts.
This chapter, however, is interested not in the impractical nature of these experiments and
inventions, but in how Swift, like Shadwell, represents the relationship between human labor and
innovation via experimentation. Regardless of Gimcrack’s empty boast, the weavers’ response to
the possible threat of automation is notable for the servant’s description of the mob as “a great
Rabble of People,” Longvil’s comparison of the weavers to “wild Beasts,” and Bruce’s reference
to them as “dogs.”
10
Shadwell’s satire here is directed at the assumed social status of virtuosi; as
Tita Chico writes, conceptions of scientific authority based on the “modest witness,” which the
play repeatedly undermines, had to do in part with the profession’s exclusion of women and
members of the lower classes.
11
But the words “Beasts” and “dogs” also take on additional
significance considering Gimcrack’s experiments throughout the rest of the play. After all, he
boasts of having, via blood transfusion, switched the natures of bulldogs and spaniels. And he
claims to have replaced a man’s blood with that of a sheep’s, resulting in the subject becoming
not only sheeplike but also wool-producing; “I’ll make all my clothes of ’em,” Gimcrack says of
the man’s wool, literally turning a man not only into a beast, but also into the raw material of that
industry (presumably becoming both the shearer and object of that labor). In this way, Gimcrack
ventures into the “more beneficial arts” but at the expense of the laboring body; as Snarl says,

wherein the fiction of a “modest witness” is invoked to stamp the experiments as genuine, this theatricality leans
more toward theater than science. Tita Chico (“Gimcrack’s Legacy: Sex, Wealth, and the Theater of Experimental
Philosophy,” in Comparative Drama Vol. 42 No. 1, 2008, 37-38) adds that the objectivity implied by this “modest
witness” is often instead a cover for subjective desires, and that the play further “implies that the popularization of
experimental philosophy encouraged such buffoonish and self-interested behavior” among amateurs.
10
Shadwell, The Virtuoso, V.ii.106; V.ii.121-122; V.iii.82.
11
Chico, “Gimcrack’s Legacy,” 29. Chico points out that the “modest witness,” or any so-called objective process
for the authentication of experiments using social corroboration, also set standards for who qualified as a witness:
“the figure of Gimcrack, so often a throw-away allusion in critical accounts to signify a narrowly satiric response to
the Royal Society and its experimental programs, more accurately registers the value systems embedded in the
practice of experimental philosophy” (p. 46).

34
Gimcrack had killed four or five other men with similar transfusions.
12
Like the rioting weavers,
these experimental subjects become expendable: sacrificed for the sake of progress, perhaps, but
also (even literally) dehumanized in the process.
13

These human-animal categories also collapse with the industrial revolution. Mechanical
innovations transform mills into a kind of laboratory and turn craftsmen into machine operators
or, in the case of automation, mere muscle; even animals like oxen or horses begin replacing
human workers. Global production chains, the Raj, the slave trade, and a new wage-earning
domestic workforce, made possible by the technologizing of mills, presented new dilemmas to
anyone reconciling natural philosophy’s claims about the human—the idea that all humans are
also, equally, animals—with the inhumane treatment and shifting skill requirements of laborers.
In The Virtuoso, Shadwell juxtaposes innovations which really do transform human subjects
(e.g., the sheep man) with the ribbon weavers who might be beasts in their anger, but who are
also suffering more abstract redefinitions of their humanity through the transformation of their
labor by the inventor class. Lucinda Cole argues that anxieties around species identity shaped
eighteenth-century satire, that authors like Shadwell and then Swift were “deeply occupied with
the distinctions between human and non-human animals.”
14
While Cole is referring to the horse-

12
Shadwell, The Virtuoso, II.ii.127-128; II.ii.182-192; II.ii.209-215. In their introduction to the play, Nicholson and
Rodes (p. xxiii) point out that these blood transfusions are like actual experiments reported to the Royal Society and
published in the Philosophical Transactions.
13
Gimcrack also ignores, for instance, the question “But what will become of the rest of the parsons?” after claiming
to have invented a device—a sort of megaphone—for one parson to do the work of many (V.ii.63-64).
14
Lucinda Cole, “Introduction: Human–Animal Studies and the Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century, Vol.
52, No. 1 (2011), 5. See also: Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth
Century (University of Virginia Press, 2003). Nash discusses the role of Edward Tyson’s The Anatomy of a Pygmy
(1698), a formative text in the species border-building of eighteenth-century literature. As Cole points out, creative
rhetoric is required to excuse practices such as slavery, and to keep the educated European man at the center of
human subjecthood, often by defining itself as that which masters its own animality and delegates others to the
scientific gaze—as experimental subjects. Biology—that is, natural philosophy’s subjective take on the human
animal—was often cited as an authority to reinforce social hierarchies based in sociopolitical assemblages. Zakiyyah
Iman Jackson, in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020, 23), reiterates
and complicates further this formula regarding race: “discourses on nonhuman animals and animalized humans are

35
like Houyhnhnm and the peoples of Swift’s other fictional civilizations, this chapter shifts this
investigation to human subjects in the context of industrial labor and the threat of automation and
machine programming. I propose that this “deep occup[ation]” should be expanded to the
distinctions between humans, animals, and machines.
When new inventions destabilize the distinctions between humans and nonhuman labor
(as well as between humans and other humans), those in privileged positions use discursive
practices like science and literature to render their own category the exception—by constructing
some forms of humanity further along the spectrum toward animality or the machinic. Gimcrack
is one example, but this chapter will suggest that Swift similarly abjects notions of automaticity
and programmability in creative or scientific expression, positioning himself in the philosopher-
inventor class of Gimcrack and his referents. As many historians have observed, this period saw
the separation of mental labor into two subcategories: inventive or intellectual on the one hand,
and automatic or mechanical on the other. This chapter is interested in the role of automation
technologies in the shaping the latter category. Does the industrialization of craft reduce even
creative labor to something menial? Which types of thinking are valued when the products of
skilled labor begin to “weave themselves”? And how does this division of mental labors define
the “human” in this period? By further contextualizing Swift’s writing against new technologies
developed in the decades after the Dutch-engine loom, including the earliest experiments with
punch card programming, this chapter investigates the extent to which Swift’s representations of
programmatic knowledge production borrow from real machines. As the “more beneficial arts”
are transforming human laborers into something more machinic or animalistic, Swift participates
in a parallel project: reshaping human authorship.

forged through each other.” This chapter does not address the processes of racialization via coloniality, but it does
similarly approach “the human” as something eminently moldable by those in power.

36

Swift and Science
Much of Swift’s satirical works belong to the same literary tradition as The Virtuoso. Lemuel
Gulliver’s “Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi…,” in the third book of what is commonly referred to
as Gulliver’s Travels (1726), is one of the most famous encounters between science and the
literary imagination. For that reason, as in the case of Shadwell’s play, most scholarship on the
third voyage has focused on the ways in which Swift draws inspiration from and responds to the
popularity of natural philosophy. Critics point to similarities between the Royal Society and
Swift’s Academy of Projectors at Lagado, a fictional institution that would quickly eclipse
Shadwell’s Gimcrack as the most famous caricature of experimentalism.
15
As with Gimcrack’s
experiments, the impractical projects at Lagado resemble ones reported in the Philosophical
Transactions, and many scholars since have pointed out that Swift was widely read in natural
philosophy, and that he visited the Society at Gresham College in 1710.
16
The common refrain
throughout Swift scholarship is that the author was well-versed in the works produced by the
Society, including Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal-
Society (1667), and The Philosophical Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1725). What
separates Swift from his predecessors is that, while he also satirizes the dispassionate priorities
of the “projectors” (philosopher-inventors) and their experiments, he seems especially interested
in the role of the Society’s related publications. Unlike Shadwell et al., Swift is responding to

15
Swift likely includes in his satire all learned societies, including the Dublin Philosophical Society and his own
alma mater, the University of Leiden. This line of scholarship goes back to the eighteenth century; the Earl of Orrery
claimed that Part III was “in general written against chymists, mathematicians, mechanics, and projectors of all
kinds” (Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1752).
16
Marjorie Nicolson and Nora M. Mohler, “The Scientific Background of Swift’s Voyage to Laputa,” in Annals of
Science Vol. 2 No. 3 (1937). I can see Swift’s influence, for instance, in the writing of Charles Babbage a century
later (On the Economy of Manufactures, 186): “There is, perhaps, no trade or profession existing in which there is so
much quackery, so much ignorance of the scientific principles, and of the history of their own art, with respect to its
resources and extent, as are to be met with among mechanical projectors.”

37
how the popularity of the new science is changing conventional wisdoms around the production
of knowledge. Gimcrack is indifferent to the lives of his ideas beyond his social circle—in fact,
his fame is his downfall—but Swift’s projectors treat the dissemination of their experiments to
the public as their ultimate end, even as commodities.
The experiment referenced most often in Swift scholarship is the “Project for improving
speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operators,” a machine powered by humans
turning cranks which, randomly and without human thought, “may write Books in Philosophy,
Poetry, Politicks, Law, Mathematicks and Theology.”
17
Scholars have discussed this “wonderful
Machine,” as Gulliver refers to it, in three ways: as a critique of non-experiential knowledge
making, traced often to Isaac Newton’s aside in Principia, that “we could derive the rest of the
phenomena of Nature by the same kind of reasoning from mechanical principles” (which, in this
case, is nothing more than recombination and agglutination); relatedly, as an early example of
machine thinking which foreshadows the rise of the algorithms in digital culture; or, most often,
as a parody of a burgeoning, unregulated print industry that figuratively produces nonsense. In
every case, Swift is represented as an “ancient” responding to “modern” systems of knowledge
dissemination popularized by the Royal Society (and a publication system which rewards its
imitation). The Society considered truth to be discovered or generated rather than evident or
abstract, and for ancients like Swift, this new approach splintered knowledge into a heterogeneity
of pseudo-truths produced either by experiments which transform idiosyncratic perception into
fact, or by misguided beliefs that just because it’s printed, it must be true.
18
This chapter will
discuss at length this “wonderful Machine,” with attention paid to all three readings of the engine

17
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Edited by Albert J. Rivero. Norton, 2002), 152-158.
18
See: Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
(University of Chicago Press, 1998); and Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes,
Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton University Press, 1985).

38
listed above—and another: as an expression of anxiety around the replacement of intellectual
labor in the production or acquisition of knowledge.
In the Advancement of Learning, Bacon refers to the production of knowledge without
learning as something “the spider does”; by drawing only from within itself, it produces “only
the cobwebs of learnings.” When they think at all, it is a fruitless kind of mania which produces
nothing of worth. Alexander Pope does something similar in The Dunciad (1728), and again in
his “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735), when he uses the metaphor of a silkworm spinning to
describe the poetry coming out of Grub Street as the mindless output of words without reading
others. Swift often borrows his friend Pope’s language when he attacks London’s commercial
print industry, using the word “Grub” (insect larva) to insult, as Samuel Johnson defines the
connotation of the street name in his Dictionary, “any mean production.”
19
In The Battle of the
Books (1704), Swift even describes the “Modern Spider of Invention” as that which feeds upon
“the Insects and Vermin of the Age,” who like Bacon’s spider “Spins and Spits wholly from
himself, […] displays his great Skill in Architecture, and Improvement in the Mathematicks”
only to produce cobwebs “spun out of [his] own Entrails” (“thinking” on its own just as an
automated loom weaves on its own). These, Swift claims, are “the Guts of Modern Brains.”
20

Like the “Project for improving speculative Knowledge,” here Swift borrows a metaphor for
modern knowledge production as a false endeavor. Rather than a “wonderful Machine,” it is a
bug: a spider or silkworm. As this chapter will demonstrate, Swift also draws figurative affinities

19
Alexander Pope, William Lisle Bowles, William Warburton, and Joseph Warton. The Works of Alexander Pope,
Esq., in Verse and Prose: Containing the Principal Notes of Drs. Warburton and Warton. Vol. V (J. Johnson, 1806).
20
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, to which is added The Battle of the Books and the Mechanical Operation of the
Spirit, 2nd edition, edited by A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford, 1968), 151-152. Immanuel Kant, in
Critique of Pure Reason, writes of mathematical attempts at knowledge production: “By means of this method the
mathematician can build nothing in philosophy except houses of cards.”

39
between the automaticity or compulsory nature of insects and the overly mechanical processes he
associates with the new science and its publications.
Recently, scholars of science and literature have complicated the notion that Swift merely
responds to the output of the Royal Society. In The Experimental Imagination, Tita Chico argues
that, rather than writing literary reflection alone, Swift participates in the shaping of scientific
knowledge.
21
Writing on the second voyage, Gregory Lynall in Swift and Science compares the
author’s matter-of-fact style to Hooke’s, suggesting that Swift parodies and thus reveals “the
scientific treatise as a literary form.”
22
Gulliver’s descriptions of the Academy are not dissimilar,
on the surface, to the Philosophical Transactions, right down to the inclusion of diagrams for the
projectors’ inventions. Gulliver’s Travels even resembled the other publications in circulation by
Swift’s publisher, Benjamin Motte, which included works of natural philosophy.
23
Thus, Swift
writes amid and in the form of modern knowledge dissemination, even contributing to its living
discourse. One strategy of like-minded critics has been to transhistorically put into conversation
Swift’s descriptions of the miniature Gulliver in Brobdingnag with later thinkers who conceive

21
Tita Chico, The Experimental Imagination: Literary Knowledge and Science in the British Enlightenment
(Stanford University Press, 2018), 11. Joseph Drury writes that eighteenth-century literature should be considered
“an active participant in the social and material networks that establish and sustain that knowledge,” in “Literature
and Science in Enlightenment Britain: New Directions,” in Literature Compass Vol. 14 No. 6 (2017), 9. These
readings are a part of a general turn to re-adopt Swift as a prophet of science. As many have pointed out, some of the
outlandish experiments described in the Academy at Lagado hold grains of truth yet discovered in Swift’s era. The
most famous example is the mention of “two lesser Stars, or Satellites, which revolve about Mars” (144). Swift has
also seen a renaissance in histories of the computer. See: Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: A Personal
Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence (A. K. Peters, 1979); Eric A. Weiss, “Anecdotes:
Jonathan Swift’s Computing Invention,” in Annals of the History of Computing 7.2 (1985). In “Swift’s Prescience:
A Polite Precursor of Corpus Linguistics” (Journal of Language and Literature 2.1, 2003), John McKenny even
proposes Swift as an early inventor of algorithms.
22
Gregory Lynall, Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690-1730
(Springer, 2012), 13.
23
Other books printed for Benjamin Motte, as listed in the 1727 edition, include: A New Theory of the Earth, from
its Original to the Consummation of all Things by William Whiston, which claims to prove that the Bible’s take on
creation is “perfectly agreeable to Reason and Philosophy,” and another by Andrew Motte, a mathematics lecture
given at Gresham College titled A Treatise of the Mechanical Powers, wherein the Laws of Motions, and the
Properties of those Powers are explain’d and demonstrated in an easy and familiar Method. Victoria & Albert
Museum, London, United Kingdom.

40
of the body and world as machine-like.
24
In such works, a growing popular interest in automata
demonstrates a paradigm shift among the middle classes, and Swift’s rendering of Gulliver as an
automaton helps orient readers to this new worldview. Comparing the second voyage to future
works, such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1747) or the theatrical automata of
Jacques de Vaucanson (1737), has likewise opportuned discussions of Swift as an agent in man’s
changing relationship to machines.
This chapter is also interested in Swift’s position toward and contribution to the sciences
of the eighteenth century. However, rather than focusing on Swift’s relationship to figures such
as Boyle and Newton, this chapter is especially interested in the things that make up arguably the
most consequential technology of his century: the machines found in textile mills. As Jennifer L.
Lieberman points out in “Finding a Place for Technology,” literary scholars tend to favor the
discursive similarities between literature and science.
25
In so doing, they have not only left the
material realities of Gulliver’s Travels unexcavated; they have neglected the tension caused by
Swift’s interest in both science and industry. Between the founding of the Royal Society and the
Society of Civil Engineers (1771), machines moved from laboratories to mills, and narratives of
technological innovation shifted from philosopher-inventors to industrialists; scientific thinking
methodized into industrial thinking, and technical knowledge served a different end goal: utility

24
See: Allison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine,
1660-1830 (University of Toronto Press, 2007); and Simon Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” in The Sciences in
Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999).
(For reference, the 1751 edition of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie defines an “automaton” as a “device that moves by
itself, or a machine that carries in itself the principle of its motion.”) William Coward wrote in 1702 that “Man is a
mere piece of Mechanism, a Curious Frame of Clock-Work, and only a Reasoning Engine.” Adelheid Voskuhl
writes that automata were “not epistemically relevant simulations of live bodies but rather mechanical replications of
cultural and political body practices and ambitions,” in Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and
Cultures of the Self (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 21.
25
Jennifer L. Lieberman, “Finding a Place for Technology,” in Journal of Literature and Science 10.1 (2017), 27.

41
and optimization.
26
Over the course of Swift’s career, the British Empire was transitioning from
its age of science to an age of machinery, and in Swift’s surviving correspondence, it is more
common to find the author discussing woolen manufacture than the treatises of the intellectual
elite. Even Swift’s renowned animosity toward Newton is more about the latter’s anti-Ireland
policies as Master of the Mint than his approach to science. Swift’s interest in the dissemination
of knowledge by philosopher-inventors has more to do with the state-sanctioned application of
that knowledge than the silly doings of feckless gimcracks.
27

The above critical approaches to Gulliver’s Travels tend to neglect a changing industrial
climate with which Swift was intimate as a political actor during the early eighteenth century.
Textile production in England at this time encompassed imperial brutalities enacted upon India,
North America and, close to Swift’s heart, Ireland. Swift is never so obvious that he includes
rioting weavers in his stories, but, as the first part of this chapter will show, industrial innovation
figures throughout Gulliver’s Travels. I examine anew Gulliver’s third voyage to trouble the
Royal Society’s privileged status in its scholarship and situate Swift’s satires of science with
histories of technology—especially the inventions of textile machines and their influence on
constructions of labor. Ultimately, this chapter will look again to Swift’s “Project for improving
speculative Knowledge” to revisit the author’s critiques of knowledge production as they are
embodied in a machine inspired by the inventions of Swift’s time. Rather than comparing the
experiments at Lagado to works such as Man a Machine, this chapter will compare Swift’s

26
Celina Fox, in The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2009), chooses 1771 over
1660 to blur the distinctions between science, the arts, and the commercial sector.
27
I am thinking of technology as Alexander Weheliye defines it: “the application of knowledge to the practical aims
of human life or to changing and manipulating the human environment,” and in which race is also a technology “for
the benefit of some and the detriment of other humans.” See Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics,
and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke University Press, 2014, 12, 26). For some scholars, Swift’s
critique of the Royal Society is not their science per se, but their roles within the Newtonian Whig intelligentsia,
which beget models of governance based on that science and under the banner of “public good.” See: Lynall, Swift
and Science; Chico, The Experimental Imagination.

42
notions of automation to real-world engines, from the Dutch-engine loom to the automated silk
drawloom and punch card system concurrently developing in Lyon, France. Those drawlooms
are uniquely situated in the history of technology because they span the philosopher-inventor’s
workshop to the textile mill; they embody the shift, prescribed by Bacon, from the experimental
laboratory to the administration of public good. Swift, for whom the intervention of learned
virtuosi into economic affairs is a highly contested and politicized arena, has much to say about
automation’s migration into his corner of the world.
Introducing this material history to a reading of the “Project for improving speculative
Knowledge” reconceptualizes eighteenth-century intellectual labor and knowledge production in
industrial terms. Since textile manufacture served as vanguard for all machine innovation, any
changing attitudes toward manual labor in the textile trade (e.g., weaving) influenced analogous
attitudes in other industries (e.g., book publication). Automated weaving promised to replace the
craftsperson’s role, the act of composition, with a mechanical process; meanwhile, copyright
laws inaugurated authors and inventors as autonomous owners of their own ideas. As Joseph
Loewenstein writes in The Author’s Due, any “transformation in the available means of storing
and distributing information inevitably requires of a culture that it renegotiate its conception of
how information is produced.”
28
While new technologies were revolutionizing the concept of
material production in England, legal discourses—from the Statute of Monopolies to the Statute
of Anne—were engaging in the individuation of intellectual endeavor centered on the human
subject.
29
Literature, I argue, contributes to this formation of the thinking human subject in its

28
Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (University of Chicago Press,
2002), 119.
29
The Statute of Anne (1710) granted authors 14 years of “sole right and liberty of printing,” a term limit later
reinforced by Donaldson v Becket (1774). As William Blackstone observed in his Commentaries on the Laws of
England, these term limits “appear to have been copied from the exception in the Statute of Monopolies […] which
allows a royal patent of privilege to be granted for fourteen years to any inventor of a new manufacture” (Book III,

43
representations of nonhuman thinking. The “wonderful Machine,” inspired by inventions in the
real world which were deskilling industrial labor, provides an opportunity to discuss the methods
by which the figure of the author or inventor is separated, conceptually, from the more vulgar or
mechanical aspects of intellectual labor at a moment when these categories are in flux. When it
seems possible for words, too, to “weave themselves,” the reshaping of laboring bodies through
scientific and literary discourse shifts to keep human the authoring subject—to construct “the
human” as an author—in opposition to unthinking subjects.
This chapter argues that, despite Swift’s sympathies for the peoples below Laputa, his
work contributes to the above cultural project by applying metaphors of industrial innovation to
hierarchize types of labor, even constructing the industrial half of intellectual labor as subhuman.
For scholars of Gulliver’s Travels, this reading might sound surprising. Swift’s tendency toward
cultural relativity and critiques of empire have made his work popular grist for revisions of the
discursive “human”; Gulliver’s encounters with other civilizations undermine England’s notions
of its own superiority.
30
But while Swift empathizes with the oppressed subjects of all empires,
rebutting constructions of “the human” as the privilege of the metropole, his satires conscript
automation technologies into a wider eighteenth-century discourse around humans and animals,
rendering people who resemble or work with such machines further along the spectrum toward
those creatures—like the spider—who reckon geometrically, but who never really think. As this
chapter demonstrates, even as Swift destabilizes the borders between animals and “rational
man”—a category invented by the new science—he draws new borders. He constructs his author

The Rights of Things (1766), Ch 26, “Of Title to Things Personal by Occupancy,” 405-7). See also: Mark Rose,
Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 1993).
30
Applying posthuman studies has often illuminated the way Swift questions anthropocentric and Eurocentric ideas
and practices by collapsing key conceptual distinctions between the human and the nonhuman, the British and their
colonial others. See, for instance: John Morillo, The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660-1800: Toward
Posthumanism in British Literature Between Descartes and Darwin (University of Delaware Press, 2018).

44
subject in opposition to machinic animals: the lumbering, but especially the verminous. In doing
so, Gulliver’s Travels equates programmatic thinking, metonymized by objects of industry like
the punch card, with an unthinking animality.

Swift and Industry
For Swift, empire, science, and technology are intimately linked. To investigate this relationship,
I follow the work of Barbara Hahn, treating textile machines as both the result of and cause of
larger global processes, as nodes via which historians can connect the histories of science with
the histories of labor and commodities.
31
The term “Industrial Revolution” usually refers to the
increase in manufacturing that came with the cotton boom toward the end of the eighteenth
century. Here, I look to earlier such spurts, when challenges in wool and silk manufacture led to
local innovations that predate James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny and Richard Arkwright’s water
frame. As Gillian Cookson writes in The Age of Machinery, to become famous for new ideas in
textile machine engineering, “timing was everything.”
32
Inventions took place over decades, via
knowledge exchanges between millworkers and philosopher-inventors, only becoming history
when industrialists scaled machines to meet the demands of the cotton industry. The same can be
said of the earliest automated looms in Lyon, France, which, due to traditionalist views within
the silk industry, were tabled until the nineteenth century. Still, these early machines operated as

31
Barbara Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 2-6. The cotton
industry especially relied on competition from India and, to borrow Hahn’s expanded definition of “manufacture” to
include the harvesting of raw materials, the “technology” of the plantation system.
32
Gillian Cookson, The Age of Machinery: Engineering the Industrial Revolution, 1770-1850 (Boydell, 2018), 226.
Cookson writes that the textile industry was “curiously slow in adopting its own technology,” and that only a small
percentage of innovations were ever patented. See also: Trevor Griffiths, Philip A. Hunt and Patrick K. O’Brien,
“Inventive Activity in the British Textile Industry, 1700-1800,” in The Journal of Economic History 52.4 (1992);
Richard J. Sullivan, “Patent Counts and Textile Invention: A Comment on Griffiths, Hunt, and O’Brien,” in The
Journal of Economic History 55.3 (1995); and Robert C. Allen, “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature: The
Spinning Jenny in Britain, France, and India,” in The Journal of Economic History 69.4 (2009).

45
harbingers of future mechanization, circulated in print by the intellectual elite. In the case of
punch cards, the tail of innovation is especially long, and I argue that the building blocks of
machine programming, the impetuses for Charles Babbage’s mechanical calculator and IBM
computers, find literary expression as early as Gulliver’s Travels.
Throughout Swift’s narrative, the textile industry recurs in three ways: as an anchor for
Gulliver’s unstable relationship to the size of objects; as a narrative strategy to describe imagined
worlds in familiar terms; and as an allegory for England’s economic oppression of Ireland.
Regarding the first,

consider how the Lilliputians describe Gulliver’s pocket watch: “he put this
Engine to our Ears, which made an incessant Noise like that of a Water-Mill.” Here clockwork,
emblematic of the small, intricate designs of seventeenth-century virtuosi, are translated by
Swift’s shifting positionality into the crude batteries of more recent industrial production. In
another episode, Gulliver makes dainty Lilliputian artifacts of war by comparing them to knitting
needles; in multiple other chapters, the fineness or coarseness of clothing reflect his size in
relation to the livestock of his hosts.

And in one especially memorable image from the second
voyage, a miniature Gulliver compares the purring of a cat to “a noise behind [him] like that of a
dozen Stocking-Weavers at work.”
33
A dozen machines in operation suggests something like a
mill, and a stocking-weaver is “one who weaves with a stocking-frame,” the knitting machine
invented by William Lee in Nottingham which kickstarted the first industrial revolution.
34
In this
view, the farmer’s Brobdingnagian house cat audibly signals the transition of textile production
from handwork, something small rural households might have toiled at as a unit, to mechanized

33
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 29, 45, 22, 76.
34
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “stocking-weaver,” “stocking-frame,” accessed August 20, 2019. The machine,
supposedly invented in 1589, was used to knit socks, mittens, et al. French histories tend to claim that the stocking-
loom was first invented in Normandy by French inventors and stolen by England. In “The History of Projects,” from
An Essay Upon Projects (1697), Daniel Defoe describes the knitting frame as “built with admirably symmetry.”

46
mass production, emasculating the diminished stature of a man—figuratively for the farmers and
literally for Gulliver. Thus, Swift’s horrors of scale can also be read as anxieties toward the
proliferation and increasing size of industrial artifacts.
As Jonathan Sawday makes clear in Engines of the Imagination, Europe prior to the
eighteenth century was not lacking for machine noise; it would not have been strange for Swift to
compare a loud sound to mill-power.
35
Stocking-frames, by then in use for over a century, would
have been easy to recognize for a general readership, and stocking-weavers had over that time
become consolidated under single roofs. Hahn writes anecdotally that, by the 1720s, “one hosier
employed more than forty apprentices [and, to hide the machines,] erected a large building in
Nottingham.”
36
In general, as Cookson notes, “textile technologies, which evolved steadily over
the centuries, saw a gathering change in pace in the early eighteenth century.”
37
By 1717 there
was a flax mill in Ireland and by 1726 a lint mill in Scotland, both powered by water. The most
important inventions were those which mechanized spinning—the process of making fibers into
yarn—and while these culminated in Samuel Compton’s spinning mule of 1779, they belong to a
long history of innovation that begins with patents in 1678.
38
Arkwright’s 1769 frame, which
used rollers to draw and twist fiber, was not much different than John Wyatt and Lewis Paul’s
1738 patent, which was in turn adapted for wool and cotton from an Italian silk-throwing system

35
Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (Routledge,
2007), 4-6.
36
Hahn, Technology, 69. Cookson suggests that Lee’s invention would have been especially totemic to readers as
both a noisy machine and a symbol of this new social reorganization of labor (Age of Machinery, 8-9).
37
Cookson, The Age of Machinery, 5-13. For instance, an Act of 1719 restricted skilled workers’ movements
abroad, its aim to stop metalworkers being lured to France and Russia.
38
Hahn, Technology, 155. The first aspects of the textile industry to be fully mechanized and powered were fulling,
scutching, and carding. Once the fibers were prepared in bulk, spinning machines, either by rolling or stretching and
twisting, prepared the yarn for weaving. Arkwright’s principal innovation was continuous rotary motion, something
which took previous inventions and made them cost-effective. See also: David T. Jenkins, The Cambridge History of
Western Textiles (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 723.

47
which had already been imported to Derby in 1702.
39
In other words, that Brobdingnagian house
cat was compared to increasingly normalized phenomena.
As others have pointed out, Swift likely borrowed machines like those above to render
quotidian his most speculative inventions. For instance, in describing the “floating” technology
of Laputa, Swift contrives the following:
At the Center of the Island there is a Chasm about fifty Yards in Diameter, from whence
the Astronomers descend into a large Dome, which is therefore called Flandona Gagnole,
or the Astronomers Cave […] The place is stored with great variety of Sextants,
Quadrants, Telescopes, Astrolabes, and other Astronomical Instruments. But the greatest
Curiosity, upon which the Fate of the Island depends, is a Load-stone of a prodigious
size, in shape resembling a Weavers Shuttle.
40

What I find interesting about this passage is the movement from science—and the instruments of
natural philosophy—to something as familiar as weaving. Other scholars have pointed out that
this passage demonstrates Swift’s misogyny; for instance, the invented phrase Swift uses to name
the Astronomers Cave seems partly named after a flandan, a style of woman’s bonnet at the time.
Susan Bruce notes similarities between this description and a womb, noting a superstition that
lodestones prevented miscarriages.
41
In this view, the comparison to a “Weavers Shuttle” further
feminizes (and arguably thus aims to render frivolous) what is otherwise a wondrous scientific
achievement. Lynall recently argues that Swift is also imitating the Royal Society’s approach to
science; “by domesticating this technology of the foreign ‘other’ through direct comparison with

39
The 1702 Derby mill was originally founded by Thomas Cotchett and driven by a waterwheel built by George
Sorocold. This mill quickly failed, but it inspired Thomas and John Lombe’s more successful mill at the same
location. The Lombes, using improvements on silk throwing observed in Italy, opened the new mill in 1718 with
Sorocold as engineer. This latter mill, which was five stories tall and employed over 300 workers, is far more
famous than the original, having been written about by Daniel Defoe in A Tour Thro’the Whole Island of Great
Britain… (1724), 72-73; and by John Theophilus Desaguliers, assistant to Newton and frequent contributor to the
Philosophical Transactions, in A Course of Experimental Philosophy Vol. 1 (W. Innys, 1745), 69.
40
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 141.
41
Susan Bruce, “The Flying Island and Female Anatomy: Gynaecology and Power in Gulliver's Travels,” in
Genders Vol. 2 (1988), 70.

48
European invention, Gulliver’s description resembles the rhetorical strategies of many essays
published in the Philosophical Transactions.”
42

What Lynall does not mention is that the inventor of the actual “flying” weaver’s shuttle,
John Kay, was not a member of the Royal Society but a hand-loom reed maker in Lancashire.
Akin to the Dutch ribbon engine a century before, the flying shuttle eliminated the need for an
assistant and improved the efficiency of the handloom. The assistant in this case was replaced by
a piece of wood with which the weaver could, by pulling a string, send the shuttle “flying” along
a track. The mythic version of the story dates Kay’s patent to 1733 and credits him for creating
the bottleneck necessary for the future innovations in spinning. However, revisions to this history
suggest that the flying shuttle was both adopted very gradually and in development for years
prior.
43
Obviously, Swift does not base his “Weavers Shuttle” on Kay’s, but he arguably does
knowingly draw comparisons between the device by which the island of Laputa floats above
Balnibarbi and an object very much at the center of ongoing innovations in weaving. Thus,
Gulliver makes practical the wondrous, but he also translates that science into objects which
directly impact the economies of the British Empire.
Swift was more than merely interested in the material realities of the textile industry. In
multiple letters written during the 1720s, he blames the economic crisis in Ireland on England’s
Navigation Acts and especially the Woollen Act of 1699, which relegated Ireland to a colony,
prohibited the exportation of Irish woolen manufacture, and forced Ireland to export its raw wool
to heavily levied English ports.
44
The cause was dear to him; he met with Dublin’s Corporation

42
Lynall, Swift and Science, 10.
43
Cookson, Age of Machinery, 16-19; Hahn, Technology, 58-62.
44
The three letters discussed here include “A proposal for the universal use of Irish manufacture” (1720), “The
present miserable state of Ireland” (1726), in which Swift describes Ireland’s plight to Sir Robert Walpole, and “A
Letter to the Archbishop of Dublin, concerning the Weavers” (1729). These letters were examined at the Victoria &
Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom, July 2019.

49
of Weavers in Woollen and Silks multiple times to encourage more sustainable practices in the
Irish textile sector. (Despite Gulliver’s seeming loyalty toward England, there was likely much
bitterness behind Swift’s words when Gulliver hopes the flock of Lilliputian sheep he delivers to
England would “prove much to the Advantage of the Woollen Manufacture, by the Fineness of
the Fleeces.”
45
) As Lynall points out, in comparing the technology by which Laputa wields
martial power over its colonies to a weaver’s shuttle, Swift uses a piece of a loom “as a symbol
of Britain’s economic grip over Ireland.” In fact, a Key published alongside Gulliver’s Travels
identified the lodestone as “a just Emblem of the British Linen and Woollen Manufactures.”
46

While some of Swift’s ire is reserved for the projectors, his letters place greater blame on the
industrialists in Yorkshire and Lancashire whose innovations he resents for spinning Irish wool.
There is something whimsical about a floating island, just as the many contrivances of learned
societies seem harmless in their laboratories. But for Swift, when mechanized to an industrial
scale, the most innocent ideas can incur terrible costs.

Spinners and Weavers
In those aforementioned letters, Swift calls for the people of Ireland—via the clergy, politicians,
and wealthier families—to start wearing only Irish woolen manufacture in order to curb demand
for foreign goods. He also beseeches the weavers themselves to stop cutting corners in their own
manufacture so that imported goods were not seen as superior. One of the experiments in the
Academy at Lagado seems to share Swift’s sympathies:
I went into another Room, where the Walls and Ceiling were all hung around with
Cobwebs, except a narrow Passage for the Artist to go in and out. At my Entrance he
called aloud to me not to disturb his Webs. He lamented the fatal Mistake of the World

45
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 66.
46
Corolini di Marco, The Flying Island, &c. Being a Key to Gulliver’s Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib,
Luggnag, and Japan. Published by Edmund Curll, 1726. See: Lynall, Swift and Science, 110.

50
had been so long in using Silk-Worms, while we had such plenty of Domestick Insects,
who infinitely excelled the former, because they understood how to weave as well as
spin. And he proposed farther, that by employing Spiders, the Charge of dying Silks
should be wholly saved, whereof I was fully convinced when he shewed me a vast
number of Flies most beautifully coloured, wherewith he fed his Spiders, assuring us, that
the Webs would take a Tincture from them; and as he had them of all Hues, he hoped to
fit every body’s Fancy, as soon as he could find proper Food for Flys of certain Gums,
Oyls, and other glutinous Matter to give a Strength and Consistence to the Threads.
47

When Gulliver enters this room, he finds it covered in spider webs. Inside, an “Artist” explains
his project to replace imported silkworms with “Domestick Insects,” or spiders. The plan mirrors
Swift’s own calls for support of Irish over foreign manufacture; instead of advocating for Ireland
to boycott English goods in favor of their own (or produce and export their own goods illegally),
here the spider provides the possibility of locally sustainable textile production while the Chinese
or French silkworm stands in for the English imports which are threatening the Irish economy.
This analogy would’ve worked in multiple ways at the time. Demand for cottons and silks from
abroad endangered England’s woolen trade, too. Calicos and muslins imported from India, along
with silks imported (or smuggled) from France, led Parliament to enact high taxes on imported
cotton prints and, in 1719-21, prohibit the printed cotton trade entirely. Meanwhile, England was
trying to build up a local silk industry.
48
Because Laputa stands in metaphorically for England,
on the surface this scene seems to reference the latter political dynamic; however, as he often
does, Swift slips Ireland into his analogy.
Scholarship on this chapter of Gulliver’s third voyage tends to agree that Swift, in his
representations of the Laputan experiments, makes material and literal what the Philosophical

47
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 153.
48
In 1718, John Appletree founded the Raw Silk Company. In 1728, a weaver named Claudius Rey published an
article titled “Scheme to Settle and Establish the Silk Weaving Trade on a Solid Foundation, and for the better
employing the poor of this Kingdom…” The purpose of this document was to (1) devise ways to stop the smuggling
of foreign silks into England, and (2), like Swift’s own writing, to encourage English silk weavers to not cut corners
and lower the value of their goods in effort to better stand up to the better-quality imports.

51
Transactions convey in figurative or overly aspirational language. In this case, Swift imitates
experiments in silk spinning often discussed both by the Royal Society and projectors elsewhere
in Europe (discussed below). That said, Swift is also literalizing a recurring reference in his own
letters against the Navigation Acts: Ovid’s fable of Arachne and Minerva. In “A proposal for the
universal use of Irish manufacture,” Swift writes of the goddess who, jealous of Arachne’s
weaving, “turned her into a spider, enjoining her to spin and weave for ever, out of her own
bowels, and in a very narrow compass.” Swift admits that he “always pitied poor Arachne, and
could never heartily love the goddess on account of so cruel and unjust a sentence.” (It should be
noted that Ovid’s Minerva attacks Arachne with a weaver’s shuttle, like how Laputa uses a
lodestone “resembling a Weavers Shuttle” to rain cruelty on the lands below it.) This analogy,
then, paints England as the bitter goddess and Ireland as the poor spider, turning a parable about
mortal hubris into one about retaining autonomy over one’s own labor.
49
It is an application of
the Arachne myth that would become common regarding industrialization, most famously in
Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1836), quoted in the epigraph to this chapter. There, the
spider becomes that which “has a spinning-jenny, and warping-mill, and power-loom, within its
head,” and Arachne becomes pluralized into thousands of millworkers who endlessly provide
without personal gain, a Sisyphean loop in which Swift in his letters sees Ireland trapped a
century before.
50
Though Carlyle is writing for a different time, I see Swift similarly using the
figure of spiders, here in this letter and regarding modern knowledge production, to represent
mindless and fruitless industry.

49
The template that Arachne “boasted more insolently than befits a mortal woman” is attributed to Vatican
Mythographer I (c. 875–1075). See: Nathalie Rivère de Carles, “Subtle Weavers, Mythological Interweavings and
Feminine Political Agency: Penelope and Arachne in Early Modern Drama,” in Interweaving Myths in Shakespeare
and His Contemporaries, edited by Janice Valls-Russell, et al. (Manchester University Press, 2017).
50
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 150.

52
When it comes to spinning silk, the silkworm was at the time the only viable resource. As
Tipping Silvester expresses in a 1733 poem, the “Silkworm drags its gawdy Train, / With which
Arachne still contends in vain.”
51
But Swift renders the Laputan Artist’s spiders more able than
cursed; unlike silkworms, they “understood how to weave as well as spin.” Gulliver’s version of
Arachne turns the myth into techno-optimism, a sort of liberating techne by which Ireland can
potentially reverse its sentence. One reason the Artist’s spiders “excelled” silkworms, it turns
out, is that they are programmable. The Artist explains to Gulliver that the color, strength, and
texture of the silk can be determined ahead of time by what he feeds the flies (which in turn feed
the spiders). Gulliver observes “a vast number of Flies most beautifully coloured,” and according
to the Artist, “the Webs would take a Tincture from them,” and that “Food for the Flys of certain
Gums, Oyls, and other glutinous Matter […] give a Strength and Consistence to the Threads.”
52

Thus, through a kind of insect husbandry, the figured weaving of silk is predetermined, requiring
no additional human labor; the spiders spin and weave on their own. While this project will
likely suffer the same fate as the other experiments at the Academy—redoubling Arachne’s
plight—for a momentary fantasy, Swift borrows something only recently possible in industrial
sectors: the mechanical production of a commercial good that is variably repeatable using objects
inscribed with instructions predetermined by human hands.
Since the drawloom first migrated to Italy in the thirteenth century, the race to invent the
perfect “coded object,” and thereby be able to automate the weaving process, motivated Europe’s
machine innovation. Swift’s “Flys” behave not unlike the cylinders invented by Vaucanson for
his automata or, invented by Basile Bouchon a year before Gulliver’s Travels was published, the

51
Tipping Sylvester, “The Microscope,” from Original Poems and Translations: Consisting of The Microscope,
Piscatio, Or, Angling, The Beau and Academic; […], published by J. Wilford, 1733.
52
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 153.

53
perforated paper tape of the first programmable loom. Bouchon’s invention followed a building
European aspiration to ease pattern weaving. The aim, as with the Dutch engine and the flying
shuttle, was to circumvent the need for assistants. When the silk loom arrived from China, the act
of weaving patterns required the help of a drawchild, a young or small worker who sat above the
loom and lifted thread groups following a pattern book. The nature of this labor changed in 1605
with the French drawloom, which allowed the drawchild to work from beside the machine; these
newer Lyonnaise looms required the drawchild to pull down on lashes based on instructions the
weaver read off a point paper plan prepared in advance. This motion lifted the corresponding
warp threads, causing the patterning shuttles to pass through the shed, thereby incorporating a
second pattern into the cloth. In England, too, the inventor Joseph Mason patented a machine as
early as 1678 by which the “weaver may performe the whole work of weaving […] without the
help of a draughtboy.” While Mason’s loom didn’t take, similar improvements to drawlooms
would eventually transform the labor of the drawchild into something increasingly obsolete and
mindless—decreasing, bit by bit, the amount of creative mental labor required of the drawchild
with one goal above all: to eliminate the child entirely.
It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that actual automation in silk weaving seemed
possible. As Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels, Bouchon mechanized the communication
between weaver and drawchild with perforated paper tape, wherein a simple binary—whether or
not a hole in the paper blocked a spring-loaded needle—determined if the drawchild should pull
down on the lash.
53
Bouchon’s assistant Jacques de Falcon soon after replaced this tape with a

53
Ellen Harlizius-Kluck, “Weaving as Binary Art and the Algebra of Patterns,” in TEXTILE 15.2 (2017), 180. This
history is recorded inconsistently across encyclopedias and eras. Harlizius-Kluck provides a valuable source by
highlighting moments when histories disagree. Most histories date Bouchon’s machine to 1725, Falcon’s to 1728,
and Vaucanson’s to 1745. Some mention a “Regnier,” but in what capacity they were involved I do not know.
Harlizius-Kluck also mentions the peg-machines and crumb-machines (Broselmaschine) in Essen and upper Austria,
which in the seventeenth century automated weaving using notches on wooden poles (p. 182). See also: Emanuel
Anthony Posselt, The History of the Jacquard Machine (Charles River Editors, 1888); Martin and Virginia Davis,

54
sewn-together chain of hole-punched pasteboard cards—or “punch cards.” These coded objects,
the most important such objects in machine programming history, improved upon Bouchon’s
design. However, in both inventions, a drawchild still manipulated the warp threads; they just
didn’t need to be told which ones. In other words, all semblance of intellectual labor had been
removed from the job. Even the weaver’s labor was reduced during production, for all patterning
was done beforehand and could be reproduced if the punch cards kept their integrity. (With dyes,
gums, and oils, Swift’s Laputan Artist accomplishes the same with flies.) Eventually, in 1745,
Vaucanson designed a more complex (and powered) punch card system to fully control the warp
(and thus, by alerting the machine whether to lift the thread groups mechanically, rendered
unnecessary the drawchild). Though theoretically self-acting, Vaucanson’s machine was “as
useless as it was costly,” and it wasn’t until Joseph Marie Jacquard patented his loom in 1804
that the drawchild was finally (and practically) put to rest. By the nineteenth century, designers
only needed to draw the preferred pattern and send it to an artist; the artist then punched holes in
pasteboard cards such that, when fed through a Jacquard loom, it would weave into the silk the
exact pattern preconditioned by the manufacturer.
Swift’s spiders do not predict the Jacquard loom, but the spider room in the Academy at
Laputa resembles a vision of textile automation, one which threatened to replace human labor
with mechanisms and nonhuman power (such as water, wind or, indeed, animal).
54
This vision
would be articulated clearly in the November 1745 edition of Mercure de France, prompted by

“Mistaken Ancestry: the Jacquard and the Computer,” in Textile 3, No. 1 (2005), 78-79. Edouard Foucaud, The Book
of Illustrious Mechanics: Of Europe and America (WJ Hamersley, 1845), 80.
54
Qtd in Kassia St Clair, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History (Liveright Publishing, 2019), 9. One
way that industrialization deskilled labor was through specialization; as economist William Petty wrote in the
seventeenth century, “Cloth must be cheaper made, when one Cards, another Spins, another Weaves [et al.]; than
when all the Operations above-mentioned, were clumsily performed by the same hand.” Hahn describes the concept
of a “vertical mill,” in which the entire pipeline of textile production, from the plantation to the marketplace, can be
pictured as one long sequence in which each part is ignorant of the other.

55
the new drawloom invented by Vaucanson: “a machine with which a horse, an ox or an ass [can]
make cloth more beautiful and much more perfect than the most skilled silk-workers.”
55
Though
the machine failed to change the industry in its time, Vaucanson’s drawloom would have, in
theory, made it possible for animals, even lumbering beasts of burden, to excel over human
laborers. Paola Bertucci, writing on Vaucanson’s career as the Inspector of Silk Manufacture,
argues that the virtuoso intended to redesign the industry like his automata, by “relocating skill
out of the body of the artisan and into the machine.”
56
Like Gimcrack, Vaucanson considered
human workers replaceable; he wanted to perfect the machines, not the people, who he thought
were too stubborn and country-bred to educate. His solution “was to limit their role, deskilling
their labor, and reducing them to mere providers of motive force.”
57
That same semi-fantastical
article in Mercure de France recounted of Vaucanson’s drawloom that “the fabric weaves itself
without any human help: the warp threads raise, the shuttle passes the weft, the reed presses the
yarns; the fabric rolls up as it makes itself.” That vision—the endpoint of automation—promised
a future of “ghost factories,” mills in which only one person needs stand around as the machines
operated on their own.
58
These new automated silk drawlooms, this vision promised, replaced
both drawchild and weaver—like the Artist in Laputa who only watches the room of spiders as
they spin and weave without need for direction.

55
Mercure de France, November 1745. See also: Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 144.
56
Paola Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale
University Press, 2017), 195, 203. In a chapter titled “Mechanized Labor and Virtuoso Machines: Jacques de
Vaucanson,” Bertucci shows how “Vaucanson’s mechanical inventions relocated skill from the spinners’ bodies to
his machines […] to replace the action of the spinners’ hands with a machine that could be operated by anyone […]
This spinning machine, Vaucanson underscored, would actually perform better than the ablest spinner” (p. 198-199).
57
Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment, 198. David Landes in Unbound Prometheus (1969) defines “industrialization”
primarily in terms of the replacement of human muscle with inanimate power.
58
Edward Jones-Imhotep, “The Ghost Factories: Histories of Automata and Artificial Life,” History and Technology
Vol. 36, No, 1 (2020), 3. See also: Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern
Europe (John Hopkins, 1986), which traces how Enlightenment philosophy reflected a shift in organizational
fantasies from centralized power to self-regulated systems in machines as well as societies.

56
Centuries pass before automobile factories replace the workers on conveyor belts with
robotics and farms of computer servers run without human presence. But representations of
automation as some combination of human inaction and nonhuman autonomy gather in early
eighteenth-century literature; and it is no accident that Swift imagines a self-acting workforce as
something less than human. Deskilling, reducing the labor of humans to mindless and automatic
motion, meant such laborers shared affinities with insects, automata, or both.
59
Considering also
the coded objects shared between programmable looms and the history of computing, Swift’s
spider metaphor begs the question: does the continued use of vermin in conversations around
automation have as long a history as punch cards themselves? Jussi Parikka, for instance,
“questions the supposed newness of the coupling of (seemingly) simple animal behavior with
media technologies.”
60
I share the same curiosity. The reason we call software issues “bugs” is
due to actual moths which crawled into Mark II relays during the 1940s, but I argue that insects
entered conceptualizations of programmable machines since the beginning. As Sadie Plant muses
in 1997, computers were modeled after “Jacquard’s loom, which gathered itself on the gathering
threads of weavers who in turn were picking up on the thread of the spiders and moths and webs
of bacterial activity.”
61
This view of computing history finds the building blocks of machine

59
As David Brewster tells Walter Scott regarding the history of insect automata, “The same combination of the
mechanical powers which made the spider crawl […] reappeared in the stupendous mechanism of our spinning-
machines, and our steam-engines”; “Letter XI,” in Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Bart.
(William Tegg and Co, 1856), 285. See also: Jessica Riskin, “The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of
Artificial Life,” in Critical Inquiry Vol. 29, No. 4 (2003). I include here Isaac de Caus’s birds (1644), Vaucanson’s
duck (1738), and Henri Maillardet’s machine spiders, snakes, and centipedes at the end of the century. Voskuhl and
many others have pointed to the relationship between automata and factories (Androids, 6). Simon Schaffer, in
“Enlightened Automata,” argues that automata were more than metaphors; they “played a significant role in the
manufacturing economy” (p. 128). According to Schaffer, Vaucanson designed automatic silk-weaving machinery
using the rotating barrels that he first designed for his automata. And Edmund Cartwright claims to have invented
his power loom after hearing about a chess-playing automaton. For Cartwright’s letter, see Edward Baines, in
History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835), 229.
60
Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2010),
xv. See also: Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions.
61
Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture (Fourth Estate, 1997), 14.

57
thinking in the smallest organisms. It is one thing to say of Vaucanson’s drawloom that horses,
oxen, and asses might outdo silk-weavers; it is another to represent what used to be human labor
with an animality even less valued.

Web Crawlers
In Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack experiments on all sorts of animals, from
humans to the bugs under his microscope. In fact, if Shadwell had modeled Gimcrack after any
one philosopher-inventor of his era, it was the Royal Society’s Curator of Experiments, Robert
Hooke.
62
Hooke’s Micrographia, one of the first books published by the Society, solidified the
association of experimentalism at the time with the study of insects and other small animals. To
that effect, Gimcrack is multiple times described by the other characters of the play as more
concerned with maggots, lice, ants, flies, and millipedes than the human world.
63
As Gimcrack
himself says in one fashion or another throughout the play: “’tis below a virtuoso to trouble
himself with men and manners. I study insects.”
64
He is first introduced tying threads from the
legs of a frog in a bowl of water to his own teeth (to learn how to swim). Later it is discovered
that he “has spent two thousand pounds in microscopes to find out the nature of eels in vinegar,
mites in a cheese”; that he claims to use only glowworms to light his study; and that he not only
discovered many new doglike species of spiders, but that, like the Artist at Lagado, he even
trained one “spaniel spider” named Nick to be as tame as any pet.
65

62
Hooke himself certainly believed this to be the case. After attending a performance of The Virtuoso on June 2,
1676, he complained in his diary that it was like everyone was pointing at him. Shadwell did borrow from Hooke’s
work, perhaps more than any other philosopher-inventor.
63
This theme is repeated throughout the play, for instance: Shadwell, The Virtuoso, I.ii.11-13; III.iii.1-7.
64
Shadwell, The Virtuoso, III.iii.86-89.
65
Shadwell, The Virtuoso, I.ii.7-10; V.ii.39-42; III.iii.39-43; III.iii.69-101.

58
The mention of insects is common in the works of literature mentioned at the top of this
chapter, usually to emphasize the misguided nature of the natural philosopher’s inquiries into
truth. For instance, Cavendish in The Blazing World (1666) writes of an Empress who, after
being presented with microscopical images of fleas, asks “whether the Microscopes could hinder
their biting, or at least shew some means how to avoid them?” This criticism is based in some
truth; Bacon himself argued that the advancement of science would require the study of “mean
and even filthy things.”
66
Cole suggests further that vermin—a slippery term for any creatures
defined as “small, vile, noxious and even dangerous to agricultural and sociopolitical orders”—
were enlisted as experimental subjects because there was no moral objection to their torture and
disposal.
67
(Pope, for instance, in an article for The Guardian, later criticizes human cruelty of
animals, but also argues that humans have a moral justification to destroy vermin.
68
) Like
Shadwell figuratively, Cole also points out that the category of “vermin,” or “experimental
animals,” collapses when members of the Royal Society “make all of creation a laboratory for
human beings” (in which “all of creation” includes humans, too).
69
This chapter follows Cole in
“reading beneath the grain”; though not a work in animal studies, I situate my reading of Swift
with the borrowed premise that vermin are often invoked in matters of industry to redefine
laboring bodies. There is a suggested bodily vulgarity, a gesture toward digestion, spitting, and

66
More examples, included in Chico, “Gimcrack’s Legacy,” include: Centlivre’s Valeria, who performs experiments
on a “huge Flesh Fly,” and Mary Astell, who in An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696) refers to natural
philosophy as “only the Discovery of some few unheeded varieties of Plants, Shells, or insects.” In Insect Media,
Parikka gives credit to the commercialization of the microscope, too; as more people viewed microscopical things in
their homes, insects were looked upon “as [the] engineers, architects, and tinkerers of the microscopic world” (xvi).
67
Lucinda Cole, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740 (University of
Michigan Press, 2016), 1.
68
Alexander Pope, “Against Barbarity to Animals,” The Guardian No. 61, May 21, 1713, in Norman Ault (ed.), The
prose works of Alexander Pope, vol. 1, The earlier works, 1711-1720, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1936, pp. 107-14.
69
Cole, “Introduction,” 4. Animal studies, or perhaps more accurately “animality studies,” chips away at eighteenth-
century conceptions around rationality, sociality, and free will. See also: Lucinda Cole, “Animal Studies and the
Eighteenth Century: The Nature of the Beast,” in Literature Compass (2019).

59
even historical associations between vermin and racialized bodies, which adds to the devaluing
of such bodies in civilized spaces.
In the early eighteenth century, natural philosophy remained associated with bugs, and
Shadwell’s Gimcrack persisted in literature as its pathetic practitioner. The word “gimcrack” had
come to mean any “mechanical contrivance,” and in a 1710 issue of The Tatler, Joseph Addison
published a parody of Gimcrack’s will in which the virtuoso bequeaths to his “dear wife” a long
list of undesirable objects, including a dried cockatrice, grasshoppers, a rat’s testicles, mosses,
beetles, butterflies, and caterpillars.
70
With Gimcrack’s legacy in mind, it is interesting to see
how Swift reimagines the machinic labor of textile workers in Gulliver’s Travels; in the spider
experiment, spinning and weaving are moved from human plus machine to bug alone. Similar
scenes occur in the first two voyages: a horde of tiny Lilliputians—“two hundred Sempstresses”
and “three hundred Taylors”—crawl over Gulliver’s giant body to measure him for clothes,
reminiscent of the organized movements of ants; the aforementioned tiny sheep which Gulliver
delivers to England are also bug-like in size, replacing the raw material of industry not with a
sheep-man but with a sheep-bug; and the king of Brobdingnag alternatingly refers to the tiny
Gulliver as “a piece of Clock-work” and an “insect.”
71
With the exception of the Brobdingnagian
cat, who was “three times larger than an Ox,” these otherwise human or mammalian laborers are
rendered verminous. Some, including the cat, are also rendered machinic. The silkworm spins
because it is genetically programmed to do so. The spider weaves in geometric patterns. Insects
move en masse with machine precision. For Shadwell, vermin hold the secrets of the universe.
But for Swift it seems there was something insectoid about anything automatic. He invokes bugs

70
Joseph Addison, “The Will of a Virtuoso,” The Tatler No. 216, August 26, 1710.
71
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 52, 86, 112.

60
in similar ways to Shadwell—as oddities of interest rather than of worth—but his references
seem also to industrialize that science via insect metaphor.
Of course, insects were literally and famously at the center of the silk industry. Though
relatively new to England, the Bombyx mori—the silkworm originally domesticated in China—
had become a bit of an obsession for inventors and even monarchs in Europe who hoped to, like
the Laputan Artist, find a domestic alternative. James I, for instance, arranged for England to
grow mulberry trees, a necessary food source for silkworms (but had, it turned out, grown the
wrong kind).
72
At the same time, the silkworm was a popular symbol in English literature due to
its sacrificial role in silk production.
73
And perhaps the most famous metaphorical use of the
silkworm would be articulated in 1847; Karl Marx, in a pamphlet titled “Wage Labor and
Capital,” uses the lifecycle of a silkworm to emblematize what he called “a complete wage-
worker.”
74
Marx describes sericulture, in which silkworm larvae are born on mulberry leaves, eat
until they begin spinning silk for their cocoon, and then are steamed, baked, or soaked in a saline
solution in order for the cocoon to be harvested (for if the larva leaves the cocoon, it ruins the
silk threads).
75
He suggests that this existence, in which one’s labor is one’s life (and death), is
not so dissimilar to “the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds,
shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.” Silkworms, Marx writes, “are that unfortunate species
in which life-activity has so long coincided with labor-power as to be naturalized as value.”
76
In

72
Another attempt began in the Virginia colony in the mid-seventeenth century; see: The Reformed Virginian
Silkworm; Rare and New Discovery of a Speedy Way, […] Found Out by a Young Lady in England, […] for the
feeding of Silk-worms […] on the Mulberry-Tree Leaves in Virginia, published in 1652. And with the influx of
Huguenot silk-weavers into London, more public but failed ventures occurred. France did manage to eventually
raise their own silkworms, until the 1840s, when disease killed them off (Jenkins, Western Textiles, 807).
73
Silkworms were centrally featured in poetry works such as Thomas Moffett’s The Silkworms and their Flies
(1599) and Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648). William Blake later aligned silkworms with feminine, domestic,
and artisanal textile production in his epic poem Jerusalem (1804).
74
Ingrid Diran, “Marx’s Silkworm: Valuable Life and the Life of Value,” in Diacritics 46, No. 1 (2018), 9.
75
St Clair, The Golden Thread, 61-2.
76
Qtd in Diran, “Marx’s Silkworm,” 21.

61
this view, other literary “complete wageworkers” include Shadwell’s sheep man and especially
Arachne, whose metonymic reduction from autonomous weaver to endless, mindless weaving
mirrors her transformation from human to bug.
As mentioned before, with his spider room Swift was responding to actual experiments
which aimed to replace silkworms with domestic insects. The holy grail of the textile industry in
the eighteenth century was a thread that could rival Chinese silk and, for many inventors, spider
silk—due its greater strength and elasticity—offered the most promising results.
77
The most
famous such inventor was Francois-Xavier Bon, a French aristocrat who knitted a pair of gloves
from spider egg sacs. After displaying them in London in 1710, Bon also published an English
translation of his methods in the Philosophical Transactions, in which he claimed to have, like
the Laputan Artist, trained spiders to produce silk better than silkworms.
78
These claims were
quickly debunked, for in truth one silkworm cocoon produced 12 times the amount of silk that
one spider could produce in their lifetime and, for many reasons, as Kassia St Clair quips,
“spiders were deeply resistant to being farmed.” Still, inventors continued (and continue) to try
to spin spider silk into gold.
79
Similar innovations were attempted with other kinds of vermin. As
Bon was boasting about his spider silk, a German (real-life Gimcrack?) advertised that he could
train either squirrels or mice to do the labor of spinning.
80
And, according to Babbage a century

77
St Clair, The Golden Thread, 272-278.
78
Francois Xavier Bon, “A Discourse Upon the Usefulness of the Silk of Spiders,” in Philosophical Transactions
No. 27 (1710), 2-16. See also: C. G. Gilroy, The History of Silk, Cotton, Linen, Wool, and Other Fibrous
Substances; […] (Illustrated by Steel Engravings, Harper & Brothers, 1845), 159.
79
St Clair, The Golden Thread, 279. Some reasons for the difficulty of spider farming include rounding up enough
flies and, if you put multiple spiders in the same place, they ate each other. However, it has been done; Jacob Paul
Camboue, a French missionary in Madagascar, pioneered methods to extract silk from spiders in the 1880s and
1890s. His colleague Mr. Nogue built a contraption that extracted silk from N. Madagascariensis spiders in groups
without them being harmed, and silk goods made from these spiders were displayed at the Exposition Universelle in
Paris in 1900. This process was recreated in 2008 by Simon Peers and, in 2012, Peers displayed a whole cape out of
the silk (now displayed at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London). More recently, biotechnologists have been
trying to spin silk synthetically, using spidersilk as their ideal.
80
Gilroy, The History of Silk […], 161.

62
later, Munich engineers made lace by predetermining the movement of caterpillars on a stone
surface by drawing the negative of the intended pattern with olive oil (thus programming them,
like Swift’s spiders, with food); the caterpillars, who produce a textured paste after eating a
certain kind of leaf, then unwittingly walk around the oil-enclosed stone area until they have
spun a strong but semi-translucent veil.
81

Experimentation with bugs, yes, but these are also early attempts at automation in textile
production. At the time, of course, automation was mostly speculative or metaphorical thinking,
inspired by the automaticity of insect behavior. That insect-like behavior served as a model for
the endless and ordered motions of a labor force which give the impression that textile goods
might one day weave themselves. A later example of this metaphorical thinking is John Dyer’s
poem “The Fleece” (1757), which describes the invention of a new spinning machine, “without
the tedious toil of needless hands,” in conjunction with bees and honeycomb.
82
Recently, vermin-
inspired automation is very real; spider-bots and web crawlers scan endless websites for search
engines and other software queries without human guidance. Artificial intelligence presents the
illusion of a pre-programmed and centralized computer brain but is actually a de-centralized and
distributed “swarm intelligence” which mimics complex behavior through trillions of simple
interactions.
83
Mammals, even oxen, are considered intelligent. They might be strong-willed and,
like Shadwell’s fictional spaniel spiders, trainable. But bugs can only be programmed. It is an
important distinction which makes both insects and machines common analogies for people not

81
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers (C. Knight, 1832), 76. The inventor of this
process, according to Babbage, is a Mr. De Hebenstreit, and the caterpillar species is the Phalaena pardilla, which
feeds on the Prunus padas plant (or bird cherry).
82
John Dyer, “The Fleece,” line 294.
83
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (University of Minnesota Press,
2013). See also: Parikka, Insect Media, xi-xii. It is an insect-inspired model useful for thinking about our own
fetishization of the digital product, the way we grant a special faith to what computer screens give us because we
cannot fathom the activity of the million bug-bots inside the machine. See: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed
Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011).

63
allowed to think, such as when Frederick Douglass says that slavery “reduces man to a mere
machine” or when Theodor Adorno writes that “the comparison of men with insects betokens the
recognition that they have been deprived of autonomous will.”
84
It is a metaphor for doing rather
than thinking, like silkworms who labor rather than live, and like the silent Arachnes who, for
Carlyle, represent an entire society that lives only a “digestive mechanic life”: reduced to merely
the function of manual labor, the belly and limbs expand to industrial scale while the head, the
intellectual center, shrinks out of disuse.
85

The Knowledge Mill
Two of the more memorable gimcracks in Gulliver’s Travels are neither related to insects nor
involved in textile production, at least at first glance. The first is designed so Gulliver can turn
the pages of giant books in Brobdingnag. The tiny Gulliver required this machine because, in
Brobdingnag, books were “as thick and stiff as a Past-board, and […] eighteen or twenty Foot
long.”
86
This size is notable because one, it likens the page of a book to a punch card; and two,
these dimensions suggest that books in Brobdingnag were roughly the same size as the second
machine I want to discuss, which approximates a kind of bookishness: the “Project for improving
speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operators.” In this other room at the Lagado
Academy, Gulliver finds a “Professor” with “forty Pupils about him” and a twenty-foot “Frame.”
The frame (or engine) contains “all the Words of their Language in their several Moods, Tenses,
and Declensions, but without any order” glued to wooden blocks strung by wires. Thirty-six of

84
Theodor T. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 465. See also: Despina Kakoudaki, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the
Cultural Work of Artificial People (Rutgers University Press, 2014), 157.
85
Marie Laniel, “‘The silent Arachnes that weave unrestingly in our Imagination’: The Industrial Metaphoric Web
in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus,” in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens (87 Printemps, 2018).
86
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 114.

64
the students turn cranks to randomize these blocks while the remaining four write down any
legible sentences formed by happenstance, with the aim to eventually produce “a compleat Body
of all Arts and Sciences.”
87
This mechanism quite clearly goes against the “ancient” models of
knowledge acquisition, in which wisdom is passed down from the great minds of the past. Here
Swift has imagined a machine to satirize modern learning; like the Modern Spider of Invention,
without reading or acknowledging others, this “Frame” uses engineering and mathematics to
produce literature spun from its own verminous cog work.
The target of the engine’s satire is likely multiple. As Joseph Drury observes in Novel
Machines, natural philosophers engaged in the “mechanization of knowledge making through the
introduction of formal rules of method.”
88
This included, over time, the instrumentalization of
the scientific method. Lynall suggests that Swift is responding to calculating engines like those
invented by Blaise Pascal (1642) and Gottfried Leibniz (1673), whose designs, “to perform
mechanically all the operations of arithmetic with certainty and expedition,” were regularly
reported on in the Philosophical Transactions. These were, according to Norbert Wiener, the
early steps toward cybernetics; Leibniz envisioned, using mathematics as a universal language,
the construction of an encyclopedia that would include all human knowledge and a calculating
machine which could parse it using logic based on Aristotle’s categorization of concepts.
89

Along these lines, Pamela McCorduck in Machines Who Think calls Swift’s engine “a dotty
burlesque of Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna.”
90
Llull rings, articulated disks which recombined old

87
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 154-5.
88
Joseph Drury, Novel Machines: Technology and Narrative Form in Enlightenment Britain (Oxford University
Press, 2017), 27, 85.
89
The first known derogatory use of “calculating engine” was directed at mathematical attempts at reproducing
human thought. Matthew L. Jones, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about
Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016), qtd in 59, 142, 217.
90
McCorduck, Machines Who Think, n11, 317, qtd 37. McCorduck points to Llull rings, but also the North African
zairja, Chinese I-Ching, and other inventions by Pope Sylvester II, Leone Battista Alberti, Georg Philipp
Harsdorfer, and Athanasius Kircher (pp. 9-10, 37).

65
maxims to generate new insight, were an easy target; Francois Rabelais in Gargantua and
Pantagruel and Bacon in the Advancement of Learning wrote off the “Art of Lullius” as “vanity
and imposture” and “nothing of worth” respectively.
91
Martin Gardner, in Logic Machines and
Diagrams, even writes that the Ars Magna “amounted virtually to a satire of scholasticism.”
Indeed, scholarship tends to focus on Swift’s ire toward these kinds of get-knowledge-quick
schemes and anyone hoping to repair, as the Professor laments to Gulliver, “how laborious the
usual Method is of attaining the Arts and Sciences.”
On this subject, Swift returns multiple times. In Gulliver’s Travels, a different Lagado
experiment proposes the delivery of scripture to the brain via the consumption of “a thin Wafer,”
inscribed upon in tiny lettering.
92
And, in A Tale of the Tub, the author devises a step-by-step
recipe for attaining truth by snorting the desired books, a method which seems to harken back to
Gimcrack’s many strategies for knowledge acquisition (like learning how to swim by attaching
his teeth to a frog).
93
The recurring metaphors of the digestive system are no coincidence; the
machines with innards made of cogs sound like they are chewing and grinding. For Swift, for
whom the spiritual should remain spiritual and the intellectual should remain of the mind, what
degrades the learned subject is precisely its translation into bodily functions, to something as
mechanical or vulgar as Vaucanson’s duck or as beneath human dignity as the “digestive life” of
Arachne. The Modern Spider of Invention, rather than attending to geniuses of the past, feeds on
“the Insects and Vermin of the Age,” suggesting that philosophers of Swift’s time do not actually
learn; they digest and regurgitate only their contemporaries, and thus they can only ever achieve
“Guts” rather than wisdom. The Laputan engine, however, speaks more to the production of

91
The first quote is from Chapter 2, Section VIII of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The second is taken from Gilver
Wats’s interpretation of the Advancement of Learning (1674), 180.
92
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 154, 158.
93
Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 125-6.

66
knowledge than its acquisition. Swift eyes the printing presses which operate, like the author of
A Tale, “too freely.” In this case, Swift is more interested in the spider’s inevitable “cobwebs”—
or, rather, the machine’s inevitable word vomit—than the guts from whence they came. Here,
Swift literalizes a strategy which he often uses to satirize short cuts in writing; in fact, he likely
borrows from his own aside in “A Tritical Essay Upon the Faculties of the Mind,” that he would
not believe “the accidental jumbling of Letters of the Alphabet would fall by chance into a most
ingenious and learned Treatise of Philosophy.”
94

But the Professor’s engine does more than randomize or recycle; it also automates the
production of that so-called knowledge: the act of writing. Like Babbage’s Difference Engine
(1822) a century later, the first fully automatic calculator, Swift’s engine is motivated by hand
crank. The labor which cranking replaces is the act of composition, such that after the Professor
“emptyed the whole Vocabulary into his Frame,” the combining of those words does not require
a thinking subject.
95
John Chalker attributes the engine’s inspiration to a 1677 pamphlet in which
John Peter describes “a new way” to write poetry.
96
Swift would have read the review in The
Spectator (1711), in which Richard Steele refers to Peter as “an ingenious Projector” who with
“Poetical Logarithms […] divided into several Squares […] inscribed with so many incoherent
Words,” is “able to compose or rather to erect Latin Verses.”
97
Swift’s engine also “erects”—that
is, it builds, constructs, or assembles rather than writes—strings of random words. In these cases,
the building blocks of literature are vocabulary alone; however, Swift elsewhere has discussed
using prewritten phrases (or, to use a twentieth-century term, lexia) in the composition of literary

94
Jonathan Swift, Thomas Sheridan, and John Nichols, The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, DD...: with notes,
historical and critical. Vol. 3 (J. Johnson, 1808), 267. “A Tritical Essay…” was originally published in 1707.
95
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 155.
96
John Chalker and Peter Dixon, eds. Gulliver’s Travels (Penguin, 1967). Chalker, in his endnotes, points to John
Peter’s Artificial Versifying, or the Schoolboys Recreation, A New Way to Make Latin Verses (1677).
97
Richard Steele, The Spectator No. 220, November 12, 1711. Steele (or possibly the poet John Hughes) relates
Peter’s project to John Napier’s Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio (1614).

67
works.
98
His friend Pope, as Martinus Scriblerus, imagines this in his prose satire, “A Project for
the Advancement of the Bathos,” which mocks the influence of the “other arts of this age” on
literary production by proposing the collection of works by specialists—“ironists,” “allegorists,”
“simile-makers,” etc.—into a “cabinet” from which a poet or orator will draw out the phrases
they need like playing a piano.
99
Pope himself often composed poems by reordering couplets,
and you might say satire shares a certain quality with recombination, but not all recombining is
automated nor as mindless as Swift’s metaphorical engine.
For Swift, such methods have real consequences, especially when used for knowledge
making. Recently, historians of the Enlightenment have framed the era as a media event in which
written words, through their proliferation in print, begin outpacing the ideas themselves; as Brad
Pasanek and Chad Wellmon write in “The Enlightenment Index,” this new literary production
“points less to ideas, authors, philosophers, or social organizations than from one page to
another.”
100
Scholars since, this one included, create their own repositories of notes on “paper
slips” (real or virtual), with which they compose new works and disseminate new knowledge via
reorganization (or regurgitation).
101
In A Tale, Swift bemoans those who collect quotations from
compendiums rather than original works, thereby treating thoughts as commodities and replacing
human memory with the objects of their inscription. Kelly Swartz, in “The Maxims of Swift’s

98
Jones writes that the classical rhetorical tradition, still prevalent in the eighteenth century, predicated creativity on
“the putting together of previously existing ideas in novel, but not entirely original, forms” (See: Jones, Reckoning,
227-9). Lynall points out, however, that Swift’s attacks on the printing industry often describe “hack authors
infusing their own crude productions with plagiarized material” (See: Lynall, Swift and Science, 6-7).
99
Alexander Pope, William Lisle Bowles, William Warburton, and Joseph Warton. The Works of Alexander Pope,
Esq., in Verse and Prose: Containing the Principal Notes of Drs. Warburton and Warton. Vol. 3 (J. Johnson, 1806),
115-6. “A Project…” was originally published in 1727.
100
Brad Pasanek and Chad Wellmon, “The Enlightenment Index,” in The Eighteenth Century 56.3 (2015), 361. See
also: This is Enlightenment, edited by Clifford Siskin and William B. Warner (University of Chicago Press, 2010),
including especially Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass, “Mediating Information 1450-1800”; and Markus Krajewski,
Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929, translated by Peter Krapp (MIT Press, 2011).
101
Samuel Johnson used slips to compose A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). William Smellie cut and
pasted from existing works to compile the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1768-71). See: Pasanek and
Wellmon, “The Enlightenment Index.”

68
Psychological Fiction,” writes that Swift structures A Tale as “aphorism after aphorism,” and his
author becomes a mere “collector of cliché.”
102
For Swift, this new “Method, to become Scholars
and Wits, without the Fatigue of Reading or of Thinking,” is a dangerous one.
103
(And it is the
method for which Gulliver ironically praises the Laputan Professor.) After the Licensing Act
lapsed in 1694, publication expanded, and standards dropped in favor of profits. The “index”
became activated as a mechanism by which knowledge multiplies into all possible iterations. In
Swift’s view, the new philosophers could, by mindlessly recycling the intellectual labor of others
via works of reference published or collected, concern themselves with self-promotion (or wage-
earning) rather than the advancement of learning.
One might read Swift’s engine, then, for its resemblance to what Marcus Krajewski in
Paper Machines calls “the scholar’s machine”: the manipulation of card indexes and paper slips
such that, by allowing the scholar to reorder previously written notes into something virtually
new, it behaves as a “text generator.” Jean Paul, in Selections from the Devil’s Papers (1789),
wrote (incorrectly) that “Gulliver saw a machine in Lagado that mixed paper slips to such an
extent that anyone they were read to could not tell whether they were read from an ordinary book
or not.”
104
Paul’s misreading of Swift’s engine imagines this scholarly practice embodied in a
wooden frame: each paper slip or index card is a wooden block randomized by the students’
cranking. The frame, in this view, becomes the scholar. Or, to put it another way, these lexia
become a kind of coded objects—like “Flys” or punch cards—manipulated by draw children (or
students) in the automated manufacture of literature. In an illustration included in the original

102
Kelly Swartz, “The Maxims of Swift’s Psychological Fiction,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 30.1 (2017), 12.
103
Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 96.
104
Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines, 53-7.

69
publication of Gulliver’s Travels, the frame even resembles as loom.
105
(Many people, in fact,
only understood or were able to picture machines thanks to the circulation of such diagrams;
especially when it came to the newer, mechanized, and especially French looms, knowledge
spread more quickly in published illustrations than in firsthand experience.
106
) Due to Swift’s
interest in the textile industry, looms would have influenced any machine he imagined; indeed,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “Frame” was commonly used to refer to
machine knitting, and the illustrations of stocking-frames were in regular circulation. Arguably,
the engine more accurately weaves rather than writes its “Books in Philosophy, Poetry, Politicks,
Law, Mathematicks and Theology.”
While Swift does not explicitly borrow from real-world looms for his fictional engine, he
elsewhere is quick to compare literature to textiles. In his “Letter to the Archbishop of Dublin,”
for instance, he adds that not only woolen manufacture but also literature is more fashionable in
Ireland if it is considered “from England.” And, in an angry letter to Motte, Swift encourages
Irish booksellers to smuggle their Dublin-printed books to London, just as he encourages Irish
wool manufacturers to export “to any Country in Europe […] and conceal it from the Custom-
house Officers, as I would hide my Purse from a Highwayman.” In referring to a perceived—
though not enacted—banning of Irish-printed literature, Swift even compares the Statute of Anne
to the Navigation Act.
107
As many historians of authorship have pointed out, the invention of
copyright is also the transformation of ideas into commodities, of an author’s labor into goods.
Swift points to this cheapening of thought by comparing the commodified quality of books to the

105
The diagram of Swift’s engine was first used in the second edition of Gulliver’s Travels, published by Benjamin
Motte in 1726. There is no attribution; however, Swift authorized its inclusion in the 1735 Faulkner edition.
106
For more on how diagrams, illustrations, and technical drawings shaped the flows of knowledge around machine
in Europe, see: Wolfgang Lefèvre, Picturing Machines 1400-1700 (MIT Press, 2004).
107
The letter, sent in 1736, is quoted in Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book, edited by Paddy Bullard
and James McLaverty (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 19.

70
social value of textile goods—not dissimilar to how Bacon, responding to Llull, compared the
methodized formation of knowledge to the secondhand clothing in “a Fripper’s or Broker’s
shop.” Thus, it is fitting that Steele, in his aforementioned review of John Peter’s pamphlet, also
writes about “the Project of a Dutch Mechanick, viz. a Mill to make Verses,” and that Swift’s
Professor at Lagado refers to the “reasonable Charge” necessary to operate his knowledge
engine. It is also fitting that the engine’s books are ultimately the product of the “bodily Labour,”
“Six Hours a-day,” of forty students. While not the factory scale of “two hundred Sempstresses”
and “three hundred Taylors,” here Swift has imagined, in economic terms, a textile mill for the
industrial production of knowledge.
By the end of the century, Swift’s engine, and the fantasy that machines could automate
literature, metastasized into a way for critics to devalue the perceived unoriginality of literary
works. One article in the Critical Review, for instance, refers to “all the machinery of the modern
novel,” and another refers to Gulliver’s Travels directly; regarding the novel The History of Miss
Maria Barlowe, a reviewer for the Monthly Catalogue accused a whole swathe of modern novels
as being produced by “the famous machine of [Swift’s] Balnibarbian.”
108
In these cases, what
was machine-like was the tendency for such novels to borrow from formulae—automaticity sans
machine. But for Swift and his contemporaries, commercialism, not a lack of creativity, is what
earned the mechanical metaphor. Allison Muri writes in The Enlightenment Cyborg that “the rise
of a merchant class had created a ‘mechanical’ identity out of the very tools of a man’s trade.”
109

Likewise, in “The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” Swift puts down opportunistic writers of
religious works by referring to them as “British Workmen” toiling at a “Trade.” And, in A Tale,

108
See: Drury, Novel Machines, 25-6. The works mentioned were published between 1760-1780. Another example
is The Adventures of an Author (1767), which includes machines that spit out indexes and reviews. And this theme
is revisited again and again in the nineteenth century and beyond (see: Chapter Four).
109
Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg, 148.

71
he describes the modern critic as “a sort of mechanic, set up with a stock and tools for his trade,
at as little expense as a tailor.”
110
With the rise of Grub Street, the print industry, and the author
as a profession, comparing written works to the products of mechanical labor became a way to
devalue them. While Swift often borrows these machine metaphors to comment on proper ways
of learning or religious participation, those machines imply also commercial motives; his critique
of such authors delegates them to the kind of vulgar labor unworthy of his creative class, to the
automatic or digestive doings of bugs and robots.
111
Like the imagined output of engines and
spiders, such works do not require intellectual labor. They are not so different than the clothwebs
and cobwebs of other machines.

Author-Inventors
When Gulliver parts with the Professor at Lagado, he promises to “do him Justice, as the sole
Inventor of this wonderful Machine,” and “that he should have the Honour entire without a
Rival.”
112
Gulliver’s choice of words, to identify the Professor as an “Inventor” rather than an
author, and by comparing this elsewhere to “the right Owner” of the entire “Honour” (analogous
to a royal patent) places the Professor in the role of the industrialist. Gulliver says nothing about
the “compleat Body” of works which the engine will supposedly produce; the Professor is “the
right Owner” only of the frame’s design (and not its manufacture). Throughout the eighteenth
century, debates for authors’ rights to ownership piggybacked on patent law by arguing for “the
Resemblance between a Book and any other Mechanical invention.” However, often property
produced by hand was confined to the physical object—the book—while the fruits of intellectual

110
Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 269, 101.
111
It is a reasonable hypothesis that verminous imagery, placed beside denigrated commercialism, might suggest
historically antisemitic representations, but I cannot confirm this as of yet.
112
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 155.

72
labor extended beyond manuscripts to the ideas within.
113
The printing of a book was one labor,
but the thoughts put into it were more highly valued. This also reflected the difference between
scientific thinking—e.g., brainstorming—and industrial thinking, which involved the tinkering
with, manufacture of, and operation of machines. Due to this growing legal and philosophical
divide between thinking and making, the labor of the mind became more venerated or mystified,
culminating in “lone genius” figures like the late poet John Milton.
114
The more physical the
production of writing, the more the intellectual labor is located not in the composition but in the
concept. As Samuel Paterson wrote in 1772, “to write is mechanical; but to be an Author is no
easy matter.”
115
Authors produce ideas not objects. Thus, it is the idea of the machine which
warrants the Professor Gulliver’s praise.
The same process was occurring in technological innovation. As Matthew L. Jones writes
in Reckoning with Matter, the cultural project to insist on authors’ rights “helped make invention
more intellectualized,” too; machines were credited not to the contribution of artisans, only to
“the ideational designs of philosopher-inventors.” Jones traces an evolution, coinciding with the
industrial revolution, from the single figure of an artisan-inventor, getting their hands dirty, to “a
bifurcation of design” in which one person came up with the idea and others made it material.
116

Even in art, contempt for manual work evolved as industrial production began to replace the

113
Rose, Authors, 34, 72-4. The first quote is Baron James Eyre, in Cases of the Appellants and Respondents,
regarding Donaldson v Becket (1774). See also: William Warburton, “A Letter from an Author to a Member of
Parliament Concerning Literary Property” (1747); and Nick Groom, “Unoriginal Genius: Plagiarism and the
Construction of ‘Romantic’ Authorship,” in Copyright and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Critique (2010), 279.
With value placed on ideas, piracy became the principal concern of the Statute of Anne. Swift’s and Pope’s
resentment toward Grub Street, and Pope’s first use of “copy right” in 1727, also responded to piracy.
114
Karl Marx famously flips this construction on its head in Capital when he calls John Milton an “unproductive
worker” in the composition of Paradise Lost, whereas “a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style
is a productive worker” (1:768n, quoted in Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 131).
115
Samuel Paterson, Joineriana: Or, The Book of Scraps Vol. 1, 1772.
116
Jones, Reckoning, 99, 8, 34. Katherine Ellison argues that the binary of brainwork versus handwork has always
been overstated. See: Katherine Ellison, “Digital Scholarship as Handwork and Brainwork: An Early Modern
History of Cryptography,” in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4, Fall 2013, pp. 29-46.

73
work of the craftsman.
117
Brewing was a larger battle between the body and the mind, between
the economic and the aesthetic. Those craftsmen educated enough to trade on their ideas, like
Vaucanson, were able to position their labor as constituting an “immaterial ingenuity,” aligning
them with philosophers rather than the artisans who, as Denis Diderot writes, “practice the
mechanical arts that need the least intelligence.” In the early seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal
was perhaps the first to argue that “artisanal labor should be noncreative” and subordinate to the
philosopher’s vision. This opinion would be reaffirmed by the authors of the many encyclopedias
published in the decades after, including Diderot, who ignores the role of artisans altogether in
the descriptions for his Encyclopédie, thereby relegating any non-philosopher to a non-inventive
class.
118
With Gulliver’s promise, the Professor also belongs to this tradition; despite needing the
“bodily Labour” of his students to produce words, and despite the machine’s fully automated
method of composing those words, he gets sole credit. By literalizing this design bifurcation in
his mechanical metaphor, Swift deconstructs the legal category of “Inventor” as that which
privileges individuated intellectual labor over industry.
As Swift implies, the philosopher-inventor is a constructed category. Innovations gather
over time, often via the tinkering of manual laborers, and yet everyone or everything else in the
realization of an invention becomes a footnote to the accomplishment of a single intellectual.
This binary stays true even when the reality does not fit the Diderot model, which was often the
case regarding inventions in the textile industry. In fact, the so-called geniuses of technological
innovation are as fictional as Swift’s Professor, spun by Victorian-era historians as part of the

117
Francis D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, 55; John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian
Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 100.
118
Joanna Stalnaker, “Diderot’s Word Machine,” in Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the
Encyclopedia (Cornell University Press, 2010), 15. See also: Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 126; Bertucci,
Artisanal Enlightenment, 24. This same goes for Ephraim Chamber’s Cyclopædia (1728) and similar encyclopedias
published by the Royal Society and the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences.

74
invention of the “Industrial Revolution” (and memorialized in statues). As Hahn writes, “The
belief that inventions caused industrialization was itself invented by industrialists who celebrated
themselves and their industry in the nineteenth century.”
119
In reality, before Cartwright invented
the power loom, he “had never before turned [his] thoughts to any thing mechanical, either in
theory or practice.”
120
Before bringing his business savvy to spinning machines, Arkwright was a
barber. Jedidiah Strutt, credited with inventing an attachment to the stocking-frame for ribbed
stockings in 1759, referred to himself in a self-written eulogy as without “wit” or “genius.” Kay,
as previously mentioned, was a craftsman; and Hargreaves was an illiterate handloom weaver.
Robert C. Allen, in “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature,” goes so far as to say Hargreaves’s
jennies “owed nothing to science.”
121
Gravenor Henson’s History of the Framework-Knitters
(1831) describes many more such cases, and Desaguiliers admits that “Men quite illiterate have
often produc’d wonderful Engines.”
122
Like the Dutch-engine loom at the top of the chapter, it
seemed as if machines determined history; and this idea, that the world was itself an automaton,
undermined the role of human ideation.
123

For these philosopher-inventors (and then industrialists) to maintain their statuses as sole
inventors, a great deal of non- or quasi-intellectual labor must be erased. The figure of the
philosopher both in industrial histories and concurrent reporting must be represented as above
the rest of humanity. Cesar du Marsais provides a useful metaphor; in 1730, he described the
philosopher as “a human machine like another man, but he is a machine that, by its mechanical
constitution, reflects on its movements […]. He is, so to speak, a clock that sometimes winds

119
Hahn, Technology in the Industrial Revolution, 6.
120
Baines, History, 229.
121
Allen, “The Industrial Revolution in Miniature,” 920.
122
Desaguliers, Experimental Philosophy, 69.
123
The idea that the world could be conceptualized as clockwork is a popular way we understand the Enlightenment
today, spurred on by the writings of philosopher-inventors like Robert Boyle, who has suggested that whoever might
have invented the “great Automaton the World,” they have since let it run on its own (qtd Jones, Reckoning, 223).

75
itself.” Marsais considers the philosopher unique for being able to “reflect on the mechanism that
constituted its nature,” whereas most people—those silent Arachnes—lack the self-awareness to
do so. Where philosophers are their own machine, everyone else is merely the cog in someone
else’s (like the mindless laborers in a textile mill where textiles “weave themselves”).
124
Here is
an example of how the artifacts of technology contextualize the circulation of knowledge. Even a
fictional one like Swift’s engine demonstrates the kind of philosopher that cannot wind itself
(requiring forty students to do so). Those students become, like the ribbon weavers of Shadwell’s
The Virtuoso, the subjects of the Professor’s experiment, the dumb muscle that turns the cranks
and, assuming the machine ever actually managed to produce philosophical works, would likely
resemble the lower-class workers in English mills who had begun (and would continue to) revolt,
sabotage, and protest the systemic devaluing of their labor. Meanwhile, the Professor’s labor is
intellectual—he thinks—because he does not crank or turn.
If innovation is attributed to whomever can be identified as the one who labors the most
intellectually, such narratives required a recursive effort to hierarchize the different types of
mental labor. As introduced at the top of this chapter, there was an eighteenth-century project to
define “real” thinking as inventive, while mechanical thinking is reduced to mere “reckoning.”
125

This is the difference between, for instance, writing and typing, between Shakespeare and the
million monkeys at typewriters that Julian Huxley imagines might write Hamlet. Thinking with
the body, whether motor or emotion, was a lower order of thinking, against which the thinking
subject is defined.
126
Diderot in his Encyclopédie notes that weavers work for decades in mills

124
Bertucci, Artisanal Enlightenment, 176. Marsais’s pamphlet The Philosopher (Le Philosophe) was not published
until 1743, but it was circulated beforehand, starting in 1730.
125
Jones, Reckoning, 17, 217. Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that “by Ratiocination, I mean computation,” which
reduced “thinking” to “reckoning”; Jones compares calculating engines to this same low-level kind of thinking.
126
As Chico wrote of virtuosi, this speaks to the idea that men were rational and women emotional, further along the
spectrum toward corporeality and even animality and thus not fit for the purely intellectual arts. See N. Katherine

76
“without knowing anything about these machines,” and that a stocking-frame “makes hundreds
of stitches at once […] without the worker who moves the machine understanding anything,
knowing anything or even dreaming of it.”
127
Inventors of automated literary production tend to
demote the mental capacity of would-be such “authors,” too; for instance, John Peter advertised
his pamphlet with the promise that anyone of the “meanest capacity” or “altogether ignorant of
arithmetic, and of all literature” could still utilize his poetry generator.
128
The Spectator review
burlesques this language, adding “any one without knowing a Word of Grammar or Sense, may,
to his great Comfort, be able to compose […] Latin Verses.” Pope promises something similar in
his “Project,” that “epic poems may be made without a genius, nay without learning or much
reading.” Today, unsuspecting scrollers online consume a constant stream of knowledge from
unthinking bots. Swift, in this case unknowing himself, taps into this future when the Professor
explains to Gulliver that “the most ignorant Person […] without the least Assistance from Genius
or Study,” can use his engine to produce the greatest of all works.
129
He envisions a future where
we all devolve further into those modern spiders.
Swift elsewhere suggests that method-based productions are “ever in greatest Perfection,
when managed by Ignorance.”
130
While he is referring to the “Art of Canting,” the sentiment
reflects that of Adam Ferguson decades later: “Many mechanical arts require no capacity. They
succeed best under a total suppression of sentiment and reason.”
131
Swift often sides with the
people caught beneath the intellectual labors of natural philosophers and figures of state, but he

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of
Chicago Press, 2008), for a summary of liberal humanism and its scholarly detractors.
127
Denis Diderot, “Introduction,” “Bas,” Encyclopédie, 1751-66.
128
Johannah Rodgers, “The Genealogy of an Image, or, What Does Literature (Not) Have to Do with the History of
Computing? Tracing the Sources and Reception of Gulliver’s ‘Knowledge Engine’,” in Humanities 6.85 (2017), 4-6.
129
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 154.
130
Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 269.
131
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767 (Transaction Publishers, 1980), 182-3. See also:
Schaffer, “Enlightened Automata,” 129.

77
also disapproved of the way the mechanical arts promised the less learned that they could be
taken as seriously as the great minds of the past. His sympathy has a limit. This is because, as
Muri writes, “to imagine intellectual labour as a commercial, manual, and mechanical labor
constituted an alarming diminishment in the status and profits of the educated gentlemen.”
132

Swift puts down machine thinking at a time when the intellectual elite treats textile workers as
docile automatons in service to philosopher-inventors, when the technologies of the slave
plantation have done so with force, and when automation, heralded by punch card-programmed
looms, threatened to literalize his satire. Swift lampoons the Laputan writing machine, but he
neglects the actual victims of that experiment: the students. This thinking had real consequences;
Allen, for instance, points out that the innovations in eighteenth-century England were motivated
by the high cost of hiring craftspeople; this dehumanization of the labor force, a process which
Ferguson and then Marx respond to in a growing political discourse, reorganized society for the
benefit of empire and joint-stock company. That process occurred both on the factory floor and
in pamphlets, tracts, and fiction, to which Swift contributed, that helped shape man’s changing
relationship to new industrial technologies.

Conclusion
For a long time in its critical literature, the central question of Gulliver’s Travels was “what sort
of animal man, as a species, really is.”
133
Swift, for his part, lampoons the Laputan tailors who
design Gulliver new clothes “despise [practical Geometry] as Vulgar and Mechanick.”
134
Here,
Swift undermines the notion of the Pythagoreans that mathematics (or rationality) separates man

132
Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg, 142.
133
See, for instance: Crane, R. S. “The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas.” Reason and the
Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600-1800 (1962): 231-253.
134
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 137.

78
from the animal. And he similarly caricatures his narrator Gulliver by framing the travelogue as a
tool for the inventive class. At the start of the second voyage, Swift writes to the “gentle reader”
for patience regarding Gulliver’s reflections, which Gulliver imagines may be “insignificant […]
to groveling vulgar minds” but helpful to any “philosopher[s]” intending to “apply them to the
benefit of public as well as private life.” Again, the circumstances of the foreign or racial other
are framed as the raw material for ridiculous, western intellectuals. The utility of the reflections
is judged by the nature of the subject matter, suggesting that some types of knowledge can be
applied, via technology by the act of invention, but are above “vulgar minds” unable to translate
knowledge into instrumentation. And again, Swift here pokes fun at the Royal Society; those
helpful reflections upon which Gulliver’s comments are, first, his slaying of a giant “rat” and
then, himself defecating.
135
Thus, Swift identifies vermin and digestion as that raw material by
which “philosophers,” like the projectors, aim to benefit society. This, Swift establishes, is what
Gulliver believes. And this episode casts his appreciation of the Professor, who generates other
such reflections for “the benefit of public,” as equating mechanical knowledge production to a
kind of thinking characterized by subhuman processes.
But this chapter also argues that Swift’s opprobrium of those projectors doubles back on
himself. While many critics champion Swift’s attacks against rationalism, myself, and others like
Muri, argue that Swift belongs to the same intellectual class whose “moral authority relied upon
differentiating lower-order mechanic intellect from higher-order nervous intellect.” While he was
putting down the Laputans for their allergies to the “Vulgar,” Swift was also putting down the
“gross corporeality” of mechanical labor not unlike how the Houyhnhnm treated the Yahoos.
136

This contradiction informs not only the discursive human promoted by Swift, but one ingrained

135
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 78-9.
136
Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg, 142.

79
into western culture since the Enlightenment. The liberal subject is, as scholars of Posthumanism
have recently argued, in a constant state of fluctuation, redefined from moment to moment, tied
to the plasticization of others against which that subject is defined.
137
The subhuman other has
alternately been defined as irrational, as uncivilized, even as un-technologized in cases where the
use of informational technologies—such as the “index” by which learned Europeans achieve
their rationality or civility—distances the technologized from the animalistic other. But, as N.
Katherine Hayles points out, machine encroachment into knowledge formation in the eighteenth
century also presented a new challenge: the idea that “the human” was becoming a posthuman
subject, “a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and
reconstruction.”
138
To be both technologized (belonging to a culture of systematized education)
and not subjected by technology (forced to merely operate machines or toil mindlessly as cogs in
a figurative machinery), the liberal subject—and specially “the author”—needed yet another
other to serve as that which it is not.
When scholars of Posthumanism look to this era, they observe the processes by which
technology was used to further define “the human” who can invent against “the animal” who
cannot.
139
At the same time, the things of technology threatened the autonomy of invention, and
in the case of punch card systems, their thinking entirely. In this chapter, I have suggested that
the metaphors of vermin—grubs for hack writers, silkworms for bad poets, flies for the coded

137
Weheliye (Habeas Viscus, 5-9), building off Sylvia Winter’s and Hortense Spiller’s pretense that science is often
a social text, argues that there are many different, constructed definitions of “the human,” as well as many discursive
super- and sub-humans, generated by one’s positionality in regard to animality or machines or racial norms. Jackson
(Becoming Human, 23-24) adds that the liberal human was not necessarily defined against the animal, but against
non-European forms of rational humanism, and that the figure of the animal was used to not dehumanize but
bestially humanize certain humans in order to cast them as rational in the wrong way.
138
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 3. As Hayles writes, in moments when “the human” is revealed as a
construct, “bodies of knowledge are similarly apt to be seen as constructs” (85).
139
See: Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford University Press, 2004); Zakiyyah Iman Jackson,
“Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism,” in Feminist Studies 39.3 (2013); and
Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

80
objects of automation, and spiders for spinning and weaving—associate the early steps toward
automation with a certain kind of animal: creepy, crawly reckoners. These technologized animals
are useful figures via which the liberal subject can abject automation from its sense of self, a way
to imagine oneself as both belonging to a progressive civilization of science and yet free from the
machinery via which that society optimizes its subjects. In more ancient times, as Cole explains,
bugs were considered weak and defective animals (in a way that often paired them unfairly with
women); in the early modern period, this shifted to a bifurcation of nature’s design, between
those creatures blessed with intelligence and a soul, and those who are sentient but spiritually
and emotionally dead—that is, the lowest order of nonhuman animals.
140
But with the rise of
industrialization, and thus with the rise of spiritually and emotionally dead forms of labor among
the artisan classes, this same stratification enters the social realm. As workers became further
deskilled and grouped in large mills, they lost their subjectivity and individuality; they became
something like those soulless nonhuman animals. Meanwhile, inventors like Vaucanson, like the
members of the Royal Society (or the Academy at Lagado) treated these humans as if they were
as disposable as their verminous counterparts.
In Man a Machine, La Mettrie writes: “man was trained like an animal […] he became an
author in the same way as he became a porter.”
141
Perhaps instead, as England mechanized its
labor force in the eighteenth century, he became an author the same way he became a stocking-
weaver—programmed rather than trained for an industry that was further becoming a machine
itself (in which literature, too, seemed to write itself). Efforts to define categories such as “the
author” have historically demoted machines to the status of mere tools or products and demoted

140
Cole, “Eighteenth Century,” 3. In 1701 parasitologist Nicolas de Bois-Regard congratulated his readers “for
having overcome the mistaken Aristotelian assumption that insects and women are intrinsically defective” (qtd 11).
141
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 13.

81
those writers who authored too machine-like to something subhuman or, as Richard Hurd wrote
of plagiarists in 1753, “servile.”
142
Swift is doing something else; by privileging the automatic
tools of composition in his satires of modern knowledge making, Swift is forced to reclaim the
purely human author-inventor by other means. One way he does so, it seems, is to borrow from
the well-rehearsed method described above, to define human subjectivity, again, against not only
nonhuman mammals or so-called uncivilized others, but those tiny creatures whose behavior and
low-level cognition resemble the automatic qualities of the century’s proliferating machines. He
contributes to a cultural project that would soon accelerate as punch card systems move from the
scientific laboratory to an industrial reality. Thus, scholars must look past the contradictions of
Swift’s “rational man” and reconsider the eighteenth-century author as a figure embedded in a
world where engines both spin wool from colonies and churn out poetry—who, like Swift, must
occasionally take the spider’s point of view.

142
Groom, “Unoriginal Genius,” 283.
83
CHAPTER 2

“New Mythological Machinery ”
1
:
Jacquard-Woven Art and the Mechanical Reproduction of the Author

Figure 1. A la Mémoire de J. M. Jacquard,
woven by Michel-Marie Carquillat for Didier Petit & Co.,
after Jean-Claude Bonnefond, Lyons, France, 1838

1
George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, in Lord Byron: The Major Works (edited by Jerome McGann, Oxford
University Press, 2008), I.1607.
84
Introduction
I would like to begin this chapter in much the way Charles Babbage started conversations at his
famous Dorset Street parties. Each spring, Babbage threw Saturday social events for London’s
fashionable society, often attracting the biggest names in science and literature. By the 1840s,
these parties totaled hundreds of guests well into the early morning. Charles Dickens and Charles
Darwin attended regularly. The Duke of Wellington and Prince Albert made appearances. And,
at some point during the evening, Babbage would trot out the latest scientific or engineering
marvel to impress his guests. After 1832, often the conversation piece was his own Difference
Engine—the one-seventh completed portion of it encased in glass and mahogany. Later, Babbage
showed off the photographic experiments of another occasional guest and pen pal, Henry Fox
Talbot. Starting in the spring of 1840, however, Babbage began displaying something different.
After having lobbied for months through friends in France, he managed to procure the memorial
portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard pictured above. The modest 20-by-14-inch image was not, at
first glance, a marvel of innovation. Yet, when displaying the tableau, Babbage always asked his
guests the same question: how was it made?
2

The portrait was produced in Lyon, France, to memorialize the life of Jacquard and his
importance to the city’s silk industry. The monochrome image, modeled after a painting by Jean-
Claude Bonnefond, portrays the inventor sitting in his workshop. Despite its familiar appearance,
Babbage’s prized object was a brazen accomplishment for its day. Nearly all his guests guessed

2
The narrative here is largely indebted to James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand Loom Led to the Birth of
the Information Age (Oxford University Press, 2004). Babbage had written to his friend Francois Jean Dominique
Arago in Paris in 1839, asking him to procure for him “a piece of silk in which is woven by means of the Jacard [sic]
loom a portrait of M. Jacard sitting in his workshop. It was executed in Lyons as a tribute to the memory of the
discoverer of a most admirable contrivance which as once gave an almost boundless extent to the art of weaving”
(qtd Essinger 46); as Essinger records, Babbage also visited Lyons in 1840, where he witnessed the looms at Didier
Petit & Co (at 34 Quai de Retz) and purchased a copy of the portrait to give as a gift to the Queen of Piedmont and
Sardinia; in the Henry Babbage Collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, there is another 5-by-7-inch
silk-woven portrait of Jacquard after the same Bonnefond design.
85
that it was an engraving. (When I viewed a copy at the Computer History Museum, I might have
been similarly fooled.
3
) But the portrait, which features Jacquard beside his famous apparatus,
the jacquard loom, was in fact produced by that very machine—woven with silk more finely than
anything before. The loom, which this chapter will examine in detail, accomplished what Falcon
and Vaucanson attempted a half-century before; it replaced the mental labor of the weaver and
the physical labor of the drawchild in the patterning of figured silk. Like his predecessors,
Jacquard used punched pasteboard cards to control the drawloom via binary patterns, rendering
repeatable and automated what had previously taken great amounts of skill and time. Benefiting
from another three decades of improvements, the 1838 portrait was woven by Michel-Marie
Carquillat using 24,000 of those cards in only eight hours. Today, the dozen or so remaining
copies of the portrait are cherished as artifacts of computer history.
4
However, this chapter is
interested in what such a marvel meant then, to Babbage’s guests and, beyond Dorset Street,
English cultural producers.
For Babbage, the Jacquard portrait was proof in the putting of his life’s passion: machine
precision at the intersection “of the intellectual and mechanical departments.”
5
He delighted in
the misreadings of his guests and likely used punch cards of his own design, intended for his
never-built Analytical Engine, to correct his guests, explaining how the tableau was woven. His
greatest public success—in his own lifetime—was the popular 1832 volume On the Economy of

3
Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA. Visited July 2021. In addition to the portrait, the museum has in
its archives a miniature working model of a jacquard loom from the early nineteenth century, a demonstration model
for commercial purposes which I imagine Babbage would have envied.
4
Ada Lovelace references it in Note F when describing the use of punched cards in Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
Likewise, Babbage, to the Duke of Wellington and Prince Albert, says of the Jacquard portrait that “it will greatly
assist in explaining the nature of my calculating machine, the Analytical Engine” (qtd Essinger 4). A quick Google
search brings the curious to: “The Most Famous Image in the Early History of Computing,” Jeremy Norman’s
HistoryofInformation.com, edited February 8, 2016, http://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=1888
5
Charles Babbage, The Works of Charles Babbage Vol 8. On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (Edited
by Martin Campbell-Kelly. Taylor & Francis Group, 1989), 77. Babbage is here referencing movable type.
Elsewhere he claims that “the greatest source of error” lay with “the copyist, the compositor and printer.”
86
Machinery and Manufactures, which celebrated at every turn the development of machines
which erased human error. When Babbage asks his guests “how was it made?” he epitomizes
what Thomas Carlyle describes as “the Mechanical Age,” a time when men are either “captains
of industry” or “tool-using animals,” and mechanical processes encroach upon all forms of
manufacture, from iron beams to the most delicate finery.
6
If the previous epoch, as Lord Byron
writes in Don Juan, was “the patent-age of new inventions,”
7
then the mid-nineteenth century
saw those inventions reshape how individuals experienced culture. Babbage’s demonstrations
served a similar purpose as Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s famous trio of automata (1774)—the musician,
draughtsman, and writer—and the wonder with which viewers beheld the written words of the
latter (“I do not think, therefore do I not exist?”). It is a way to highlight the material object at the
expense of any thinking or creative subjects—to shift attention to the automata writer’s 6,000
parts or the Jacquard portrait’s 24,000 punch cards. Jaquet-Droz’s automata could only imitate
nature, but the portrait exceled human hands and could never exist without the invention of the
automated loom. This was something new, and for Babbage’s guests, it was one more sea-change
in the possible modes of artistic production.
In addition to the above portrait and other jacquard-woven art, this chapter examines
literary history during the decades prior, as the jacquard loom first became known in England,
and when the rapidly improving technologies around copying and printing promised a future of
mass manufacture across the arts. Babbage’s parties were unique for providing access to artifacts
of science, especially for his literary guests. However, for most people, the paradigm shifts of
literary production happened in abstractions and over time, refracted through the book industry,

6
Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” in A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle
(1829, 1971). Carlyle remarks: “nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is rule and calculated contrivance.”
7
Byron, Don Juan, I.132.1049-1056.
87
property laws and, as this chapter argues, in everyday objects such as brocade. Readers and
critics, I argue, were increasingly invested in the question “how was it made?” and what the
answer—true or false—meant for their relationship to texts. Literature becomes defined by the
“continuous rediscovery of its origins,” and this includes the material evidence presented by the
final object.
8
Authors, in turn, constructed scenes of making, situated in the industrial history of
art-manufacture, in ways that both adopt and reject the new modes of artistic production which
mark their lives. This chapter demonstrates how this paradigm shift in art-manufacture is traced
from automated weaving to poetry, and how this question of “how” reframes the question we are
more familiar with as literary scholars: who made this?

Machine Imposture
This chapter, like the previous one, is concerned with representations of labor. As John Ruskin
argues in The Nature of Gothic, an industrial society must think past the quality of the artwork
produced—a grand cathedral, in his case—to the quality of the artists’ lives as they labored: to
what went on at the scene of making. Whereas the first chapter was concerned with resemblances
between art and automation, with how the industrial revolution influenced what types of creative
work were valued, this chapter focuses on the automation of the creative act itself—and the
consequences of this new machinery for the creative actor. The shift from Daniel Defoe’s “Age
of Projectors” to Samuel Johnson’s “Age of Authors” was, in part, a shift from ideas that can be
divorced from individuals to ideas that are defined by the moments when they are created: by
who did the work. Over time, literary criticism became preoccupied with whether the author’s

8
Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760-1845 (Cambridge University Press,
2006), 6-19.
88
connection to the product of their labor rang authentic.
9
Thus, if the scene of the creative act is
compromised by divisions of labor or complex tool use, the author’s relationship to their own
literary production is threatened. This chapter assumes as a premise that the creative act was
thusly compromised by the threat of automation technologies, along with, as Johnson remarked,
the “very uncertain tenure […] of literary fame” due to the related surplus.
10
The challenge for
authors in the Mechanical Age was to retain some semblance of their person—hand, mind, or
personality—in the material evidence of their labor.
To frame this moment, I borrow from scholarship which investigates how ideologies of
authenticity manifest in the wake of eighteenth-century print innovation. Tom Mole, for instance,
rephrases this media surplus as a “personality overload”; with the proliferation of printed works
also came too many names and author engravings. Mole argues that “celebrity […] eased the
sense of industrial alienation between readers and writers” and became a consumer strategy for
“selective reading”; in response, authors made their work more commercially viable by imbuing
their writing with the sense that they are addressing their readers directly—what Mole terms a
“hermeneutics of intimacy.”
11
(Like Mole, this chapter examines Byron’s literary career, which

9
Isaac D’Israeli, An Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (T. Cadell, junr., 1795), xviii.
Roland Barthes locates the origin of authorship as an ideological function in the Romantic period. Michel Foucault,
in his investigations regarding how the author became “individualized,” likewise points to this period. See: Barthes,
“The Death of the Author”; Foucault, “What is An Author?”; et al. In general, I am using Andrew Bennett, The
Author (Routledge, 2004), to anchor my summaries of authorship scholarship here.
10
William Wordsworth, for instance, worried that great poets were being “driven into neglect by frantic novels,
sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” In these narratives, new
definitions of literary value reflect an anxiety that so-called worthy culture producers were being drowned out by a
cacophony of information. Samuel T. Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads: 1798 and 1800
(Broadview Press, 2008), 177. Brad Pasanek and Chad Wellmon, “The Enlightenment Index,” in The Eighteenth
Century 56, no. 3 (2015), 374-375. Pasanek and Wellmon survey the use of flood imagery when describing the print
industry in the eighteenth century, including a footnote in Pope’s The Dunciad, which describes how “a deluge of
authors cover’d the land,” and, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s first Discourse (1750), the figure of Socrates reborn
denounces the “mass of books by which we are flood.” By the height of the Romantic era, The Retrospective Review
described book reviews as a method of protecting the public readership from an “inundation of paper and print.” The
author category—and the literary canon—provide insurance against being just another forgotten name in a catalog.
11
Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Springer, 2007), 5-
22. See also: Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (JHU Press,
1993); James Soderholm, Fantasy, Forgery, and the Byron Legend (University Press of Kentucky, 2015). In a
89
embodies contradictions between economic motivations and emphases on authentic connections
over print, to investigate the complexities of author identity vis-à-vis industry.) Tilar J. Mazzeo,
meanwhile, argues that Romantic poets, to account for future threats of forgery and plagiarism,
must compel “the reader to call an imagined consciousness into being” through their language.
12

And Margaret Russett investigates a new crisis in the “social regulation of identity,” wherein
these constructed authentic connections are revealed to be fictions when examined alongside the
practice of imposture. Russett argues that the strategy of Romantic poets to imagine themselves
on the page—and the readerly practice to read authors with their likenesses in mind (to conflate
an author’s “voice and bodily gesture” with their “physiognomy”)—anticipates poststructuralist
redefinitions of authorship. Authenticity, in this context, is merely a side effect of suturing an
author’s personality to a textual persona.
13

Authenticity has also historically been evidenced by handwriting. Original manuscripts
are the material history of composition. They tell the story of how the art was made: the artist in
their workshop, their hands at labor. For Byron’s publisher John Murray, handwriting suggested
the person himself: “I believe it would be difficult to find a handwriting in which the character of
a man and of his writings is more accurately reflected than is the case with Lord Byron.”
14
That
is, an author’s hand invokes their subjectivity; their intellectual and emotional labor is sponsored
by the physical act of writing and, as Samuel T. Coleridge remarks of Shakespeare, arguably that
“mind is as manifest as his hand.”
15
Consider the following passage from Byron’s Don Juan, in

similar vein, Andrea Henderson writes about strategies to textually invent a sense of the fleeting—an approximation
of the real and intimate—in Romantic poetry, what she terms an “aesthetic of the ephemeral,” in Romanticism and
the Painful Pleasures of Modern Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 243.
12
Tilar J. Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period (UPenn Press, 2013), 185-6.
13
Russett, Fictions and Fakes, 6. Russett additionally argues that the relationship between objects of forgery and
performances of imposture is fluid and cross-contaminated.
14
Qtd in Andrew Burkett, Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (SUNY Press, 2016), 34
(from “Byron’s Penmanship,” 215).
15
Qtd in Russett, Fictions and Fakes, 21.
90
which the speaker expresses the legitimacy of his text (or anxieties around its future) by limiting
its composition to a person, time, and place:
Whether my verse’s fame be doom’d to cease,
While the right hand which wrote it still is able,
Or of some centuries to take a lease;
The grass upon my grave will grow as long,
And sigh to midnight winds, but not to song.
16

By imagining his absence, Byron’s subject emphasizes the fact that this verse was produced by
his “right hand” alone. Byron mentions his own hand often—for instance, at the end of Beppo,
he writes “my pen is at the bottom of a page”
17
—drawing attention to the physical act of making.
Here, the speaker cannot be compelled to produce more “song,” for new song can only be
produced by his hand still living, natural, and famous
18
; the implication is that, after his death,
nobody else can forge poetry attributable to him, and no innovation which reproduces art will
ever be able to compose original work by an author without their presence. His work will forever
remain tied to his lived (and natural, even organic) experience.
Byron is also aware that, due to the economic and personal motivations of the “literary
rabble,” authors cannot truly control their legacies. He is aware that the recent improvements in
copying technologies—stereotypy, lithography, mezzotint, steel plate, et al.—promised to further
remediate his poems through endless reprintings and new editions. As Mole points out, the
industrial conditions of the nineteenth century taught authors to anticipate their texts (and selves)

16
Byron, Don Juan, IV.99.788-792.
17
Lord Byron, Beppo, XCIX.5. See also Susan Wolfson on Byron’s texts’ afterlives.
18
Here the organic—nature, decay, loam—is positioned opposite to mechanism, as we expect from Romantic
prefatory writing. For instance, in Lady Blessington’s A Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron (1834), Byron
writes that “after one has laid in a tolerable stock of materials for thinking, I should think the best plan would be to
give the mind time to digest […] by which we make the knowledge acquired our own; and on this foundation we
may let our originality (if we have any) build a superstructure” (quoted in Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary
Property, 330). Mazzeo also comments that “Byron articulates a model of authorship that posits appropriation,
adoption, digestion, and even plagiarism as the conditions of inventions and self-expression” (p. 120).
91
to be “repeatedly renewed in different contexts and media.”
19
The above passage thus anticipates
the Byronic subject’s posthumous activity, the grass which grows and blows in the wind, and
qualifies the nature of that future; without Byron’s hand, his already composed verses might lose
their liveliness and only “sigh” rather than sing. The words can be copied, but if the hand dies,
the possibility of real future compositions, or even revivifying old ones, die with it. On the one
hand, this is an old ideology; in Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Edward Young
writes that “no two faces, no two minds, are just alike.”
20
The biological person extends their
uniqueness to the products of their labor, and so no other person can produce the same. On the
other hand, the nineteenth century would see a reconfiguration of this Romantic ethos, centered
not on the threat of human imitation but of mechanical composition. Ruskin, for instance, writes
in 1859 that “Fine Art must always be produced by the subtlest of all machines, which is the
human hand. No machine yet contrived, or hereafter contrivable, will ever equal the machinery
of the human fingers.”
21
Byron in Don Juan expresses caution around technologies, but he was
likely not imagining the capacity of automation to one day challenge the primacy of “hands” or
limitations of that “sigh.” In this chapter, I do. In fact, I argue that the introduction of automation
begins to undermine, generally, authors’ confidence that their textual selves will outlast either
the flood of copies or a possible future of machine imposture.
To reiterate this project’s larger premise, notions of authorship develop as new methods
for artistic production—e.g., new extremes in the division of labor—reach a critical mass. Like
the previous chapter, this one reconsiders literature through the textile history, especially new

19
Tom Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception
History (Princeton University Press, 2020), 6.
20
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (A.
Millar and R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 42. This analogy persists in legal discourse; Francis Hargrave, in Argument in
Defence of Literary Property (1774), elaborated on this notion: “a literary work really original, like the human face,
will always have some singularities.”
21
John Ruskin, The Unity of Art (T. Sowler, 1859).
92
methods for the mechanical reproduction of ornately designed textiles.
22
Andrew Piper argues
that “contra [Walter] Benjamin, the Romantic book precedes photography as a key medium for
contemporaries to reflect upon the problem of technological reproducibility.”
23
I argue further
that other printed materials, such as calicoes and silks, rehearse the rise of mechanical forgery
and mass manufacture, providing cultural precedent for producers and consumers of literature. I
agree with Piper that it is by 1800—not, as Benjamin estimates, “around 1900”—that “technical
reproduction […] captured a place of its own among the artistic process.”
24
By this premise, the
formation of the Romantic author is partly influenced by the erasure in textile production of
human labor. The subjective turn may be a response to the automatization of everyday life, but it
also owes something to how new methods in manufacturing compromised the status of artworks
as evidentiary of their original creative labor.
25
By Byron’s time, artists had yet to fully confront
the possibility that the creative act might someday be reproduced without their presence. But as
this chapter will show, the jacquard loom and its punch cards begin modeling the reduction of
artists to simple patterns, stored in cardboard for future reactivation. It is an anxiety prevalent
today in science fiction—the idea that unique individuals are deceptively simple and predictable,
able to be represented by a few lines of code.
26

22
Increasingly, as Tilar J. Mazzeo explains, “Romanticism is studied as a movement that is fundamentally engaged
with and shaped by the circulation and production of commodities and the culture they generate”; “William Blake’s
Golden String: Jerusalem and the London Textile Industry,” in Studies in Romanticism 52, no. 1 (2013), 115.
23
Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (University
of Chicago Press, 2011), 57; 262 n15.
24
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
(Harvard University Press, 2008), 217-218.
25
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT Press,
1992). Crary notes that the shift to subjectivist views is part of modernity itself; faced with mechanical reproduction,
the human privileges the unreproducible. It is an insistence that even if a copy is identical on the surface from
another work (i.e., single-press lace), that there must be, for every copy, an original object or author. Somewhere
there was handmade lace or a Wordsworth contemplating “under this dark sycamore.” William Wordsworth, “Lines
written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” line 10.
26
Recent examples include the television shows Westworld (2016-2020) and Devs (2020).
93
Forgeries happened anecdotally, of course; great artists inspired copycat artworks, and
print imposture, already familiar to authors with the prerequisite fame, rehearsed this possibility.
Byron’s supposedly evidentiary handwriting, for instance, was forged by Caroline Lamb.
27
The
above lines from Don Juan aside, Byron’s “hand” kept producing “song” after his death; as this
chapter will examine further, Washington Irving in 1835 wrote “An Unwritten Drama of Lord
Byron,” challenging the relationship between authors and their work by using “of” not “by” in
the title, implying constellations of other possible unwritten works of absent authors still to be
produced.
28
By the time Talbot photographed one of Byron’s manuscripts in 1840, a stanza from
Ode to Napoleon that Byron intended never to publish, something else was happening.
29
As
Benjamin implies, a new kind of mechanical reproduction threatened to industrialize not only the
“mirror,” but also the “lamp.”
30
Clashes between art and automation reach the public sphere in
these early decades; from photography to music boxes to self-playing pianos.
31
Automated looms
enter England during the 1810s and wouldn’t transform its industry until the 1820s, but it is that
liminal moment between the introduction of a new technology and its social integration that this
dissertation is interested in. And, perhaps more than these other technologies, the jacquard loom

27
As Soderholm quips, “Byron awoke in 1812 to find himself not only famous but also drawn into the fray of
fantasy and forgery”; Fantasy, 8. Industries have been sustained by Byron forgeries, both during and after his life:
Major George Gordon Byron claimed to be his natural son and forged letters in his name; the poet John Clare at one
point believed he was Byron and composed poetry as such (See: Russett, Fakes and Fictions, 31); and Byron’s
correspondence suggests a nearly constant legal battle with booksellers falsely claiming to have purchased poems by
him (for example: Lord Byron, “Letter to Mr. Moore on December 24, 1816,” in Letters and Journals of Lord Byron
with Notices of His Life Vol. 3, edited by Thomas Moore. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1833).
28
Washington Irving, “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron,” in The Gift: a Christmas and New Year's Present for
1836 (edited by Miss Leslie, Philadelphia: E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1835). See also: Piper, Dreaming in Books, 147.
29
William Henry Fox Talbot, “Copy of a stanza from the ‘Ode to Napoleon’ in Lord Byron’s hands,” prior to April
4, 1840; Talbot photographed a handwritten stanza of Lord Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1814) after the
poet’s death (what Talbot referred to as a “photogenic drawing negative”). The stanza was ordered by John Murray
and suppressed by Byron afterwards, published posthumously in Thomas Moore’s 1830 biography of Byron. The
original manuscript is currently at the Ransom Center, Austin, TX. See Burkett, Romantic Mediations, 19-44.
30
M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford UP, 1971).
31
Building on the metal cylinder methods used by Vaucanson in the mid-eighteenth century, the swiss clockmaker
Antoine Favre invented the automated music box in 1796. Pianotype, patented in 1822 by William Church but not
manufactured until James Young and Adrien Delcambre in 1840, was able to record (and even replay) the physical
movement of fingers across a keyboard. Claude Seytre patented the self-playing piano using perforated tape in 1842.
94
demonstrated what authorless art production looked like. It is, I argue, no coincidence that the
modern author was codified while practitioners of other arts were coming to terms with fears that
they might one day be reducible to machinery.
The prerequisite for authenticity, Benjamin suggests, is the presence, however distant, of
the original. What was “new” about the “mechanical reproduction of a work of art,” distinct from
copies made via printing presses and lithography, was the capacity of new copying technologies
to put the original work out of reach of its simulacra. Photography provided the prime example
because the original was both ephemeral—as fleeting as a glance—and, like a negative, did not
resemble the final version. The chapter presents the jacquard loom as a paradigm shift equal to
photography. Babbage made a show of Talbot’s experiments, but there is a reason his prized
possession was a machine-woven image; the question “how was it made?” is another way to ask
after its authenticity. The punch card, as I will demonstrate, obscures the original creative scene
more so than a photographic negative, dramatizing the void upon which we construct fictions of
authorship. It represents the capacity to store the activity of authorship—and, since to be stored
is tantamount to being forgotten, the possibility of erasure. Admittedly, complex machine-woven
objects from this period, like the Jacquard portrait, were expensive and rare, vanity projects for
collectors and special occasions.
32
They did not change the world, even if Babbage tried to help
them do so, one social gathering at a time. Rather, like eighteenth-century instruments made as
proof-of-concept, machine-woven artworks played out a “what if” that would have crossed the
minds of many. While the jacquard loom is not so notorious that it tore through the reality of

32
Pushing the limits of Jacquard-woven art was a common practice at the time, a way for different firms to show off
the capacity of their weavers and their machines. Novelty Jacquard-woven art continued until the mid-twentieth
century. Some examples I’ve come across in my research include a landscape image of Independence Hall for the
United States centennial (4x7 inches, 1876, Horstmann Collection, Hagley Library); a series of portraits of U.S.
presidents (1950 Exhibit, “Jacquard Woven Portraits of American Presidents,” Smithsonian Institution Archives);
and, the most impressive, a silk-woven prayer book made in Lyon in 1888 (Morgan Library, New York, NY).
95
what people knew of art and literature, for the purposes of my argument, the loom was evidence
of a moment in history when people started conceiving that a copying machine requiring no
original might shape the future of artistic production.
Walter Ong argues that while technology harnesses the media surplus of the eighteenth
century “for practical purposes,” “Romanticism uses it […] as a springboard to another world.”
33

Technology, in the latter case, is something that the Romantic author must transcend. Poetry had
to develop the broadcastability, Celeste Langan explains, to function across—and above—media
systems.
34
But, as many scholars have since pointed out, this transcendence is posture. Those
mechanisms are pervasive and often equal to human fingers. We need only to look at the
Jacquard portrait to know that the precision of the machine had long matched the subtlety of the
hand, and the punch card, by storing compositional patterns for repetition, threatened to match
the mind as well. Romanticism, I argue, uses new technologies not as “a springboard,” nor, as
Clifford Siskin and William Warner suggest, “a bully pulpit” or “platform” for the Romantic
subject.
35
Rather, as new technologies continued drilling a hole into the center of authorship, the
thinking subject had to find ways to reinscribe old ideologies in new shapes and sizes to mask
the machinery inside. Byron, who compares his own poetry to the “mode” of Newton—to the
“mechanics” by which “steam-engines will conduct him to the Moon”
36
—is perhaps the author
who best opportunes comparisons between anxieties around his work’s afterlives, his interest in

33
Walter J. Ong, “Romantic Difference and the Poetics of Technology,” in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology:
Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, 2012), 264-279.
34
Celeste Langan, Maureen McLane, and James Chandler, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,” in The Cambridge
Companion to British Romantic Poetry (2008). Here, Romantic poetry is portrayed not as a genre (a literary
category), but as a medium between orality and print, such that print becomes the output, even the waste product, of
the mental composition, rather than its immediate value. In doing so, Romantic poets position a certain kind of
authorship above prose writing (which is, unlike real poetry, sublimated to new technologies and industry).
35
Clifford Siskin and William Warner, “If This Is Enlightenment Then What Is Romanticism?” in European
Romantic Review 22, no. 3 (2011), 288.
36
Byron, Don Juan, X.2.10-16.
96
reactivating history as poetry, and punch card systems which were shaping the way people
imagined what posthumous reactivation might look like. In my framing of Byron, the hand
holding the pen recedes further behind mechanism, and the question “how was it made?” must
allow for the era’s new metaphors of production.

Infinite Scenes of Making
Silk-woven art predated any automated loom. Brocade flourished during the seventeenth century,
when Lyon solidified its reputation as the European center of the silk industry. By the end of the
Ancien Régime, the city exploded in population, and silk manufacture accounted for over a third
of the workforce.
37
At the time, the quality and pattern of the cloth, not the cut of the dress or
coat, determined the fashion. Those patterns changed seasonally, and silk designers produced
increasingly intricate designs to outdo their competition. The most famous designer was Philippe
de la Salle, a marchand-fabricant often called the “Raphael of Silk Design.” De la Salle, along
with a London-educated gauze manufacturer, invented a new kind of drawloom, experimented
with the raising of silkworms for certain colors, and very likely could have beaten Jacquard to
the punch if not for the revolution.
38
His most ambitious project was a series of woven portraits;
each, managed without automation, are evidence that vanity silk art predated the jacquard

37
As Lesley Ellis Miller explains, “Lyon had gained a reputation for producing the most innovative silks in
Europe”; “Between Engraving and Silk Manufacture in Late Eighteenth-Century Lyons: Marie-Anne Brenier and
Other Point Papermakers,” in Studies in Decorative Arts 3, no. 2 (1996), 61, 190. According to Miller, silk
production expanded quickly after encouragement from Louis XIV, and about 38% of the Lyonnais population
worked in the silk industry in the 1780s. The wealthiest of them were the 400 or so marchand-fabricants, and the
half which specialized in patterned silks competed for the design work of around 100 freelance designers. See also:
Lesley Ellis Miller, “Making a Reputation from Innovation: Silk Designers in Lyon, 1660-1789,” in Fashioning the
Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800.
38
David T. Jenkins, “Silk,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press,
2003), 807. The London-educated student was Camille Pernon, an example of the commonplace transmission of
industrial techne between London and Lyon. De la Salle’s experiments with silkworms resemble those done with
spiders in Swift’s Academy of Laputa.
97
loom.
39
Aside from Jacquard’s added punch-card system, the process stayed much the same.
Designers painted their patterns on lined paper—in which each box represented one thread—
allowing for weavers to translate the design to either instructions for the drawchild or binary for
punch cards. After Jacquard patented his machine, the game changed, but it would take decades
for the new looms to match the intricacy of de la Salle’s designs. Some of the early attempts—
such as a profile of Napoleon, produced in Paris by a jacquard loom in 1810—were hardly more
complex than the outline of a flower.
40
But more complex designs followed, and over time the
location of “genius” shifted from designers to the machines themselves: from “have you seen the
new De la Salle?” to “look at what looms can do now!”
41

As the previous chapter outlines, the punch card system was not entirely novel. What
Jacquard did was simplify the inventions of the previous century and, so, he was the first to bring
fully automated weaving past the prototype stage. As I summarize in the Introduction, previously
drawlooms relied on a two-person team to operate: the weaver (or liseuse) controlled multiple
treadles at their feet and called out instructions to the drawchild (or faiseuse de lacs), who
activated the warp thread so that it joined into the action of the patterning shuttle.
42
Even the
most experienced such team could manage only two rows per minute by this method. It was

39
Miller, “Between Engraving and Silk Manufacture,” 212. One of De la Salle’s portraits, of Louis XV, can be
viewed at the Musée des Tissus, Lyon, France.
40
The weaver responsible for the 1810 silhouette, William H. Horstmann, would later introduce the first Jacquard
loom to America, after some delays due to shipwrecks, in 1824, with a hope to turn Philadelphia into “the Lyons of
the new continent.” See: Linus Pierpont Brockett, The Silk Industry in America, a History: Prepared for the
Centennial Exposition (The Silk Association of America, 1876); and WM. H. Horstmann Company, One Hundred
Years: 1816-1916, The Chronicles of an Old Business House in the City of Philadelphia.
41
Jacquard looms increased in capacity over the years and were often identified by the number of holes able to be
punched per card. According to Brockett (The Silk Industry in America, p. 108), Jacquard looms were sold as 400,
600, and 1,000 machines. While the two portraits discussed in this chapter required tens of thousands of high-yield
cards, many silk-woven art objects required far fewer: for the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, for
instance, a woven image of Independence Hall required only 1,000 cards, and portraits of George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln, and Cardinal McCloskey each required between 4,500 and 10,000 cards.
42
According to the glossary in St. Clair, The Golden Thread (p. 297), a “warp” is “a set of threads in weaving,
usually the ones extended lengthwise on a loom, that are held taut so that the weaver can work more easily.”
98
painstaking and skilled labor, and each new pattern required extensive preparation. Jacquard
mechanized much of the process, removing the need for the drawchild entirely and turning
complex weaving into something as quick and easy as plain cloth. His harness, positioned above
the loom, consists of a revolving cylinder around which chains of punch cards pass across rows
of needles. Each needle is connected via hook and bar to a warp-thread, and as the punch cards
pass over the spring-loaded needles, each needle either extends (if aligned with a punched hole in
the card) or is blocked (if there is no punched hole).
43
This determines whether the needle’s
corresponding warp thread is raised.
44
Using this machine language, Bonnefond’s portrait of
Jacquard can be translated, by stationers and silk designers, into 24,000 punch cards sewn into an
unbroken chain, there ending the intellectual and creative labor of humans in the composition.
45

Thereafter, a machine—illegible to the human eye, optimized for speed, and designed so no
skilled labor is necessary—performs the rest of the composition.
The binary logic between raising or not raising the warp is why the jacquard loom and its
punch card system is remembered as an ancestor to the computer. Oddly, the significance of the
punch card is rarely discussed outside of its place in the evolution of machine programming. But,
importantly for its time, these laced sequences of cards were prime examples of how industrial

43
The term “jacquard loom” has served as a catchall for many kinds of automated looms using a similar system.
Such machines came in many sizes, from 16 to 600 hooks, the length of a factory floor. Most early Jacquard looms
in Europe were made of wood, but by the end of the century, most were made of iron.
44
In my readings on the jacquard loom, there are multiple contradictions regarding which needle position triggers
which corresponding lift motion. Most sensibly, it is the lack of a punched hole and the blocked needle which lifts
the warp, such that no punch card who result in no lifted warps.
45
See: Jenkins, “Silk,” 325-7. The weaver no longer needed even to stop the shuttle between steps. The only
difficult part of the process left is the production of the pasteboard cards. This was done like how the draw-loom
worked before; one person read aloud the patterns while another punched out the holes. In addition to the Essinger,
Jenkins, and Miller, this chapter draws from various sources to patch together Jacquard’s and his loom’s history:
Thomas R. Ashenhurst, A Practical Treatise on Weaving and Designing of Textile Fabrics: With Chapters on the
Principles of Construction of the Loom, Calculations, and Colour (J. Broadbent and Company, 1893); T. F.
Bell, Jacquard Weaving and Designing (Longmans, Green, 1895); Kassia St. Clair, The Golden Thread: How
Fabric Changed History (Liveright Publishing, 2019); Martin and Virginia Davis, “Mistaken Ancestry: the Jacquard
and the Computer,” in Textile 3, no. 1 (2005): 76-87; and Emanuel Anthony Posselt, The History of the Jacquard
Machine (Charles River Editors, 1888).
99
objects might minimize human creative labor. Sadie Plant, for instance, has described Jacquard’s
invention as “an early migration of control from weaver to machinery.”
46
Indeed, in addition to
replacing the labor of the drawchild, the loom and its cards alter the nature of the weaver’s job.
Carquillat would have overseen the process of translating Bonnefond’s hand to the cards, in
essence creating a “program” for the loom to follow; but once the cards are fed into the harness,
only manual labor remained. Punch cards, like Swift’s Laputan engine, render unnecessary the
skilled laborer or thinker. Whereas previously the weaver had to “perform” the art of the silk
designer by calling out to the drawchild each step, now the cards reenacted this process. They are
encoded with the act of composition, a kind of cardboard save-file, with which a loom can weave
patterns long after its original design is completed, repeatedly and identically. Like engraver’s
plates, a design is stored in an object for mass reproduction. But whereas a plate copies only the
finished artwork, punch cards reproduce the original creative activity. The actions by which the
composition is made—the translation of Bonnefond’s painting into silk by expert weavers—is
repeated step-by-step in their absence. Each sequence of cards is a captured scene of making, a
set of objects stored in a firm’s “library” waiting to be reactivated to weave again—like Byron’s
hand, mummified, still producing song.
The portrait of Jacquard further complicates the question “who made this?” The divisions
of labor involved in the weaving of that document—from questions regarding patronage (i.e., the
firm Didier Petit & Co) to the number of hands involved in its execution: the artist Bonnefond;
the artisans who translated the painting to graph paper, the weaver Carquillat; and the laborers
operating the loom—literalize ambiguities of modern authorship.
47
Even ignoring the labor, the

46
Sadie Plant, “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics,” in Body & Society 1, no. 3-4 (1995), 51.
47
Here I am not even including the machine mass-market engravings based on Bonnefond’s painting, such as the
one by lithographer E. Simon a Strasbourg, as well as other more rudimentary silk-woven versions.
100
portrait raises age-old questions about imitation and originality. Bonnefond was the director of
Lyon’s school of fine arts and an imitator of classic styles. His representation of Jacquard in a
cushioned chair, beside the accoutrement of his profession in his place of work, borrows from
merchant portraits of the Italian Renaissance and is evocative of eighteenth-century industrialist
portraits, such as those by Joseph Wright of Derby, where captains of industry are shown in
fancy dress beside the material emblems of their achievement. In Wright’s paintings, Richard
Arkwright (1789) is placed beside a model of his spinning frame and Samuel Oldknow (1792)
holds a bolt of muslin in one arm.
48
Bonnefond’s painting similarly balances grandeur and
realism in its placement of Jacquard beside a model of his loom, blueprints, punch cards, and
various tools, with silk in his left hand (and strewn throughout with different patterning). Due
partly to how closely the artist adheres to established conventions of portraiture, Bonnefond is
often unmentioned in discussions of the woven portrait. Amid the complex divisions of labor, the
original composition (which Bonnefond represents) becomes merely one more step in the
production; he applies the paint based on convention, for the silk designers to copy onto graph
paper, for the weaver to program the machine.
The portrait is also a depiction of authorship itself. Jacquard sits in his workshop as if
engaged in the invention of his famous apparatus. He holds calipers against strips of cardboard,
as if measuring out the holes to punch—his hands evidence of his role in the loom’s making.
Jacquard, in this fiction, labors at the manufacture of the loom alone and with preindustrial tools.
The calipers (or dividers, or compass) in Jacquard’s hand function also on a symbolic level, like

48
Judy Egerton, Wright of Derby (Tate Gallery, 1990), 202. Egerton notes that Wright’s portraits combine “the
tradition of merchant portraiture,” with the fact that “men of science were frequently painted with their inventions
beside them.” Though Arkwright and Oldknow had spurious claims as inventors, and these portraits belong to a
dubious hagiography, Arkwright probably contributed more to the industrial revolution than any other single
individual, and his portrait—Wright’s, the mass-produced mezzotint version by J. R. Smith (1801), and Thomas
Carlyle’s 1839 pen-portrait caricature—shaped the public idea of what a “captain of industry” looked like.
101
a laurel branch in early portraits of Shakespeare or Hume’s History of England in the arms of
bluestocking women.
49
By the eighteenth century, compasses were used in the frontispieces of
mathematics treatises as symbols for the instrumentality of reason.
50
And in accordance with
Masonic lore, the compass equates Jacquard’s invention to the creation of the universe, and him
to the “Almighty Architect.”
51
Depicting Jacquard with compass in hand, Bonnefond represents
him as both engineer and a much grander architect. The compass, and the hand that wields it,
elevate the labor of one philosopher-inventor over everyone (and everything) else involved. One
of his first biographers, Edouard Foucaud, compares Jacquard both to Prometheus, snatching fire
from heaven, and Galileo, who challenged traditional ideas of creation and was persecuted for
the effort.
52
The above portrait depicts a similar figure: the simple artisan who is also so singular
a genius that he wields imaginative power enough to challenge the gods. The image collapses the
disarticulation of the tableau’s actual production into a single figure: an architect who holds in
his hand whole chains of complex labor.

49
See, for instance: Clare Barlow, “Virtue, Patriotism and Female Scholarship in Bluestocking Portraiture,”
in Bluestockings Display’d: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage: 1730-1830 (ed. Elizabeth Eger, Cambridge
University Press, 2013). Barlow argues that portraiture helped promote “women’s right to literature” (p. 5) just as,
for instance, William Marshall’s 1640 portrait of Shakespeare emphasizes literary distinction through symbolism.
50
Anthony Blunt, “Blake’s ‘Ancient of Days’: The Symbolism of the Compasses,” in Journal of the Warburg
Institute 2, no. 1 (1938): 53-63. By William Blake’s time, the compass symbolized the notion that philosophy can be
arrived at by logical methods. In many of Blake’s illustrations, the compass appears in the hands of apes or natural
philosophers, most famously wielded by Urizen in the Ancient of Days. In that illustration, Urizen uses Milton’s
“golden compasses” (Paradise Lost vii, 224-331) to “bind the infinite,” restricting imagination with reason; in the
First Book of Urizen, Blake even describes the creation of the universe in the language of scales, weights, and
quadrants, framing the divine act as a sort of manufacture. See also: “The Spirit of Plato,” “Christ in the Carpenter’s
Shop,” “Newton,” and Blake’s illustration of Milton’s Il Penseroso.
51
Proverbs VIII.27: the Christian God “set a compass upon the face of the depth,” marking the line between heaven
and earth, day and night, and so on. The compass has been used in Masonic imagery of divine creation, at least since
the early thirteenth century, to suggest the imposition of order onto chaos; a depiction of creation on the Bible
Moralisee paints the Christian God holding dividers, an “architect of the world.” See: Lonnie Royce Shelby,
“Medieval Masons’ Tools. II. Compass and Square,” in Technology and Culture 6, no. 2 (1965): 236-248.
52
Edouard Foucaud, The Book of Illustrious Mechanics: Of Europe and America (WJ Hamersley, 1845), 49.
Foucaud calls Jacquard “a second Galileo” because “the new invention was publicly destroyed, and the life of the
inventor three times endangered.” This persecution is symbolized in Bonnefond’s painting by the broken window.
102

Figure 2. Visite de Mgr le Duc d’Aumale a la Croix-Rousse,
dans l’atelier de M. Carquillat, 1841, woven by Michel-Marie Carquillat,
mise en carte by A. Manin, after Jean-Claude Bonnefond, Lyons, France, 1844

A second jacquard-woven image challenges the narrative sponsored by the famous portrait. This
tableau, pictured above and produced by the same people, complicates the above depiction of
authorship meta-theatrically. Bonnefond this time depicts the Duc d’Aumale, a nephew of the
king, visiting Carquillat’s workshop in 1841 to witness the weaving of the original.
53
Rather than

53
Details taken from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession number: 38.170) and Jenkins, “Silk,”
795. In this case, I do not have a number for how many punch cards were required to produce the tableau, but
consensus suggests that this 1844 image required more cards than the 1838 portrait.
103
mythologizing, the curtain is pulled back to reveal the “real” scene of making. The genius with
his hand harnessing an entire industry is replaced by a room filled with people. The divisions of
labor are splayed out, and the question “who has authority?” (like “how was it made?”) lingers
uneasily. Aside from the duke, his entourage, and presumably Carquillat holding his tableau—in
multiple copies, emphasized by his index finger between the sheets of silk—Bonnefond includes
a Lyonnaise businessman, maybe from Didier Petit & Co, a well-to-do family, and a couple
background figures. The blurred figure in the back window might represent ongoing industrial
espionage. Meanwhile, the man in lighter clothing behind Carquillat labors at the loom, probably
pumping the treadle with one foot. If Bonnefond represented the real production of the tableau,
rather than this staged and virtually witnessed scene, likely the man in lighter clothing would be
the only one present; instead, he glances back angrily, perhaps resentful of the unilateral strain
on his foot, or that the weaver and firm get the credit for his labor. Perhaps more noteworthy,
Bonnefond omits his own role in the origin of the image and Jacquard, once the god-author, is
here become object—a collectible, one of many, in the weaver’s hands. What’s left is, arguably,
the creative act without the artist.
Or is there an artist? Carquillat, depicted with the original portrait in hand, exercises
ownership over the object; this reflects the social organization of Lyon, where master weavers
are historically recognized as artists. However, there is another figure depicted in the background
of the workshop—the loom, standing tall at the center of the composition, no less in focus than
the men in front of it. Because the loom automates most of the creative labor, aside from the
weaver’s programming and the laborer’s pedaling, one might argue that the loom is the closest
thing to a sole author depicted—the first answer to the question, “how was it made?” The image
is even reminiscent of one of the most famous paintings in art history, Las Meninas by Diego
104
Velázquez (1656), which ushered in modern painting thanks to Velázquez’s inclusion of himself
as the subject of another’s portrait. The loom, having also physically woven the patterns which
produced the 1844 image, has produced a similar self-portrait.
54
Here the artist supplants the
intended subject of the portrait with a scene of the creative act—emphasizing not Bonnefond’s
painting nor Carquillat’s drafting, but the material act of weaving. Instead of obscuring the loss
of an original rhetorically, the original is supplanted here by the copying machine. I argue the
loom demonstrates a new capacity for artistic (re)production in the absence of the original. Here,
perhaps for the first time, an object outpaces the human in authorship.

Repeatable Patterns
The jacquard loom destabilizes older preconceptions about copying. In a related essay for The
Wordsworth Circle, “Single-Press Literature: Improvements in Mechanism, Walladmor, and the
Production of Authenticity,” I examine the relationship between machine optimization and the
erosion of public trust in resemblance—from the different qualities of Nottingham lace to the
many forgeries of the Author of Waverley.
55
Pertinent to this chapter, the article close reads
Byron’s 1812 speech to the House of Lords (in defense of the frame-breakers), Sir Walter Scott’s
satirical introduction to The Betrothed (1825), which imagines authorship as textile production,
and the infamous hoax Walladmor (1823-24). The article argues that further attention to histories
of textile technology help us better understand Romantic conceptions of authenticity and forgery,
and that Scott identifies a new model for authorship based in technologized modes of production

54
See: Érika Wicky and Kathrin Yacavone, “Introduction: Portraitomanie and Intermediality in Nineteenth-Century
France,” in L'Esprit Créateur 59, no. 1 (2019): 1-11. In the sixth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Academie francaise
(1835) a portrait is defined as “a precise description of any object” (p. 3).
55
Zachary M. Mann, “Single-Press Literature: Improvements in Mechanism, Walladmor, and the Production of
Authenticity,” in The Wordsworth Circle (for an issue edited by Yohei Igarashi, forthcoming).
105
organized around the firm. I mention this essay here because Scott and Byron led similar careers.
They each transitioned from an older form of social distinction into a cultural capital based on
commercial recognition, and both faced questions about the authenticity of their works (and that
of their imitators’).
56
Both, concerned with the proliferation of works circulating under their
name, borrow from the textile industry to reposition their own authorship. Below, I make the
case for why the jacquard loom presents a model more suited to Byron than knitting frames, one
which speaks to anxieties of the future.
For Scott, mystery around the authorship of the Waverley novels led to a public suspicion
that they were the products of a literature factory. Scott plays along with this suspicion in his
introduction to The Betrothed, suggesting that his author-function is not singular or even human,
but a “joint-stock company.” The satirical scene—the “Minutes […] of a General Meeting of the
Shareholders”—is presented as a found record (with pages torn out) of fictional shareholders
debating modes of production for future Waverley novels. Scott jests that no novels can “be the
work of one hand,” an acknowledgement that his author-function required multiple actors.
57
He
then imagines a mechanized system, based on the “doctrine of Adam Smith,” for “composing
these novels” with the need for human intervention “saved by the use of steam.” This machine,
“a sort of framework,” would perform a similar “mechanical process as that by which weavers of
damask alter their patterns,” thus producing “many new and happy combinations” of collected
“words and phrases.”
58
The imagined framework resembles many textile innovations, of which

56
Jerome Christensen, Lord Byron's Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Society (JHU Press, 1993), 5. J.
A. Farrer’s 1907 book Literary Forgeries counts at least eight forgeries attributed to Scott in circulation, spread
across the United States and Europe, as well as in French and German. Andrew Stevenson, “Practices to Deceive:
Walladmor and Other Scott Hoaxes,” in Scottish Studies Review Vol. 24 No. 2 (1997), 41. As mentioned at the top
of this chapter, Byron faced many of his own, both impersonation (John Clare) and mechanization.
57
Russett, Fakes and Fictions, 161.
58
Walter Scott, The Betrothed, in Tales of the Crusaders (Printed for Archibald Constable and Co. Edinburgh; And
Hurst, Robinson and Co., London, 1825).
106
Scott would have known, including the Scottish tambouring machine and the optimized knitting
frame made so infamous in Nottingham the decade before. While I do not suggest it in the above
article, I would argue that what Scott describes in this introduction even more closely resembles
the jacquard loom, a framework which exceled at the weaving of damask patterns. The first
jacquard loom in Scotland was installed a year prior and, as far as material metaphors go, best
embodies the recombination of preset patterns.
Scott’s framework is not a new idea. He alludes to Jonathan Swift’s Laputan “knowledge
mill” in Gulliver’s Travels (to quote my first chapter) and anticipates an 1844 article in Punch
which claims a “Mechanical Novel Writer” replaced the Author of Waverley.
59
These metaphors
for automated fiction writing largely engage in the tradition of putting down works of literature
as overly formulaic or commercially motivated. It is no coincidence that Scott attributes his own
machine to a character from a previous novel, a Mr. Dousterswivel from The Antiquary (1816)
portrayed as a get-rich-quick gimcrack. And arguably Scott anticipates an actual future in which
his publishers William and Robert Chambers reprint his works night and day on steam-powered
presses. (After 1830, Chambers even mass-produced new, machine-optimized versions of Scott’s
novels, called “Waverley Editions,” which reduced the quality of the materials.)
60
Byron, who
like Scott was commercially successful while also dismissive of industry, also tended to put
down literature by comparing it to analogous products. In a diary entry, he quipped that books
are “passing from one counter to another, from the bookseller’s to the other tradesmen’s.”
61
In
his poem “The Blues,” Byron compares literature to baked goods, musing that “one finds every
author in one of those places,” referring to “Grange’s” (“a famous pastry-cook and fruiterer in

59
Jones, Reckoning with Matter, 212.
60
William R. McKelvy, “‘This Enormous Contagion of Paper and Print’: Making Literary History in the Age of
Steam,” in Bookish Histories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 154.
61
Byron, “Diary entry on January 4, 1821,” in Letters and Journals Vol. 8.
107
Piccadilly”).
62
He also pens a doggerel, facetiously accusing his publisher Murray of valuing The
Art of Cookery on par with his own poems, comparing both to “grist” for his “mill.”
63
Often
these comparisons are misogynist performances meant to reduce certain kinds of literature as
domestic or feminine.
64
All of them tend to associate industrial or methodized composition as
opposite to originality or literariness.
However, I argue that Scott’s “steam-engine” is as much about copying as commerce.
The bloated print industry required authors to engage in a “cultural reorientation” around the
notions of imitation and singular identity.
65
Consider, for instance, the copies William Blake
produced of his own works. As I discuss in the Introduction, Blake treated each new application
of his plates as an opportunity for a new expression. (Each version of “The Ancient of Days,”
Blake’s frontispiece to Europe, a Prophecy, is distinct in color and line, preserving the original
work’s “authority” that, for Benjamin, links a work of art to its pre-industrial tradition.) When
something is copied, the original still retains its authority while the copies serve only to point
back to it; Blake, however, copied in such a way that the original’s authority (or “aura”) could
also be transferred to the new versions. In other words, the “aura” of Blake’s works is not located
in superficial details, in that which machine copying can replicate, but in the singularity of how it

62
Lord Byron, “The Blues,” in The Liberal No. 3 (1821).
63
Byron, “Letter to Mr. Murray on April 11, 1818,” in Letters and Journals Vol. 4. Byron is referring to the popular
book by Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, originally published in 1747.
64
Byron, for instance, suggested that Felicia Hemans should “knit blue stockings instead of wearing them.” Don
Juan’s ugliest stanzas accuse women of having their bodies read rather than their words (IV.857-896). Anne K.
Mellor argues that, due to circulating libraries and higher levels of literacy among a growing middle class, women
with leisure time filled that time reading and, by 1800, had become “the primary market for works of literature.”
This, Mellor argues, put new demands on the professional author and, for men especially, “posed a cultural threat
[to] trivialize literature, substituting this vulgar, low-brow taste for the aesthetic judgments of the better-educated
gentlemen who had hitherto controlled the formation of the literary canon.” Additionally, women novelists
dominated the bestsellers list, and women poets made up a third of the poetry market by 1820. Anne K. Mellor,
“Romantic Bluestockings: from Muses to Matrons,” in Bluestockings Display’d: Portraiture, Performance and
Patronage: 1730-1830 (ed. Elizabeth Eger, Cambridge University Press, 2013), 18-28.
65
Piper, Dreaming in Books, 54-57.
108
was made.
66
What Scott imagines in his introduction is the opposite: a method for copying that
requires no original but only a set of superficial details. Scott’s “mechanical operation can only
apply to those parts of the narrative which are at present composed out of commonplaces” like
descriptions, speeches, morals, happy endings and, if Walladmor is any indication, footnoted
Britishisms and folk songs as chapter headings. It is a machine for recombining commonplaces
from previous Waverley novels into new ones, thus reducing the Author of Waverley to a set of
repeatable patterns not unlike the way the jacquard loom reduces the expert composition of silk
designers to punched holes in cardboard.
Silk designs predate the punch cards that replace them. But in the case of the jacquard
loom, there is no woven object that sources the authenticity of the work. Each Jacquard portrait,
for instance, is an imitation without an original, and if punch cards reenact creative labor, they
also represent the repetitions of an artist without a beginning. Scott muses that the Author of
Waverley is replaced, like the artists who contributed to the Jacquard portraits, with a machine. If
engraving and other new printing technologies made possible the mechanical reproduction of art,
the jacquard loom made possible the mechanical reproduction of creative labor—the artist’s hand
and even, perhaps, the artist. To put it another way: punch cards operate via a logic of prosthesis.
All machines, to some degree, replace an intelligence with its approximation, and Babbage notes
that many industrial innovations come out of attempts to accommodate human disabilities or
shortcomings in dexterity, strength, and speed.
67
Punch cards not only make it possible to repeat

66
Blake elsewhere argues that “The Bad Artist Seems to Copy a Great deal. The Good one Really Does Copy a
Great Deal.” Good copying, in my interpretation of Blake, is about repeating techniques until doing so frees the
hand to deviate truthfully. It is about familiarity with the technical aspects of composition, not the form or content.
Most of Blake’s ideologies around copying are found in his notebooks and in marginal comments to Sir Joshua
Reynold’s Discourses. Regarding the latter, I am relying on John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from
Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (Yale University Press, 1995), and Edgar Wind, “Blake and Reynolds,”
in The Listener (November 28, 1957), accessed at the Harry Ransom Center in 2019.
67
Babbage, Economy of Manufactures, 13. See also: Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (Routledge, 2014), 11. The
first telephones and gramophones were designed for the nearly deaf, and the earliest typewriters were designed for
109
ad nauseum the performance of the composition; they figuratively replace a piece of the laboring
body to optimize that body’s production. When I suggest the possibility of mechanical imposture
in authorship, this is what I am referring to: More than a mere proxy performance, like Milton’s
daughters standing in for their father’s blindness, the thingness of punch cards implies something
permanent; some aspect of the author, previously conceptualized as inseparable from their
biological person, relocates to the object and the machine. Just as the recognition of genius in
silk design moves from De la Salle to the complexities of Jacquard’s design, punch cards replace
an element of authorship that had previously been considered irreplaceable: the author’s hand,
mind, or otherwise unique biological toolbox.
By similar logics of prosthesis, photography replaced the artist’s hand. As Benjamin
writes, a camera “freed the hand of the most important artistic functions.”
68
No longer did the
technically trained painter, for instance, contribute their subtle and characteristic brush strokes to
the visual object; only the eye—the photographer’s choice of subject and frame—was left as
evidence of their talent. I argue that the jacquard loom similarly disarticulates the creative act.
The weaver, because stepping on a treadle is analogous to clicking the button on a camera, is
“freed” from weaving. This leaves only the design itself—a pattern which is entirely encoded in
a sequence of punch cards—to represent the artist’s imagination. And because that evidence is
readable only by machines, obscuring the designer’s eye even more than photographic negatives,
the figure of the punch card undermines any trust that the physical act of making evidences the
mental activity of the artist. A useful analogy is the typewriter; as Mark Seltzer writes of the later

and sometimes by the blind. Disability inspired innovation, but the logic of prothesis is also the basis for labor
division. Henry Ford even imagined a factory manned by the disabled, with machines optimizing the labor that
otherwise would be human acted, suggesting that “automized hands work better when blind”; David Yuan writes
that Ford foresaw “a future where the conflation of the worker and prosthesis is virtual complete” When divisions of
labor extend to mental operations, as Babbage argued they should be (p. 135), it was the more complex thinking that
often was relocated to machines—such as computation (see Chapter Three).
68
Benjamin, Work of Art, 217.
110
invention, “the typewriter disarticulates the relays that allow for the circular translation from
mind to hand to eye to mind.”
69
In other words, the mind and the hand, aspects of the biological
artist previously considered “as manifest” as the other, become severed by the introduction of a
new technology. The author, in Seltzer’s imagining, becomes a sort of factory housed in a single
body, with technical skill and creative thought working separately from the other. Scenes of
making in the early nineteenth century never are so directly interrupted by machinery but, as I
have argued, art-manufacture provides all kinds of artists with material examples of future labor
divisions. The jacquard loom breaks into pieces the artist’s body-mind, the biological whole on
which the Romantic myths of authorship rely.
In “Single-Press Literature,” I posit a new model for celebrity authorship: the firm. The
scene that Scott constructs in The Betrothed introduction echoes the 1844 machine-woven image,
a version of the creative process which replaces the compass-holding artist with a collective and
artefactual process. In Scott’s case, credit is awarded not to a creative laborer—in answering
“how was it made?” the scenario even discredits the question—but to the organizing principle:
the unrepresented managerial figure. Scott’s “brand”—the commonplaces of style and subject
matter associated with the Author of Waverley—consolidates his reprintings and serializations
under a single banner. Facetious though it might be, Scott thusly anticipates his posthumous
optimization, when the success of the Waverley Editions would lead some to suggest that the
author-function known as “the author of Waverley” might better be attributed to his publishers.
70

It is first and foremost a commercial model; Scott’s fictional shareholders request of Parliament
“to associate us into a corporate body,” to be granted exclusive rights to all other Waverley-like

69
Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 10. Seltzer here is building off of Friedrich Kittler’s formulation that typewriters
“unlink” hand, eye, and letter, as well as industrialist Angelo Beyerlen’s comment that the “letter” is now “located in
a place entirely apart from where the hands work.”
70
McKelvy, “This Enormous Contagion,” 69.
111
productions and “full power to prosecute […] all encroachers upon [that] exclusive privilege.”
71

But it is also, I argue, a strategy for celebrity authors to reimagine their commodification and yet
remain in dominion over their imitations and republications. Seltzer argues that male authors,
threatened by technology-empowered women at the end of the century, used the typewriter to
construct a new “counter-image of procreation”
72
; the author-firm paradoxically provides another
such counter-image, obscuring any commercial (and therefore feminized) modes of production
by subjugating that technology to their person. As the rest of this chapter will argue, faced with a
dilemma between authentic subjectivity and an automated industry, Byron, like Scott, adopts the
latter as a model for the former.

Figure 3. A punch card library at the textile firm Morton, Young, and Borland.
Photograph by Zachary M. Mann, 2019.

71
Scott, The Betrothed.
72
Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 35.
112
The Two Lord Byrons
In 2019, I visited a textile firm in Scotland that illustrated for me what such an author-firm looks
like. Morton, Young, and Borland, founded in 1900, is one of the few remaining mills that uses
nineteenth-century jacquard looms to produce lace and madras. When I visited the business in
Newmilns, the manager generously offered me a tour of the factory floor. I climbed atop the
looms to examine up close the way the punch cards were fed into the machinery, and I was
shocked at the scale of it all; used for Nottingham lace, each loom was the width of the room,
evocative of the frames which had so frustrated the Nottingham workers in Byron’s day. As my
tour guide explained, the duties of the workers at MYB included mostly the loading of punch
cards into the harness, switching on and off the looms, and standing around in case the machines
suffered any jams—their labor reduced to playing assistant to the machine. But what was most
striking about my visit, what truly awed me in terms of scale, was not the greasy iron looms tied
up in the webs of its product but, pictured above, the library of punch cards which represented
MYB’s catalogue. Even the simplest lace patterns required hundreds of cards sewn together, and
they hanged like dry cleaning along the sides of the mill. Each bundle of same pastel color cards
represented the algorithm—machine instructions—for a single design. With the original artists of
those designs long dead, the library stands in for their memory, the answer to the question “how
was it made?” stored for future use. It is a vision of punch cards—not unlike computer source
code today—as a “cultural god-king.”
Today, with the advent of machine learning, patterns generate new art in the absence of
the artist. Computer scientists need only to “train” the software model by feeding it artworks
until the software identifies and reenacts the patterns defined by the data set. Machine learning
can, like Scott’s steam-engine, recombine “commonplaces” into the semblance of original work.
113
But even in the nineteenth century, algorithms challenged the sanctity of authorship. The idea
that you can separate the author from that “how” renders absurd, for instance, what Michel
Foucault has pointed out is our tendency to consider “an author and their work” a contiguous
unit. You might say that the “author function” above refers not to the original designers but to
the leftover punch cards, for it is that algorithm, and the label tied to each bundle, that organizes
the related body of work and its variations.
73
Of course, before the jacquard loom, the “weaving
treatise” (or pattern book) served a similar function. Such books are catalogues of preset designs,
compiled by firms, which future weavers can consult as they graph their own designs on point
paper.
74
Punch cards are only one step removed from these books, but it is a step that obscures
what comes before it. The cards are not legible as the designs they encode; future weavers can
switch out rows of punch cards from the larger pattern, but they cannot deviate as freely as
someone only consulting designs on graph paper. Punch cards transform the pages of pattern
books into an inflexible “artifice of intelligence” which dictates not only form but also the range
of possible new variations.
75
They are a kind of “genre” which determine, more than the strictest
of sonnet schemes, the shape of future compositions.
As many scholars have argued, the nineteenth century saw a culture-wide investment in
natural history.
76
Interest in ancient cultures and their ruins pervaded commercial and literary
consumption, most famously in Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel and other romantic tales which

73
Michel Foucault, “What is An Author?” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, Vol. 2 (edited by J. Faubion, 1998), 211.
74
Brocade, though woven instead of printed, overlaps significantly with the printing industry because its designs
begin on graph paper. Miller, “Between Engraving and Silk Manufacture,” 64.
75
Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Machine Visions: Towards a Poetics of Artificial Intelligence” (2000). Kirschenbaum
argues that any art composed with the use of such “artifices” are “engaged in the construction of artificial subject
positions.” This, he suggests, is how poets become posthuman.
76
W. J. T. Mitchell, for instance, suggests that literature during this period must reckon with this “new, heightened
perception of thingness—of materiality, physicality, objecthood.” W. J. T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of
Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images,” Critical Inquiry (2001), 169.
114
draw on myth and folklore. The Rosetta Stone and other discoveries in Egypt inspired an interest
in stories sourced in objects of the past, a shedding of language’s ornamentation for a sense of
material origin. Meanwhile, authors framed their work as ancient manuscripts newly discovered;
rather than representing the creative act to suture their person to the work, this strategy gestured
vaguely to some evidentiary living past—from human bones to yellowed parchment—both
obscuring the conditions of the work’s making and appealing to authenticity.
77
It is rhetoric of
original authorship that appeals to our faith—like the holy relic of a medieval church; the relic (a
saint’s skull, perhaps) might be relied upon to draw pilgrims and trade. Even if the skull is
merely a proxy for biology, if treated as sacred, its sense of material origin is no less real. Both
Byron and Scott made careers out of this “found-manuscript topos,” borrowing from histories to
anchor their works in a rhetorically authentic past.
78
As an example, Byron sources both the
inspiration and the premise for his closet drama Marino Faliero (1821) in a tiny historical
anecdote about the doges of Venice: an insult, inscribed onto the ducal throne, which launched
civil unrest. I argue that the punch cards above function in a similar way, not as an authentic past
perhaps, but as that retroactive conceit, like Highland folktales or Venetian graffiti, which serve
as the framework for future compositions.

77
Consider Lady Byron gifting her estranged husband a lock of his daughter’s hair (“Letter to Lady Byron on
November 17. 1821,” in Letters and Journals Vol. 6); Byron gifting his own to Caroline Lamb (Ransom Center,
2019); and Walter Scott claiming to own a cloth fragment from the dress worn by Mary Queen of Scots at her
execution. See: Mole, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism; Simon Goldhill, The Buried Life of Things: How
Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In an 1830s book
depicting Newstead Abbey, special focus is placed on “Byron’s Oak” and his burial place, objects tied to Byron’s
person; an illustration of Byron’s bedroom window is depicted with a light glowing dramatically against a gothic
evening, suggestive of a real person in their most private place. The book, accessed at the Ransom Center, is titled
The Abbey of Newstede: Photographs, Letters, Manuscripts, and Pictures Relating to Newstead Abbey. Jerome
McGann, when tasked to distinguish between uncovered Byron manuscripts and “Byron Apocrypha,” believed he
could “smell a fake a mile away.” Quoted by Philip Oakes, “New Insight on Byron’s Inner Life,” in The Sunday
Times May 16, 1976 (accessed via the Vertical Files, Ransom Center, 2019).
78
Russett, Fictions and Fakes, 21-28.
115
This interest in history is also an interest in the present as history—and for celebrities, the
chance to watch themselves turn into future relics. Consider the difference between the circulated
portraits of Shakespeare, on the one hand, and Byron on the other. Over centuries, publishers
fiddled with Shakespeare’s image until it became more iconic than accurate. Reading his works
beside that image—presumably “as manifest” as his mind—lends an authority to the text via the
illusion of its origin. But Shakespeare, if he lived to the nineteenth century, would not recognize
himself in that iconic portrait. The process had accelerated; steel plate engraving allowed for the
immediate and successive reproductions of authors’ visual trademarks into books, periodicals,
collectibles, and cartoons. Contra Shakespeare, Byron witnessed in real-time the invention of his
own authentic past. He lived through (and contributed to) the birth of a second and iconic Byron.
His fame relied on this visual ubiquity; Murray told him in 1819 that “your portrait is engraved
& painted & sold in every town throughout the Kingdom.” That image was, as Mole writes,
“engineered over time, by several artists, until it was sufficiently simple and memorable to
recognize in silhouette”: bare throat, white collar, curling forelock, receding hairline, and his
face turned to the right.
79
Thus, each portrait is actually a repeatable pattern recognizable as
“Byron”; rather than an accurate representation, the likeness is appropriated and altered, by the
public, Murray, and the poet.
80
It is, in many ways, the representation not of Byron the person,
but of the “Byron” that his readers imagine as they read him. Piper argues that authorial portraits
activate a “tension between […] the individual and the simulacrum of individuality.”
81
I would

79
Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 18, 79-82.
80
Depending on the scholarship, Murray was either a collaborator or tyrant. Burkett (Romantic Mediations, 6)
argues that “Murray sought to delimit Byron’s own power over his self-presentation […] through invocations of
copyright law, print taxation, and more generally through the machinations of his mighty publishing house.”
81
Piper, Dreaming in Books, 59. When Ben Jonson writes of Martin Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare, he
suggests that, to find a more accurate likeness of the author, look in “his Booke.” However, as Piper notes, the
nineteenth century brought greater awareness of how words, too, could misrepresent their own authors.
116
add that the “Byron” found in books is a pattern separate from the original and, like a sequence
of punch cards, a stored “author” that can be forever reactivated.
Byron’s name is defined by what it denotes, not whom it labels.
82
Byron was aware of
this, and Don Juan suggests someone who worries that the living Byron had been supplanted by
“a name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.”
83
These lines, which imagine the author’s death
(“when the original is dust”), are an ironic response to lines by Robert Southey quoted a couple
stanzas later, which more rosily imagine the journey of one’s published work in the world:
‘Go, little book, from this my solitude!
I cast thee on the waters, go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
The world will find thee after many days.’
84

For Byron, for whom “fame is smoke,” this passage might imply that the author is forgotten, and
that the “book” would need to stand on its own merits independent from the fashion of celebrity
authorship.
85
Southey’s use of “thee” and “thy” grant the book its own future, either unattributed
or attributed to a name and portrait on the frontispiece which no longer points to the biological
referent. Later in Don Juan, Byron writes that “great names are nothing more than nominal”; if
so, then soon only the public version of “Byron”—the commodified author—will exist, and the
real author will join the “once-named myriads nameless.”
86
Much has been written on Byron’s
fame and how his name and image, like a banknote, function commercially. But I argue that the
sum of his reputation also overwrites its source code, allowing for its portability across time and
divorced from a life lived. Consider the following passage from Don Juan:

82
I am referring here to the “paradoxical singularity” which Foucault attributes to the author-function (Bennett, The
Author, 22-3). Christensen reframes this formulation when he writes that Byron’s name “expresses not the
metaphysics of blood but the privilege of copyright” (Lord Byron’s Strength, 192).
83
Byron, Don Juan, I.1743-1744.
84
Ibid., I.1769-1773.
85
Ibid., IV.841.
86
Ibid., IV.801; IV.815.
117
And when his bones are dust, his grave a blank,
[…]
Some dull MS oblivion long has sank,
Or graven stone found in a barrack’s station
In digging the foundation of a closet,
May turn his name up, as a rare deposit.
87

Discussing his subject, Byron anticipates the biological person (the “bones”) as nameless, but he
also imagines his “name” as an historical object: old handwriting, an etched stone, a fossil, or a
relic. He treats this author not unlike the way he anchors the premise of Marino Faliero in Italian
graffiti. There is a thingness to the “name” described here, too, severed from the biological
person, that perhaps serves as evidence to a life lived, a work authored, an entire history. But it is
also a thing-name that might alternately operate on its own, as if it were monument only to that
“nominal” author, wretched picture, and bust. It is a revision of the found-manuscript trope, but
one which replaces the natural history—now, again “dust”—with an engineered persona that
persists outside of time and place.
The original author is replaced by its commercial other. In other words, investment in
Byron’s person led to the cultivation of his reputation by others; he was, as he phrased it in
correspondence, “accused of every thing”
88
; the real was replaced by a highly variable illusion.
Byron seems to reflect on this process when he writes that Don Juan was, “with women,” only
“what they pleased to make or take him for.”
89
The phenomenon of Byronism—a term for this
commodification of the poet’s name, image, and personality—was, in a sense, a technology of
reproduction without an original itself. Andrew Burkett suggests that this fetishizing of Byron

87
Ibid., III.801-208.
88
Lord Byron, “Letter to Mr. Moore on August 2, 1821,” in Letters and Journals Vol. 5. As John Scott noted in
1821, Byron “awakened, by literary exertion, a more intense interest in his person than ever before resulted from
literature” in “Living Authors No. IV: Lord Byron,” in London Magazine Vol. 3 (1821): 50-61.
89
Byron, Don Juan, V.593. This stanza might read as a response to “The Byromania,” a poem written by Lady
Byron, Annabelle Milbanke, in 1812, which “diagnosed this cultish activity […] a phenomenon that flourished
even—or, rather, especially—after Byron died” (Soderholm, Fantasy, 6). In that poem, Milbanke asks “Is Human
nature to be cast anew, / And modeled to your Idol’s Image true?”
118
models the “phantomization” of authenticity which would later be attributed to photography.
Talbot’s photograph of Byron’s Ode to Napoleon, Burkett writes, “reproduces the simulation of
subjectivity inherent within Byronism by ultimately transforming a signature that ostensibly
represents authorial identity into a simulacrum of subjectivity through processes of mechanical
reproduction.”
90
For Burkett, Talbot’s experiment undermines the possibility that an original
Byronic subject persists in its reproductions. Thus, even in the case where Byron’s handwriting
is copied (i.e., Lamb’s forgery) or remains (i.e., “some dull MS”), while that handwriting might
evidence an actively authoring Byron, due to the extremity with which the Byronic figure exists
outside of the original author, what remains is merely the “simulacrum of subjectivity.” The
repetition of his person into “dust” in Don Juan suggests Byron was aware of this erasure, that
perhaps he sensed Byronism was transforming his subjectivity into an object. Like Bonnefond
decades (and many iterations of artistic labor) later, the artist becomes only words in a caption: a
forgotten name listed with “after” rather than “by.”
Byron also participated in his subject displacement. He gave away his copyright as gifts
and let others trade on his name. His practice of publishing anonymously from afar required the
subjects of his poems to speak for him, further alienating the author from his text. Mole argues
that “Byron relaxes his control over his text in order to guarantee it greater worldly agency.”
91

Burkett suggests that these practices gave him “the capacity to exert poetic subjectivity and
agency and thus fly in the face of a market economy based on mass (re)production.”
92
Scholars
agree that, like many Romantic authors, Byron’s textual personas are constructs which imagine

90
Burkett, Romantic Mediations, 35. In the chapter, “Photographing Byron’s Hand” (p. 19-44), Burkett lays out his
theory that Byronic identity is “a form of techne” (p. 36) which “contributed to the type of identity provided by
negative-positive photography” (p. 22).
91
Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 42.
92
Burkett, Romantic Mediations, 30.
119
an externalized authentic selfhood, and Mazzeo further singles out Byron as a poet who was
especially drawn to “the possibility of an autonomous imagined self.” Good poetry for Byron,
Mazzeo argues, was when the “spectacle of subjectivity” even surpassed the real author.
93
The
narrator of Don Juan is described not as Byron, but a “simulated” author coded as Byronic.
94

Where others crafted poetic personas that are meant to return, full circle, to their enlightened
minds, Byron projects his across the marketplace. His poetry, more than most, arguably does
amplify itself “on the platform of enlightenment.”
95
He crafted his persona, not as an extension
of self, but as an infinitely variable commodity—a series of “simulacra” not unlike his famous
silhouettes.
96
These practices, in tandem with Byronism and technology, allow for the Byronic
subject’s iterability.
97
Mazzeo puts it another way: Byron “was far less invested in metaphors of
personal labor, preferring to see poetry as the production of multiple imagined subjectivities and
dramatic personae.”
98
For Byron, authorship is the management of those personae, a practice of
domination over his own reiterated doubles.
What I propose here is not the image of authorship sponsored by the Jacquard portrait at
the top of this chapter, nor the “joint-stock company” of Scott’s imagination, which drapes the
brand “Byron” over the various scraps of poetry that bear his name or style. The living Byron, as
he wrote to Lord Holland in 1812 regarding the Nottingham lace scandal, was trapped between

93
Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property, 99.
94
Christensen (Lord Byron’s Strength, xxi) suggests that “with Juan, in Juan, and through Juan, […] Byron
becomes a text,” literalizing poststructuralist notions that authors are written as they write. The shift from the focus
on labor, evident in late-eighteenth-century authorship, to a focus on the “spectacle of subjectivity” in Byron’s work
(Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity, 153) is the story of technology’s influence I am trying to unpack here.
95
Siskin and Warner, “If This Is Enlightenment,” 288.
96
Henderson (Romanticism, 243) argues that the Romantic “aesthetic of the ephemeral” expresses subjectivity as a
commodity in that “it underwrote a form of subjectivity that was changeable, variable.” However, as Burkett
(Romantic Mediations, 43) insists, Don Juan’s subject is especially noteworthy for its “chameleonic propensity.”
97
Russett (Fictions and Fakes, 139) uses the phrase “the iterability of the Byronic subject” to describe “the
explosion of imitations, parodies, and even plagiarisms that began well before Byron’s death.”
98
Mazzeo, Plagiarism and Literary Property, 87.
120
positions of power and that of the subjugated; he was both landlord and “half a frame-breaker
[him]self.”
99
Though he published pseudo anonymously like Scott, he also tends to place some
version of himself at the center of his “little books.” I posit, instead, a model for authorship more
in line with those libraries of punch cards at MYB. Punch cards are a useful figure to think
through this dynamic. Like those coded objects, the textual Byron is arguably ahistorical; no
longer tied to its referent, it reenacts the role of the author on Byron’s behalf. The above “rare
deposits,” which function as objects in a transhistorical marketplace, can be reactivated in his
absence—like old punch cards that “turn up” on the floor of a textile mill, a catalog of ready and
willing authoring Byrons. As Seltzer writes of an author’s self-image at their typewriter, key to
the godlike persona is the capacity for self-duplication; the technologized distance between the
mind and the printed page weakens the idea that the author represented on the latter is the same
as the one composing, thinking, or feeling. The subject on the page is partly generated by the
machine; it is a mechanically forged other author. I argue that along these lines, Byron functions
as an author-firm in the mass production of his own subjectivities.

Posthumous Reactivation
Consider again occasions when Byron’s posthumous hand kept producing “song”—or, rather,
when his hand is replaced, via prosthesis, by its Byronic code. Washington Irving, an American
author who admired Byron, looked for the authentic origins of the poet’s past. In 1835, he
published a travelogue of a visit to Byron’s ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, including the
poet’s place of burial.
100
And he also wrote of his poetry, including that same year an exercise in

99
Lord Byron, “Letter to Lord Holland on February 25, 1812,” in Letters and Journals Vol. 2.
100
Washington Irving, Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey (Robertson, 1835). As Irving wrote of Newstead Abbey,
Byron had his own plans for his afterlife, to be “entombed, with his faithful dog, […] in the garden,” but instead he
was added to the family crypt, always not in control of his afterlives.
121
Byron’s reanimation. When Irving introduces his “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron,” he
attributes its authorship to the late poet:
The reading world has, I apprehend, by this time become possessed of nearly every scrap
of poetry and romance ever written by Lord Byron. It may be pleased, however, to know
something of a dramatic poem which he did not write, but which he projected.
101

Put aside for the moment Irving’s repeated use of “of” over “by,” which in both the title and first
line strips Byron of authorship. Byron may have “projected” the poem, serving as its natural
history, but the “right hand” did not wield the pen.
102
Irving’s narrative is an investigation into
those origins. He traces, from Byron to Thomas Medwin to himself, the “the general plan of the
poem”: to reimagine a Spanish play, “interweaving much of his own peculiar feelings and
experience.” However, when Irving himself travels to Spain to uncover this play, he cannot find
it. Booksellers and librarians do not know of it. It is a dramatization of the distance between a
work of art’s reproduction and the original, a lack of proximity upon which, Benjamin tells us,
authenticity relies. It is also a found-manuscript narrative, gesturing to an authentic past by way
of its mystery; the phrase “to know something of” further obscures the material evidence: a poem
that we cannot read based on a play that might not exist.
The implied “dramatic poem” is a story about a character named Alfonso being haunted
by a “spectre of himself.” This ever-present shadow is referred to as “his second self” and, at the
end of the narrative, turns out to be exactly that: a projected double made of his unruly passions.
In the context of Irving’s history, this double is also Byron’s commercial other, the silhouetted
“Byron” that is more pattern than man. Alfonso, in Irving’s summary, “suspects the unknown to
have supplanted him in [his love’s] thoughts,” a fear of being replaced by one’s projected other.

101
Washington Irving, “An Unwritten Drama of Lord Byron,” in The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly
Magazine (1833 – 1862), August 1835 Vol. 6 No. 2.
102
Piper, Dreaming in Books, 114.
122
Byron’s “plan,” “vague and immature,” recedes into history, leaving only this “sketch of the
plot,” which “may hereafter suggest a rich theme to a poet or dramatist of the Byron school” (or,
in reference to Bonnefond, “after”). In the end, there is no original, no Spanish play nor Byron
poem—just this narrative. What Irving provides is “a rich theme,” something that, like a genre,
dictates the range of possible outcomes. In addition to the plot, there are those “peculiar feelings
and experience,” and the typically Byronic hero with “impetuous and ungovernable” passions,
who is “abstracted and gloomy.” Just as each weaving pattern is an unwoven work “of” some
designer that can still be woven, Irving reduces Byron to a “vague and immature” framework
that a different “poet or dramatist of the Byron school” might one day execute. Each “general
plan” bearing Byron’s repeatable pattern can serve as a prosthetic for the author’s subjectivity,
ready to be reactivated for countless possible reiterations.
103

Returning to Don Juan with the benefit of a decade’s hindsight, there is evidence that
Byron is himself working through not only his inevitable erasure, but also his textual subject’s
possible reactivation. Consider the following oft-quoted stanza:
But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
‘Tis strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper—even a rag like this
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his.
104

103
The idea that Byron is a repeatable pattern has been illustrated for dramatic effect in Amanda Prantera’s novel,
Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion, 163 Years after His Lordship’s Death (1987). The novel is a series of
conversations between computer programmer Anna and a computer program “LB,” a “cognitive emulation” (or
artificially intelligent simulation) of Lord Byron. Soderholm (Fantasy, 165) describes this AI as “the technological
equivalent of Byromania—the conspicuous aping of the Byronic routine of narcissism, seduction, and deception.”
104
Byron, Don Juan, III.793-800.
123
The speaker seems to repeat an old notion; Francis Bacon wrote that “images […] remain in
books […] and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and
opinions in succeeding ages.”
105
While these “images” retain a biological origin (“seeds,” like
“dew”), one might adapt this sentiment to the nineteenth-century book trade; here “a rag like
this,” because it is inscribed, is able to amplify its reach via the “platform” of media innovations
to “make […] millions think.” For some, like Jerome Christensen, this passage also suggests an
alternative to commercial Byronism, an implication that “the eventuality of linkage” between the
ages is due to the power of Byron’s “words”/”things” to become materialized in history.
106
In
this view, Byron’s strength is cumulative when translated to ink and paper; it takes on the agency
of things in the world, just as Byron’s Marino Faliero imagines that his “true words”/”things”
will avenge him after death. These drops of ink, not unlike punch cards, are objects with a stored
message that persist across time, which even, like computer code, manifest in the real world as
both thing and verb, determining futures.
107

For others, “the shortest letter” brings to mind the spelling of “Child” in Childe Harold,
or other spellings of Byron’s name: Byrone, Byronne, Biron, et al. Russett attributes the archaic
final “e” to a “synecdoche of elite literacy,” suggesting this non-conversational addition to the
written word is what grants its cultural power. But the use of “fall” and “like dew” in the above
stanza might also suggest something more accidental: misspellings, typographical errors, or the
arbitrariness of language which add to the reiteration of the Byronic self—the various specters of

105
Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 2:492.
106
Christensen, Lord Byron’s Strength, 220. Byron repeats the phrase “words are things” in multiple works (e.g.,
Marino Faliero and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), often regarding the transhistorical nature of written language.
107
On the one hand, Michael Simpson writes, of “the highly masculine fantasy […] of a textuality so powerful that it
can break out of the prison house of the closet and realize itself in history”; Closet Performances: Political
Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley (Stanford University Press, 1998), 7. On the other
hand, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes that “code as a judicial process is code as thing.” Like the drop of ink, this is a
portrait of “code as conflated with, and substituting for, action. Now, in the beginning, is the word, the instruction”;
Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2011), 28, 19.
124
himself which he pursued and from which he fled.
108
Consider again the posthumous intrusions
of Irving, who while living in Paris handwrote a copy of Byron’s poem The Isles of Greece.
109

Irving for the most part copies the poem exact, except for a few choice words. For instance, he
changed “burning Sappho” to “lovely Sappho” and “Eternal summer” to “Eternal sunshine.” I
want to point to one couplet in particular: “And must thy voice so long divine / Degenerate into
hands like mine?” Here, Irving changes “lyre” to “voice”; this might seem a lateral move in
music, but “voice” raises further implications for authorship. Quite literally, if I place Irving into
the role of the speaker, he seems to lament the fact that Byron’s unique mind is here reduced to
another’s execution. It moves from the “divine” model of authorship sponsored by the Jacquard
portrait to a more material reproduction; Byron’s “song” becomes Irving’s inferior “rag.” To put
it another way: as Jane Stabler remarks of Byron’s use of long dashes for indescribable emotion,
anyone—from his critics to college students—might fill in what is unsaid on their own or, like
Irving, repeat with a difference his words, guided by what Mole would term a “hermeneutics of
intimacy” and I would suggest is a much simpler pattern.
This remediation occurs outside of the author’s control; the speaker in the above passage
is careful to say a “letter” only “may” form a lasting link just as he qualifies “perhaps millions,”
noting his absence in the next age. As Byron seems to touch on often, these “drop[s] of ink” and
“lasting link[s]” outlast the author; the “frail man” is reduced such that even “a rag” surpasses
him. It is “Time” that “reduces […] all that’s his,” but I would argue that this stanza might also
describe the process by which the author’s rag-like other not only outlives Byron but keeps on
authoring in his stead; what amplifies and reiterates the literary subject also reduces him to that

108
Russett, Fictions and Fakes, 152.
109
E. Herman Hespelt, for the Bulletin of the N. Y. Public Library, p. 100, as: Notebook containing extracts of
poetry and prose; hint for a tale or farce; and miscellany.
125
which links ages: like pasteboard, mere paper. That “rag,” though more commonplace than a
relic, though “short” and “small” and unlike speech, makes thousands think long after the
original is lost. Of course, Byron is not writing about punch card systems. He is writing about his
reproduction as it is afforded by fame. But as Burkett writes on Byronism and photography, as
Babbage illustrated at his parties, these decades are when mechanical reproduction fractures the
future into new possibilities of art production—literally “how was it made?” and, rhetorically,
how we then conceptualize ways to survive those industrial circumstances. The “nominal” author
consolidates, like Scott’s brand, many works under a single library call sign, but it might also be
reducible to a tag (or “rag”), attached by string to a bundle of pastel punch cards swinging from
the rafters of mill—a series of code snippets that gesture to some forgotten or vague origin, that
might be recycled into other programs, with new variables.
126
CHAPTER 3

A Poetics of Operations: Ada Lovelace and the Clerical Labor of Codework

We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as
the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

— Ada Lovelace
1

I will write a book on leaves of flowers,
If you will feed me on love-thoughts, and give me now and then
A cup of sparkling poetic fancies”

— The Fairy, in William Blake’s Europe, a Prophecy
2

Introduction
In the Summer of 1834, Anne Isabella Byron, widow of the late Lord Byron, took their teenage
daughter Ada on a tour of England’s industrial heartland.
3
Recently reconciled, the two women
visited mills in the Midlands and Manchester in order to observe the working conditions and, in
an effort to further encourage Ada’s education in the mechanical sciences, some of the newer
advancements in technology. Lady Byron later described the employment of children and efforts
by trade unions to enact labor reform, and she also wrote about a punch card mechanism used to
program weaving machines in a ribbon factory (and sketched those punch cards in her journal).
By the mid-1830s, there were hundreds of jacquard looms in Britain, installed from London’s

1
Ada Lovelace, “Notes on L. Menabrea’s ‘Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.,’”
in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs (1843), Note A.
2
William Blake, Prefatory Statement to Europe, A Prophecy (Copy K, 1821, Fitzwilliam Museum), The William
Blake Archive (http://blakearchive.org/copy/europe.k), lines 15-17.
3
Ada was born December 10, 1815. When she was still a baby, on January 15, 1816, Annabella secreted Ada away
from Lord Byron while he was sleeping. Byron never met his daughter, but he spoke of her often in letters (Vol. 3,
Letter 232, to Mr. Moore, January 5, 1816; to John Murray, Feb 2, 1818; to Murray, June 7, 1819; Vol. 4, Letter
390, to Mr. Murray, 1820; Vol. 5, Letter 471, to Mr. Murray, December 10, 1821; Vol. 6, Letter 518, to Lady Byron
(Mrs. Leigh), November 17, 1821). He also mentioned her in his poetry (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III).
127
Spitalfields district to Scotland. These “new French drawlooms” spurred conversations about the
changing nature of labor in the textile industry and, later that same year, changes to a different
kind of work: the solving of mathematical equations. Charles Babbage, inspired by the jacquard
mechanism, would soon abandon his Difference Engine in favor of a calculating machine which
used a similar punch card system. In hindsight, Lady Byron’s tour serves as a key moment in the
narrative of machine programming history, the moment when Ada Lovelace, the author who best
articulated Babbage’s second Engine, first encountered a punch card.
Often in biographies of Lovelace, the purpose of Lady Byron’s tour becomes swept aside
for this tidy serendipity. But this chapter will keep in view the question of labor (re)organization
within the history of punch card innovation as it transitions from weaving to computing. For a
century, the inconsistent march toward automation, from wooden rods, paper strips, and metal
cylinders to the jacquard loom harness, aimed to reduce the need for human labor. But this was
rarely the case in practice. Automation in fact tended to require more labor—of a more menial
nature. Early jacquard looms, made of wood, would bend and splinter, requiring a carpenter’s
repair. The punching and sewing together of the cards required two people working long, tedious
days.
4
Jacquard looms only simplified the part of silk weaving that required the most skill—as
Lovelace later writes, “regulating, by means of punched cards, the most complicated patterns in
the fabrication of brocaded stuffs.”
5
That is, the absence of the artist did not mean there was an
absence of other kinds of human labor.
Still, Babbage modeled his calculating engines on innovations in the textile industry. His
wealth came largely from his father’s investments in the textile trade, and his research for On the

4
David T. Jenkins, The Cambridge History of Western Textiles (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 794. The cards
were of a special quality which had to be imported from France and bore a tax.
5
Lovelace, “Sketch,” Note A. Emphasis mine.
128
Economy of Machinery and Manufactures took him to France, where he met with Lyonnaise silk
merchants aiming to reduce the need (and, thus, the political power) of the city’s master weavers
through the introduction of the jacquard loom. As the previous chapter notes, Babbage in On the
Economy argues that machines can, via a logic of prosthesis, reduce cost and human error while
increasing production speed. He identified that the sequencing of human and mechanical labor in
both the textile factory and in calculation was made more efficient by “breaking down tasks in
new and counter-intuitive ways.” In her lecture, “Calculation and the Division of Labor, 1750-
1950,” Lorrain Daston notes that, in Babbage’s view, “the analytical intelligence demanded by
human-machine production lines for calculations was no different than the adaptations required
by any mechanized manufacture.”
6
However, whereas jacquard looms demonstrated that punch
card systems could only (though identically) duplicate complex processes—thus reenacting the
intelligent processes in total—Babbage’s second invention, the Analytical Engine, modeled a
more ambiguous (and collaborative) relationship between the human mind and automation. By
marrying algebra and industry, Babbage appropriated the new labor structures of the textile
industry for mechanical calculation, but his machine also inaugurated another labor dynamic: the
first imaginings of human-and-machine co-authorship.
This chapter asks: If the Analytical Engine imagines possibilities for human-machine
authorship, in what ways is that dynamic shaped by its era and influential of the computer age?
How did the long history of collaborative literary production influence the next wave of punch
card-programmed machines? And how does the mechanization of that collaborative model in
turn change the way we think of authors, their intellectual labor, and their tools? To answer these
questions, this chapter will examine Lovelace’s writings related to Babbage’s Engine alongside

6
Lorrain Daston, “Calculation and the Division of Labor, 1750-1950,” in Bulletin of the German Historical Institute
(pure.mpg.de, 2018), 28.
129
constructions of co-authorship she would have been familiar with in the mid-nineteenth century
(as well as those which followed).

The Thinking Machine
Increasingly, calculation required mechanization. As the volume of traded goods and population
expanded, the need to calculate larger and larger numbers presented a problem for governments
and large-scale firms. At the same time, breakthroughs in astronomy required mathematicians to
calculate months-long equations by hand.
7
There had been a tradition amongst philosophers to
construct calculating machines dating back to the seventeenth century.
8
But the most important
invention was not a machine at all; based on Adam Smith’s writing on the division of labor, in
1790 Baron Gaspard de Prony designed algorithms that broke down complex equations into
smaller steps of mere arithmetic. Prony claimed that with these “tables,” one could “manufacture
logarithms as one manufactures pins”; as Daston describes it, now human computers followed
step-by-step instructions that were “bundled like the patterns sent to cottage weavers to produce
finished textile wares” (or to artisans to make punch cards). Prony imagined this new labor
organization as a pyramid: at the top were “mathematicians of distinction” who developed the
formulas; then “algebraicists” translated the formulas into numerical forms; and finally, the
“workers,” trained only in addition and subtraction, performed thousands of calculations by hand

7
Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed described [calculating big equations] as “labour harder than thrashing.”
8
Despite the historical significance garnered by Wilhelm Shickard’s calculating clock, Blaise Pascal’s Pascaline,
and Gottfried Leibniz’s Step Reckoner, the first working engine that could mechanically add, subtract, divide, and
multiply was the 1843 difference engine invented by the Swedish inventors George and Edward Scheutz. Though
George was an author—a translator of Shakespeare—his son Edward built the prototype after Babbage’s principles.
For more information about calculating machines, see: Doron D. Swade, “Calculating Engines: Machines,
Mathematics, and Miscalculations,” in Mathematics in Victorian Britain, edited by Raymond Flood, Adrian Rice,
Robin Wilson (Oxford UP), 2011. 239-260; and George Dodd, “Calculating and Registering Machines,” in The
Curiosities of Industry and Applied Science (George Routledge & Co., 1858), 1-24.
130
without knowledge of the larger process.
9
Prony’s tables, by applying the division of labor to
“the sublimest investigations of the human mind” (as Babbage termed mathematics), expanded
the capacity and efficiency of calculation by relocating its labor from a few experts to hundreds
of, to quote my first chapter, “mere reckoners.”
10

Figuratively speaking, the bottom level of the pyramid—the “workers”—is a machine.
Thomas Carlyle in Signs of the Times writes that algebra (and other mathematical short cuts) are
“little else than a more cunningly-constructed arithmetical mill; where the factors being put in,
[…] ground into the true product, under cover, and without other effort on our part than steady
turning of the handle.”
11
In On the Economy, Babbage even more so than Prony found the latter’s
tables a kind of “cotton or silk mill,” a path to optimize mental production: organizationally and
by one day replacing the “workers” with machine parts.
12
A decade prior, Babbage wrote to John
Herschel that he was determined to find “a substitute for the compositor and the computer,” and
arguably the ensuing Difference Engine was the first to make literal these analogies.
13
The
Engine was designed such that those “algebraicists” could set up the machine for a particular
formula, plug in the starting variables (e.g., 2
4
), man the crank, and then collect the result. Unlike

9
Daston, “Calculation,” 10-13.
10
Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 153.
11
Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” in A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle,
edited by G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 38. In fact, the first known use of “calculating
machine” was derogatory; Jacob Friedrich Fries used the term to describe arithmetic logic in 1803. Matthew L.
Jones, Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to
Babbage (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 217.
12
Babbage, On the Economy, 195. See also: Jessica Kuskey, “Math and the Mechanical Mind: Charles Babbage,
Charles Dickens, and Mental Labor in ‘Little Dorrit,’” in Dickens Studies Annual (2014): 247-274. Kuskey writes
that “Babbage naturalized the social relations he witnessed in factories by describing the industrial division of labor
as enacting a principle of mathematics” (161).
13
Harry Wilmot Buxton, Memoir of the Life and Labours of the Late Charles Babbage Esq F. R. S., ed. Anthony
Hyman (MIT Press, 1988), 65-7. See also: Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, Cultural Babbage: Technology,
Time, and Invention (Faber & Faber, 1997). The conception of the Difference Engine is often dated to 1822, due to
the quoted letter and another, to Humphry Davy (Christopher Hollings et al., Ada Lovelace: The Making of a
Computer Scientist. Bodleian Library, 2018). Charles Babbage, “Statement Addressed to The Duke of Wellington
Respecting the Calculating Engine” (23 December 1834), in The Works of Charles Babbage. Vol. 3: The Analytical
Engine and Mechanical Notation (New York UP, 1989). 2-8.
131
the calculating instruments of the Enlightenment era, this Engine belonged to an industrial one:
solid iron and capable of being powered by steam. Babbage turned Prony’s tables into hundreds
of greasy, black cogs, interlinked adding machines grinding out sums as part of an assembly line.
James Gleick describes it best: “Like the looms, forges, naileries, and glassworks he studied in
his travels across northern England, Babbage’s machine was designed to manufacture vast
quantities of a certain commodity”: numbers.
14

Babbage’s vision culminated in the punch card. Even in 1822, he was frustrated by the
limitations of his first engine. He explained in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society that
each new calculation required the machine to be reset; as Lovelace explains decades later, before
the Analytical Engine, all calculating machines “require[d] the continual intervention of a human
agent […].”
15
(Sir David Brewster, describing Babbage’s first engine to Sir Walter Scott, was
defensible in his praise of its “celerity,” but not in his assessment that “the machine can itself
correct the errors” of the mathematician.
16
) The solution came again from the industrial sector:
this time the “new French drawloom” and its punch card mechanism. The Analytical Engine,
unlike its predecessor, had a bifurcated design: the “mill,” where the algebraic operations are
performed; and the “store,” where “all the numbers are originally placed and to which the
numbers computed by the engine are returned.”
17
This design (and apt metaphor for the textile
industry) is controlled by punch cards which instruct the machine to move numbers between the
mill and the store, determine the operations to perform (add, subtract, multiply, or divide), and

14
James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Vintage, 2011), 80-1.
15
Charles Babbage, “On the Application of Machinery to the Purpose of Calculating and Printing Mathematical
Tables” (J. Booth, 1822), in The Works of Charles Babbage. Vol. 2: The Analytical Engine and Mechanical Notion
(New York UP, 1989), 6-14. The second quote is Menabrea via Lovelace.
16
David Brewster, “Letter XI,” in Letters on Natural Magic Addressed to Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (William Tegg and
Co, 1856), 392-394.
17
Charles Babbage, “On the Mathematical Powers of the Calculating Engine” (1837), in The Works of Charles
Babbage. Vol. 3: The Analytical Engine and Mechanical Notation (New York UP, 1989), 15.
132
repeat actions when necessary.
18
Just as the jacquard loom replaced the need for a drawchild to
control the warp during the weaving process, Babbage’s punch cards would eliminate the need
for an algebraicist to reset the wheelwork between each step of calculation. Like the jacquard
loom, the Engine operates per Lovelace “in the absence of all necessity for the intervention of
human intelligence during the performance of its calculations.”
19
It was a culmination of all
machine programming before it, a Victorian universal computer that could execute endless
actions in a sequence, crunch infinite and imaginary numbers, and—if one believed Lovelace’s
fancies—do anything else that numbers can do.
The Analytical Engine was also imaginary. A few months after returning from their tour
of northern England, Lovelace and her mother were among a small group invited to Babbage’s
home—and the announcement of his next invention. Lady Byron wrote of the encounter in her
journal; she described the inventor as if he stood on some sublime precipice and quoted him as
comparing his new idea (the punch card-programmed calculator) to “throwing a bridge from the
known to the unknown world.”
20
While Babbage did produce materials on the Engine in the
ensuing decades, the project remained as figurative as this preface. It was never built, and unlike
the Difference Engine, it was never drafted with consistent enough technical detail to provide
functional blueprints. Babbage repeatedly redesigned the Analytical Engine in his head; it grew

18
Martin Campbell-Kelly, in his introduction to Babbage’s Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (Rutgers
University Press, 1994), writes: “This terminology was an elegant metaphor from the textile industry, where yarns
were brought from the store to the mill where they were woven into fabric, which was then sent back to the store.”
19
Lovelace, “Sketch,” Note A. Per James Essinger, Babbage, in December 1839, wrote to his friend Arago:
“Availing myself of the same beautiful invention [Jacquard loom] I have by similar means communicated to my
Calculating Engine orders to calculate any formula however complicated.” See: James Essinger, Ada’s Algorithm:
How Lord Byron’s Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age (Melville House, 2014), 133.
20
Essinger, Ada’s Algorithm, 113. Essinger paraphrases, leaning into the subliminal language, that Babbage felt like
“he was standing on a mountain peak and watching mist in a valley below start to disperse, revealing a glimpse of a
river whose course he could not follow, but which he knew would be bound to leave the valley somewhere.” Lady
Byron noted more dryly that she understood Babbage’s idea for the Analytical Engine “to include means of solving
equations that hitherto had been considered unsolvable.”
133
like a child during his lifetime until it contained over 20,000 cogwheels and stood larger than a
train car. Every few years he tweaked the punch card system to add even more complexity. Thus,
the Engine only ever remained a premise, a symbol for what machine programming could be.
21
It
existed only within the minds of Babbage, his principal draftsman Joseph Clement, and his
“interpretess” Lovelace.
22
It exists today as an idea, scattered across Babbage’s journals, and
most definitively in Lovelace’s words, in her translation of (and footnotes to) the “Sketch of the
Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage.”
This chapter will treat the Analytical Engine as a real, operating machine. For Babbage
and Lovelace, it was—pending funding. But it also transcended its technical specifications. Like
Maxwell’s demon, Schrodinger’s cat, and especially Sadi Carnot’s engine, thought exercises and
imagined machines have historically launched their own discourses. The Engine, virtual though
it remained, embodied new conceptions of collaborative intellectual labor for its era.
23
Just as
scholars of media archaeology connect new forms of telecommunication (e.g., telegraphy) to
practices such as seances and mediumship, this chapter will look at cultural expressions (e.g.,
literary production) that share resonances with machine programming as it moves into the field

21
Allen Bromley, “Babbage’s Analytical Engine Plans 28 and 28a—The Programmer’s Interface.” IEEE Annals of
the History of Computing 22 (2000), 11. Bromley writes that, “aside from the Bernoulli numbers program prepared
for Ada Lovelace’s notes, there is no evidence that Babbage prepared any user programs for the Analytical Engine
after his 1840 trip to Turin.” By 1837, Babbage had produced many stereotype plates illustrating the machine, but
neither published them nor produced anything close to a complete set.
22
Jones, Reckoning with Matter, 51-3, 124, 201. Though none of the Engine was ever built, Clement (and his
successor, Charles Jarvis) produced many technical drawings in preparation of its production. Arguably, because
Clement was tasked with making practical Babbage’s whims, he had the clearest understanding of what the
Analytical Engine would have looked like. Per Jones, Clement and his team of engineers were given the freedom to
make changes to Babbage’s design necessary to transform ideas into materials. Importantly, Jones argues that
Babbage relied on Clement, even feared that, in the end, it was Clement who was designing the machine; as
Babbage wrote, “into his head I have for several years been conveying all my ideas on the subject of the machine
and he is consequently in full possession of them.” As such, there is confusion between Babbage’s and Clement’s
contributions. I argue in this chapter that Lovelace presents a similar crisis in authorship.
23
Sadi Carnot, Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat and on Machines Fitted to Develop That Power (J. Wiley,
1824). For a related study on technological proposals, in which the question of labor is addressed, see also: David
Alff, The Wreckage of Intentions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Babbage himself uses his Engine to
theorize on the possibility of miracles in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.
134
of mathematics. At its heart, this chapter is about the role of punch card systems in the inception,
development, and execution of ideas—both creative and analytical. Because mathematics often
stood in for higher-level thinking, the Analytical Engine in many ways suggested the potential
industrialization of thought itself. Lady Byron called Babbage’s engines “thinking machine[s]”
24
;
and Harry Wilmot Buxton, in his biography of Babbage, wrote that “the marvellous pulp and
fibre of a brain had been substituted by brass and iron, [that Babbage] had taught wheelwork to
think.”
25
What the Analytical Engine proposed was that punch card systems might potentially
perform processes not yet rehearsed by humans, that humans needed only to provide the question
or the idea while a machine developed and executed the rest.

The Two Lovelaces
Histories of computing, if they recognize Lovelace as a software pioneer, craft origin stories out
of her first meetings with Babbage’s machines. The most famous of these meetings occurred a
year before Lady Byron’s tour of northern England and two weeks after Ada’s society debut. On
June 17, 1833, Lovelace visited Babbage’s home for the first time and beheld the working model
of his Difference Engine. That tower of cogs—one seventh of the never-finished Engine—was
the first fully automatic calculator and the most complex machine ever constructed. It charmed
the teenage Lovelace and, though she did not know it at the time, tied her professional future to
its eccentric inventor. One of Lovelace’s friends later noted that Ada was the only guest present
who seemed to know what she was looking at, evidence of the spark of her exceptionalism that

24
Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age, a Pathway to the 21st
Century (Critical Connection, 1998), 38.
25
Buxton, Memoir, 48-49. Jones, Reckoning, 90. Jones, citing a conversation within Parliament between the Home
Secretary and Davies Gilbert, notes that Babbage was discussed as “another man who seems to be able to vouch […]
for Laputa” (synecdochally referring to the knowledge engine covered in Chapter One).
135
has become a cliché in such origin stories. I want to highlight something else: Rarely do those
histories acknowledge the other mechanical curiosity that Babbage showed off that day. The
mathematician also had in his possession many automata, including one which he kept in a
similar glass case as the working model of his first Engine: John Merlin’s “The Silver Lady,”
which Babbage himself describes as a “danseuse [who] attitudinized in a most fascinating
manner. Her eyes full of imagination, and irresistible.”
26
Here was a machinic woman, a windup
ornament judged for its grace and appearance, burnished with the same status as the first
automated “thinking machine.” In this other telling, computing history begins flanked by two
symbolic female figures: one is a pre-programmed object of desire, and the other has come to be
known as the “first computer programmer.”
27

There are two Ada Lovelaces. We are most familiar with the mythic figure, the woman
who saw Babbage’s Engine for the first time, understood immediately the intricacies inside, and
pictured the machine one day writing, painting, and making music. This Lovelace is the brilliant
daughter of the poetic genius, a founding mother of computer science, and an enduring symbol
for women in S.T.E.M. She is also more icon than actual person. As Sydney Padua writes,
Lovelace’s iconic status (and relation to her iconic father) has made it impossible to “hack
through the thicket” of so many contradictory accounts. There are films, comic books, children’s
books, and science-fiction novels that disregard the facts for the idea.
28
And historians have

26
Babbage, Passages, 274.
27
Lovelace’s modern reputation can be traced back to Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in
Mind Vol. LIX No. 236 (1950): 433-460. Not long after, B.V. Bowden in Faster Than Thought (1953) called the
diagram in “Note G” the “first computer program.” This reputation solidified when D. L. Moore claimed that
Lovelace was “the first computer programmer” (1976) and the Department of Defense first began developing the
Ada programming language in her memory (1977). See: Doris Langley Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's
legitimate daughter (HarperCollins Publishers, 1977). In 2009, Suw Charman-Anderson founded Ada Lovelace Day
to celebrate women in STEM past and future.
28
Sydney Padua, “Picturing Lovelace, Babbage, and the Analytical Engine: A Cartoonist in Mathematical
Biography,” in BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics Vol. 32, No. 3 (2017),
216. Padua is also the author of The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, a graphic novel fictionalizing
136
waged a politically charged discourse war over the legitimacy of her contributions via inanely
minute details.
29
Even when Lovelace is celebrated, those narratives too often elevate her to the
“great men of history” myth—perpetuating the false notion that history is authored by the few
and exceptional. This chapter will instead attend to the historical Lovelace, the woman who lived
in the nineteenth century, limited by illnesses and by restrictions related to her gender, and the
amateur mathematician who was never taken seriously enough to gain access to the Royal
Society.
30
I will privilege her writing over her place in computer history narratives in order to
focus on the ways in which Lovelace’s contributions, like many contributions by women
overlooked in history, take a different (but not less influential) shape. Her writing’s significance
has been trapped, like her reputation, between unwitting participant and original author, between
the preprogrammed object and the programmer.
Mar Hicks reminds readers of a truism in Programmed Inequality, that “all history of
computing is gendered history.”
31
This chapter extends this truism to computing’s prologue by

their relationship. Other such texts include Conceiving Ada, a 1997 art film by Lynn Hershman Leeson; a 2016
children’s book by Diane Stanley and Jessie Hartland titled Ada Lovelace, Poet of Science: The First Computer
Programmer; and the 1990 steampunk novel The Difference Engine by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson.
29
The debate around Lovelace has a long critical history. D. Stein in Ada: A Life and a Legacy (1985) wrote off
Lovelace as “a figure whose achievement turns out not to deserve the recognition accorded it.” A. Bromley has
multiple times in his career refuted Lovelace’s reputation as the first programmer (1982, 1990). M. Campbell-Kelly
echoed Stein when he wrote that “the extent of Lovelace’s intellectual contribution to the Sketch has been much
exaggerated” (1996), and many other works on Lovelace have overly focused on her life and temperament. (For
instance, B. Collier’s 1970 Harvard thesis disregards Lovelace for being “as mad as a hatter.”) Miranda Seymour
suggests that today Lovelace has perhaps been “too saved” (In Byron’s Wake; Simon and Schuster, 2018) at the
expense of Sophie Germain, Sonia Kovalesky, et al. However, a counter narrative has also emerged. J. Baum’s The
Calculating Passion of Ada Byron (1986) treats her writing seriously, and B. A. Toole’s Ada, The Enchantress of
Numbers has inspired many works since, some cited in this paper, to treat Lovelace as an important innovator in
computer history. The challenge more recently, Valerie Barr (2016) points out, is to avoid exceptionalizing
Lovelace to the point that her iconic status eclipses the contributions of the many other women in computer history.
30
Megan Ward, “Victorian Fictions of Computational Creativity,” in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative
Thinking About Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon (Oxford University
Press, 2020), 144-164. Caroline Fraser, in a 2019 article for Literary Hub, notes that attempts to rehabilitate the
stories of “great women” by raising them to the level of “great men” often backfire because “the basis for women’s
historical contributions is fundamentally different.” See: Elizabeth Burton and Mar Hicks, “A History of Women in
British Telecommunications: Introducing a Special Issue,” in Information & Culture, Vol. 55, No, 1 (2020), 1-9.
31
Mar Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in
Computing (MIT Press, 2017).
137
examining the gendered power structures that were in place during the earliest formulations of
general-purpose programming. Computing history maps onto a cultural history in which women
were once considered best suited to perform repetitious, clerical tasks—and thus, desired as
assistants by men who would rather not perform those tasks. Sadie Plant, who invokes the
juxtaposition of Lovelace and “The Silver Lady” in Zeros + Ones, offers a revisionist history
which both centers Lovelace’s role and argues that computing is feminine by design.
32
Plant,
citing also the career of Grace Hopper (the “Ada Lovelace of the Harvard Mark 1”), highlights
theoretical resonances between female sexuality and the ability of software to fulfill command
requests by general-purpose imitation. More recently, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun in Programmed
Visions cites Alan Turing and the Women’s Royal Navy Service (a.k.a. “Wrens”) to demonstrate
“programming’s clerical and arguably feminine underpinnings—both in terms of personnel and
of command structure.”
33
Chun, building on Plant’s argument, points out that the Wrens of
Bletchley Park, responsible for the tedious operation of cryptanalysis machines, were called
“slaves” and “servants” by Turing; like weaver and drawchild, an analyst called out instructions
to a Wren to make manual changes to the machine. This established a command structure which
would become reflected in the design of computer science thereafter. Here is a third symbolic
figure at the heart of computing history: the clerk who, through her servile labor, becomes both
the performing object and the programmer.
This chapter recontextualizes, through the above history, Lovelace’s published work. I
especially examine the footnotes to her translation, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by
Charles Babbage,” and one in particular, “Note G,” which includes an algorithm designed to be
executed by the Engine that has come to be known as “the first computer program.” The Italian

32
Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (Fourth State, 1997).
33
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT Press, 2008), 46.
138
mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea, using Babbage’s notes, published “Notions sur la
machine analytique” in the October 1842 issue of the French-language Bibliotheque Universelle
de Geneve. The “Notions” provided a cursory but enthusiastic summary of the concepts upon
which Babbage was basing his newest invention. A year later, in effort to drum up financial
support for the machine in England, Lovelace produced an English translation for Taylor’s
Scientific Memoirs. This translation was notable for Lovelace’s appendices (Notes), which more
than doubled the length of Menabrea’s original text.
34
In the Notes, she describes the Engine
beyond mere concept, as if Babbage’s scattered ideas amounted to a real machine, and she
emphasizes its use of a punch card system to accept program as input. The algorithm in “Note
G,” which Lovelace calls a “diagram of development,” is a large table that reflects the sequence
of operations that the machine would need to perform in order to calculate the eighth Bernoulli
number (what she labels B7). Beyond mathematics, this “diagram” begins imagining the kinds of
relationships that programmers will have with programmable machines in the future. I argue
further that “Note G” reflects and contributes to the labor dynamics of the era in which she was
writing. Thus, I reconsider in my reading of Lovelace’s “program” the historical command
structures—master and servant, human and machine, subject and object—embedded in the ideas
behind computing at its earliest stage in development.
Specifically, I situate Lovelace’s article beside three clerical figures that predate Turing’s
Wrens: (1) the literary amanuensis, an assistant who copies for or takes dictation from poets and
authors in order to free their minds to think; (2) the mathematician’s clerk, a human computer
who calculates longhand the drudgery of astronomical equations; and (3) the secretary, a figure

34
The “Sketch,” published on August 24, 1843, was considered a success by its small audience. Babbage wrote to
Lovelace’s son, Byron Noel, that his mother produced “the only comprehensive view of the powers of the Analytical
Engine which the mathematicians of the world have yet expressed” (1857). However, the article was not widely read
and not republished until 1889. This paper uses the version online at: www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
139
that becomes important (and notably gendered) after Lovelace’s death, with the rise of shorthand
notation and the typewriter. These intermediaries between the active human mind and its passive
(or mindless) execution undergo a transformation during the nineteenth century.
35
Even the most
sophisticated machines required something like Prony’s algebraicists—creating the algorithms
that allowed for complex thinking to be mechanized.
36
These new go-betweens modeled cyborg
thinking. As Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin argue, “the cultural work of defining a new medium
may go on […] before the invention of the device itself”; the above clerical practices, the labor
histories of telecommunications in the mid-nineteenth century, set the table for innovations in
which language or thought become automated.
37
Using Jill Galvan’s, Leah Price’s, and Pamela
Thurschwell’s work on literary stenography and secretarial labor, among others, this chapter
reads Lovelace’s description of the Analytical Engine against contemporary notions regarding
these clerks as “perfect mediations.”
38
More to the point, I consider how the secretarial figure, as
a metaphorical fulcrum “between inspired minds and automatic hands,” embodies earlier
Victorian-era motivations to eradicate error in recording and calculation. These normalized

35
Anne Balsamo, in Technologies of a Gendered Body, writes: “My mother was a computer [...] Grandmother was
an order clerk in a predominantly male warehouse” (Duke University Press, 1995, p. 133). This chapter, following
the rise of textile firms and “ghost factories” (where textiles “weaved themselves”), proposes a similar genealogy,
that the twentieth-century computer operator inherited something from earlier, clerical figures. Just as Jacques de
Vaucanson in the eighteenth century imagined weaving factories run by only “one girl” who turned the machines on
and off, nineteenth-century images of textile labor pictured the latest automation technologies with an illustrated
woman beside them, operating the on/off switch. Edward Jones-Imhotep, “The Ghost Factories: Histories of
Automata and Artificial Life,” History and Technology Vol. 36, No, 1 (2020), 3. I am also referring to an 1867
Jenks Bridesburg catalogue (via Hagley Library, accessed in 2019). It should be noted that even in Vaucanson’s day,
women carved market space for their own ambitions within the Lyonnaise silk industry. See also: Daryl M. Hafter,
“Women in the Underground Business of Eighteenth-Century Lyon,” in Enterprise & Society 2, no. 1 (2001), 14.
The silk weaving guilds in Lyon were so powerful they monopolized who could be a “master,” and disallowed
women from that position, delegating them to the grunt work of raw silk production. However, women in response
formed a black market by stealing their own raw silk production to weave on the side.
36
Daston, “Calculation,” 12.
37
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT Press, 2000).
38
Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell, “Invisible Hands,” in Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture, edited by
Leah Price and Pamela Thurschwell (Routledge, 2005).
140
divisions of labor—writer and steno, orator and recorder, philosopher and clerk—are the
background against which Lovelace writes.
At the center of these labor structures is the question of authorship. Was Clement, by
translating Babbage’s scattered concepts into hardware, forming ideas of his own? What about
the Engine when it finishes calculations via only variables and formulae? In 1832, The Literary
Gazette caricatured Babbage a “logarithmetical Frankenstein”; in 1858, Oliver Wendell Holmes
referred to Babbage’s machine as a “Frankenstein-monster.” The implication is that Babbage’s
creation not only thinks but, crossing the “bridge […] to the unknown world,” thinks for itself.
The confusion of authorship between inventor and assistant (human or machine) represented a
larger cultural threat—one which, even in Babbage’s specific case, was rehearsed in literature.
39

Jessica Kuskey examines the contested relationship between Babbage and Clement in Charles
Dickens’s Little Dorrit, arguing that
the novel’s representations of mental labor […] illuminate the ways Dickens as a novelist
and Babbage as an inventor were similarly engaged with contemporary debates about
mental labor, [and that] our current categorization of mental labor as uniquely productive
of intellectual property derives from Victorian efforts to establish the mental labor of the
professional as unalienated and self-directed through its opposition to the monotony,
repetition, and supposed mindlessness of mechanical labor.
40

This chapter is also interested in constructions of labor as it relates to Babbage’s Engine, in this
case through Lovelace’s writing; though not “unalienated and self-directed,” Lovelace’s “mental
labor” was far from mechanical. As Mary Shelley complicates the authorship of Frankenstein via

39
Another exploration of affinities between Babbage’s inventions and the literary world can be found in Adrian
Johns, “The Identity Engine: Printing and Publishing at the Beginning of the Knowledge Economy,” in The Mindful
Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (edited by Lissa Roberts, Peter
Dear, Simon Schaffer). Johns claims that half of Babbage’s machines are innovations not in calculation, but in
stereotypy and the printing press, improvements on the methods he observed in the book trade.
40
Jessica Kuskey, “Math and the Mechanical Mind: Charles Babbage, Charles Dickens, and Mental Labor in Little
Dorrit,” in The Body Machinic: Technology, Labor, and Mechanized Bodies in Victorian Culture (dissertation,
2012), 140. Kuskey argues that “Little Dorrit revises this division of mental labor by transforming Babbage’s
personal conflicts with his partner Joseph Clement into the partnership between the genius Doyce and his
mechanized accountant Arthur Clennam.”
141
narrative frames, Lovelace wrote from multiple positions: Babbage’s “interpretess,” his project
manager and, in “Note G,” an algebraicist who translated human into machine thinking. This
chapter, after examining historical constructions of mental labor, examines how Lovelace, like
Shelley and other women authors before her, sets the terms of her intellectual contributions—via
strategic uses of anonymity, translation, mediation, and at times magical metaphors like fairies
and ghosts—allowing her to claim authorship within a male-dominated subject.
41
She adds to a
building gender dynamic in which clerical figures become both mindless technologies of
transcription (onto which a male stylus might transcribe his genius) and a threat to masculine
authorship—by thinking for themselves.
The chapter then culminates in a reading of “Note G.” Recently, digital humanists have
turned to historical examples of programming languages to demonstrate the ways that seemingly
unrelated cultural assumptions become encoded and reproduced in technical designs. “Code,”
Mark C. Marino writes, is a text like any other text, “a sign system with its own rhetoric” which
“possesses significance in excess of its functional utility.”
42
This offshoot of Software Studies,
known as Critical Code Studies, has produced studies on UNIX, FORTRAN, FLOW-MATIC,
and the software behind Mariner 1 and Apollo 11.
43
Of course, there is the question of whether
Lovelace’s “diagram of development” was really a “computer program”: whether punch cards
and source code are analogous. As an exercise, this paper takes the claim that Lovelace wrote

41
Indeed, the “Sketch” serves as the blueprints Babbage never published. Allen Bromley writes that, “aside from the
Bernoulli numbers program prepared for Ada Lovelace’s notes, there is no evidence that Babbage prepared any user
programs for the Analytical Engine after his 1840 trip to Turin.” (“Plans 28 and 28a,” 11). By 1837 Babbage had
produced many stereotype plates. He distributed them but never published them, and they are far from complete.
42
Mark C. Marino, “Critical Code Studies,” in Electronic Book Review Vol. 11, No. 7 (2006).
43
An incomplete review: Tara McPherson (2010) has shown how UNIX reflects its era of racial segregation;
Federica Frabetti (2010) has looked at a misread bug in the code of the first space probe; Dennis Jerz (2011) has
written on the FORTRAN code of William Crowther’s game Adventure; James E. Dobson and Rena J. Mosteirin
(2019) have turned Apollo 11’s guidance system into poetry; and Mark C. Marino (2020) has examined the early
natural-language coding of Grace Hopper. For more discussion on Critical Code Studies, visit past working groups
at https://criticalcodestudies.com/ccswg.html.
142
“the first computer program” at face value; I treat the diagram-program as a kind of code, despite
the anachronism of that assumption, to demonstrate how this “significance in excess” extends
further back into the history of machine programming. I read “Note G” as a text that both serves
a technical function and reveals the shifting social systems within which it operates. Ultimately, I
argue that Lovelace’s ambiguous clerical position in the writing of her Notes—as algebraicist
and author—informs the way she imagines the functions of the Analytical Engine. She constructs
the Engine as a mechanical mathematical clerk which perfectly mediates its programmer’s
intentions, reflecting a view that computing consists only of commanders and followers. But in
both her Notes and correspondence, Lovelace complicates these categories; by extending her
position to her writing, she inaugurates an idea of the technologized clerk that is both tool and
guidance protocol, both programmed and programmer.

Automatic Hands
During Lovelace’s life, the clerical figure was largely male. However, as Price and Thurschwell
write, “the iconic late-nineteenth-century female secretary is preceded by the mid-century male
clerk”; over the course of the century, one becomes the other.
44
This shift occurs along two main
timelines: the increase of women in the middle-class labor force, and the adoption of shorthand
notation systems. Shorthand had been invented prior, but it wasn’t until Isaac Pittman’s 1837
book Stenographic Sound-Hand that the practice, which he later called “phonography,” reached
cultural relevance.
45
Before phonography, many forms of clerical labor, such as recording and

44
Price and Thurschwell, “Automatic Hands,” 2005. This shift only occurred in some sectors, of course. Military
(and other systemic, male-dominated) workplaces continued to use male clerks for jobs such as copying, memorably
in Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore (where the “junior clerk” “copied all the letters”).
45
Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford
University Press, 1999).
143
reporting, were considered respectable. Authors like Samuel Johnson paraphrased Parliamentary
speeches with an editorialized flare. Charles Dickens, a close friend of Lovelace toward the end
of her life and “probably the most famous figure ever to combine the secretarial and authorial
roles in one person,” used an early form of shorthand called brachygraphy to record speech at
almost natural speed.
46
But while Dickens was still able to reminisce about his life as a clerk in
romantically masculine terms, Pitman’s phonography, a more literal translation of sound to text,
later replaced these older practices with an automatic form of transcription.
47
The aim was to boil
language down to arithmetic, akin (as Dickens unfavorably compared Babbage’s machines) to
bureaucratic machinery. This more mechanized writing transformed the user’s body into either
the writing surface or the stylus.
48
Thus, as the clerk figure became more technologized for the
sake of accuracy, the more he was transformed into a writing machine, stripped of intellectual
agency and, as many have argued, thus feminized.
The mechanization of the body finds its cultural extreme in the automaton. After early,
popular automata by Jacques de Vaucanson and Pierre Jacquet-Droz, it was not uncommon to
find reports of the newest such attractions in newspapers, each with extra symbolic meaning.
Adelheid Voskuhl argues that eighteenth-century automata were “not epistemically relevant
simulations of live bodies but rather mechanical replications of cultural and political body
practices and ambitions”
49
; they made visible larger cultural desires for perfectly repeatable

46
Ivan Kreilkamp, “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing,”
in Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (Routledge, 2005).
47
As Lisa Gitelman explains, shorthand entered the nineteenth-century zeitgeist after Pitman improved the
“technology for linguistic representation” (Scripts, 24). Kreilkamp adds that 1837 “marked a new phase in English
print culture’s relationship to speech” (“Speech,” 13). Jennifer Wicke, arguing that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is born
of shorthand, refers to nineteenth-century inventions—such as the phonograph, typewriter, and camera—as
“vampiric” technologies for their unnatural and excessive (i.e., mechanical) reproduction (“Vampiric Typewriting:
Dracula and Its Media,” in ELH Vol. 59, No. 2 (1992), 471).
48
Kreilkamp, “Speech,” 22.
49
Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2013), 21.
144
performances and human mastery over mechanism (in those moments before industrialization
made these modernities feel inevitable). In the nineteenth century, those same cultural desires
become further gendered. Certainly, John Merlin’s Silver Lady suggested an objectification of
the female body; where male-marked automata performed more intellectual activities like chess,
female-marked automata tended to emphasize movement: accurate, repeatable, and naturalistic.
This included dancing but also the heaving of the chest, the feminine sigh that E.T.A. Hoffmann,
in his short story “The Sandman” ridicules as an idealized mode of female social behaviour (and
links to the Pygmalion-Galatea fantasy of sculptor and his sculpture). The male “Turk” famously
responded to human opponents, but the pre-scripted automaton was typically given a woman’s
likeness; it follows that any nonstrenuous labor which doesn’t require high intellect to perform
perfectly—like stenography after Pittman’s phonography—tended to be feminized. And thus,
fantasies of optimized clerical labor, of predetermined writing or copying, are formed at the
intersection of machine accuracy and female erasure.
A similar reshaping (and re-gendering) occurs in the figure of the amanuensis, the literary
assistant who either takes dictation from or copies the work of an author. Copyists, as my second
chapter notes, had fallen in status since the days of Jonathan Swift. This change is illustrated by
an 1844 short story, “The Amanuensis: A Tale of the Literary World,” in The Metropolitan
Magazine, wherein the titular character, named Miss Alford, is referred to as “a human copying
machine.”
50
While this kind of clerical labor was still dominated by men during the middle of the
century—famously memorialized in literature by Herman Melville’s 1853 short story, “Bartleby,
the Scrivener”—the relationship between an author and their assistant increasingly mapped onto

50
Mss. ABDY, “The Amanuensis: A Tale of the Literary World,” in The Metropolitan Magazine (September –
December 1844), 443.
145
heterosexual power structures; over time women’s hands replaced the sacred female muse.
51

John Milton, going blind, dictated his poetry to his daughters. Teenage girls, including Elizabeth
Pigot, Claire Clairmont, and Mary Shelley, more legibly re-penned the scribbles of Lovelace’s
estranged father. In these relationships, the power dynamics are so starkly drawn the amanuensis
disappears altogether. She might shape her employer’s intellectual or creative output—as Jane
Stabler writes, she is often “the first editor”—but gendered notions of the “lone genius” make
invisible her labor; these women are, so to speak, reduced to mere writing machines.
52
Shelley
compares the work of an amanuensis to “wifely servitude,” appropriately confusing the female
copyist or stenographer as both a machine for reproduction and object for sexual desire.
53
As
Price and Thurschwell point out, each shares a similar strategy: the reduction of the body to its
physical rather than intellectual faculties.
54
For the (male) author, the ideal amanuensis was she
who, like the Silver Lady, carried out her orders with sophisticated articulation and graceful
motion, but without contributing thoughts of her own.
This perfection of mediation is, as theorized by Price and Thurschwell, a “fantasy of
divorcing transmission from understanding.”
55
This is the myth of automatic hands; the “genius”
becomes constructed as the opposite of the “typist” who mindlessly punches keys. The extreme
case is psychography (or, relatedly, “automatic writing”), in which a writer acts as amanuensis

51
Leah Price, “From Ghostwriter to Typewriter: Delegating Authority at Fin de Siècle,” in The Faces of Anonymity:
Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. Edited by Robert J. Griffin
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 213.
52
Jane Stabler, “1816 in the manuscripts of Lord Byron and Mary Shelley,” in Keats-Shelley Journal 66 (2017), 55.
Henry James’s former typists Theodora Bosanquet and Mary Weld agreed that James wanted them simply to be
“part of the machinery,” to make as seamless as possible the transition from what he uttered and what they typed.
John Carlos Rowe describes James’s desire for a “typist without a mind.” See also: K. Jang, “Governess as
Ghostwriter: Unauthorized Authority and Uncanny Authorship in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw,” in The
Henry James Review Vol. 28 No. 1 (2007), 13-25; Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical
Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
53
As Stabler writes, Mary Shelley copied for Byron between 1816 and 1823. She later wrote on the profession in an
essay on Madame Roland for Lives of the Most Eminent French Writers.
54
Price and Thurschwell, “Invisible Hands,” 5.
55
Ibid., 6.
146
for abstractions (spirits, muses, etc.) through meditative states, seances, or trances. For many
theorists, this labor relationship is mapped onto extant cis- and hetero-gender myths. Galvan
suggests that women were believed to possess “a sympathetic excess” that made their medial
work possible.
56
As Friedrich Kittler writes, “an omnipresent metaphor equated women with the
white sheet of nature or virginity onto which a very male stylus could then inscribe the glory of
its authorship.”
57
Plant, paraphrasing, adds: “Like all ideal women and machines, secretaries and
shorthand typists were only supposed to be processing information which had been produced and
organized elsewhere.” In other words, the ideal secretarial figure only “processes” information
but does not contribute to its shape. The Bletchley Park Wrens, in this ungenerous view, cracked
codes but had no knowledge of the messages; they only switched the wires at the back of the
machine, set the drums to the front, and punched cards. Plant, describing this labor, writes: “She
hears, but she isn’t listening. She sees, but she does not watch. Pattern recognition without
consciousness.”
58
Extending this to mathematics, any ideal calculating machine would not be, as
Lady Byron suggested of the Difference Engine, a “thinking machine.” As Turing writes of
artificial intelligence, machines are only useful for “those problems which can be solved by
human clerical labour, working to fixed rules, and without understanding.”
59
The fantasy is the

56
Jill Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies,
1859-1919 (Cornell University Press, 2010), 16. Galvan argues that there is a rich interplay between “nineteenth-
century ideas of femininity [,] modernizing concepts of communication and knowledge transfer,” and the gendered
construction of paranormal mediation (p. 2).
57
Fredrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael White
(Stanford University Press, 1999), 186.
58
Plant, Zeros + Ones, 121-125. To make her argument, Plant draws on the post-Freudian theory of Luce Irigary.
Irigary, in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), writes that women have historically been pigeon-holed as man’s
ultimate go-between—from taking his messages to passing on his genetic code. Plant, bringing this argument into
the digital, writes that “1 and 0 make another 1. Male and female add up to man” in the same way that female
secretarial labor disappears, after the fact, into the man’s production (p. 35).
59
Alan Turing, “Proposal for Development in the Mathematics Division of an Automatic Computing Engine
(ACE),” in A. M. Turing’s ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers, edited by B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran (MIT
Press, 1986), 38. Emphasis mine.
147
reduction of these mediators to machine (un)intelligence until there is no “difference between a
command given and command completed.”
60

There is a long history of subject-object confusion between women and machines, even
of sharing nomenclature; words like “typewriter,” “computer,” and “secretary” have at times
referred to either person or machine (or desk). Kittler narrates a “queen’s sacrifice,” in which the
female typewriter eventually replaces the female sex object, reduced to a mere functionary—a
cog—in the discourse network.
61
N. Katherine Hayles, citing Anne Balsamo’s line “My mother
was a computer,” describes the reverse, a culture-wide imaginary in which machinic subjects—
Hayles calls them “digital subjects”—are anthropomorphized despite their lack of sentience.
62

Babbage, for his part, has often described the way his engines “demand,” “foresee” or are
“hungry for.”
63
The Analytical Engine, with its “store,” can even “remember.” At the same time,
his reputation was such that Arthur Conan Doyle describes Sherlock Holmes to be “as inhuman
as Babbage’s Calculating Machine, and just about as likely to fall in love.” The crux of these
personifications and prostheses is that idealized secretaries merge conceptually with machines
only because their labor teeters at the edge of sentience: because their use-value intersects. At the
time, such a fine line would have carried extra significance. Beyond automata, metaphorical
discussions of the master-slave binary (as Fanon said of Hegel) only make sense without the
social and historical. The rise of mass clerical labor, and then the rise of computing, triggered

60
Chun, “On Sourcery and Source Codes,” 29.
61
Kittler, “Queen’s Sacrifice,” in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, translated by Michael Metteer (Stanford
University Press, 1990). While Kittler argues that the machine does away with sexual difference, gender—that is,
the body in all its aspects—never truly disappears. On the contrary, many critics suggest that the typewriter, by
mobilizing a certain kind of woman laborer, brought her body to the forefront.
62
N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (University of Chicago
Press, 2010). (Hayles borrows the title from a line from the previously cited Technologies of a Gendered Body, by
Anne Balsamo.) The word “secretary” moved from a desk to a metonymy designating its occupant. The word
“typewriter” refers either to “a human who happens to type, or a writing instrument that happens to be human”
(Price and Thurschwell, “Invisible Hands,” 4).
63
Padua, “Picturing Lovelace,” 218.
148
techno-social metaphors designed to protect the concept of a free thinker (the “brains”) who did
not work, and the robotic, unthinking laborer (the “brawn”) who carried out his ideas. This
conflation of mastery with a certain kind of intelligence—thus retaining the concept of mastery
for only educated European men—shadows the rise of automation.
64

The Unthinking Machine
The mathematician’s clerk belongs to this history, too. While not quite the same use of automatic
hands—in this case, performing calculations rather than recording or copying—all such activities
become optimized in the nineteenth century. Prony’s tables allowed college graduates and even
teenagers to complete in days what mathematicians once did longhand over months.
65
Daston
writes of the men (and boys) at Greenwich Observatory who “completed a whole month’s worth
of lunar position or tide prediction calculations according to algorithms [like Prony’s tables].”
66

This was rote arithmetic, human labor that merged with machinic labor. But it wasn’t mindless.
Like Johnson at Parliament, accuracy remained a problem. Before some equations were solved,
one small human error forced the computer to start over. (An extreme example is William
Shanks, who spent his life calculating the digits of Pi and, after one mistake, spent the last 20
years doing it incorrectly.) Prony’s tables allowed clerks, like recorders using phonography, to

64
The use of loaded jargon (like “slave”) has recently been reconsidered in science and technical writing, related to
ants and programming languages respectively. Though useful in a vacuum, such terms imply analogies between
human and nonhuman behaviors. Ron Eglash makes the historical connection between late nineteenth-century uses
of “slave” and “servant” in engineering (e.g., servomotors and slave clocks) to Charles Babbage, crediting his 1832
book On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures for popularizing the division of high-level and low-level
thinking in labor (“Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature,” in Technology and
Culture Vol. 48 No. 2 (2007), 367). It should also be noted that Black slaves invented many new technologies but
did not own their inventions. See: Rayvon Fouché, Black Inventors in the Age of Segregation: Granville T. Woods,
Lewis H. Latimer, and Shelby J. Davidson (JHU Press, 2005). As Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark,
academic criticism remains incomplete until it confronts the truth of a racialized society.
65
The word “computer” was first used, as far as we know, by Richard Braithwaite in Yong Mans Gleanings (1613)
to describe a person in the act of calculating.
66
Daston, “Calculation,” 13-16. Daston is writing specifically about “Airy’s System.”
149
calculate without understanding the higher mathematics—but they did not eliminate the need for
sharp, focused minds. Babbage’s engines, in theory, did. Calculation is not, like recording, just
the remediation of information. But it can be expressed as an equation: the conversion of a
logical inquiry into a notational language which can then, according to set rules, be processed
into numerical expression. If Babbage’s engines worked, even the mental labor required to
perform logarithmic arithmetic could be scripted—and thus always reliably accurate. Like the
stenographer, the platonic ideal of the mathematician’s clerk speeds up transcription and
computes without error the desires of the philosopher; this dream machine would perfectly
mediate a given equation or logic problem into its solution.
The Analytical Engine was born of vision for ideal clerical labor. Babbage premised his
Difference Engine on the idea that the labored monotony of arithmetical calculations required a
machine to “become a substitute for one of the lowest operations of human intellect.”
67
This
substitution was, for Babbage and in accordance with the clerical ideal, about reducing errors and
saving time. But his first attempt at the steam-powered clerk was not good enough. As Menabrea
puts it in Lovelace’s translation, the “chief drawback” of the Difference Engine—the need for
continual human intervention—provided “a source of errors.” The Analytical Engine corrected
this flaw with the aforementioned punch card system such that the newer Engine would “spare
intellectual labour” to insure “rigid accuracy” and an “economy of time.”
68
Lovelace emphasizes
“the object of the engine” in her Notes: to achieve the “utmost practical efficiency” (“Note E”);

67
Hollings et al., Ada Lovelace, 2018. Commenting in 1823 on the advantages of Babbage’s Difference Engine for
computing mathematical and astronomical tables, English astronomer Francis Baily envisioned how the “unvarying
action of machinery” would solve the problem of “confining the attention of the computers to the dull and tedious
repetition of many thousand consecutive additions and subtractions” (Francis Baily, “On Mr. Babbage’s New
Machine for Calculating and Printing Mathematical and Astronomical Tables, Astronomische Nachrichten 2, 1843).
68
Lovelace, “A Sketch,” 1843. Menabrea estimated that the Engine would be capable of multiplying two 20-digit
numbers in three minutes. In a 2015 blog post, computer programmer Jim Randell extrapolates this estimate to guess
that the calculation of B 7 would take about 15-20 minutes.
150
“reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation” (“Note D”); and finally
annihilate the “necessity for the intervention of human intelligence during the performance of its
calculations” such that “there is much less chance of error, and likewise far less expenditure of
time and labour” (“Note A”). Oliver Wendell Holmes, describing the Engine’s capacity for
automation in 1858, even called it “too stupid to make a blunder.” The Engine thus embodies the
desires of its era to perfectly mediate one expression (“inspired minds”) into an output via a
clerical function (“automatic hands”), demonstrating how social power dynamics influence and
become reflected in technological design.
I argue also that the more technical details within the Engine’s design are influenced by
the clerical history above. Regarding how the engine is programmed, for instance, some of the
punch cards required are not so different from shorthand; the Operation Cards are, Menabrea
explains, “merely a translation” of the four algebraical notations (add, subtract, multiply, and
divide)—linguistic symbols turned binary via punched holes. As Dionysus Lardner writes, once
the question is “translated into algebraical signs” and “reduced to an equation,” the algebraicist
“is relieved from the consideration of the complicated relations of the quantities.”
69
The human
intellectual labor thus stops at the communication of the equation in natural language; the cards
then “consign the execution” to the machine. This input system is more complex than that, as I
will discuss later, but it relies on a key premise from “Note G”:
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do
whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power
of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making
available what we are already acquainted with.

69
Dionysus Lardner, “Babbage’s Calculating Engine,” in Edinburgh Review Vol. 59 (1834), 263-327, qtd in Simon
Schaffer, “Babbage’s Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System,” in Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1
(1994). Lardner is speaking to the Difference Engine, but he is describing what the later Engine is capable of.
151
This passage, which Turing refers to as “Lady Lovelace’s Objection,” is often read in the context
of artificial intelligence.
70
Lovelace reaffirms Menabrea’s claim that “the machine is not a
thinking being, but simply an automaton which acts according to the laws imposed upon it.” Like
the Silver Lady, the machine servilely follows a script. Once instructed to begin, it will continue
to behave in a singular manner until instructed to stop. As Lovelace explains, the punch cards
activate “a series of different states [...] the adding state, or the multiplying state, &c.” (“Note
B”). Once the Engine is placed into a “state,” it will remain in that state until activated otherwise
by the following punch card. This demonstrates the machine’s lack of sentience, that it cannot
“originate” or “anticipate,” but also describes its activity as automatic, preset, and even trance-
like. In other words, it is not scripted to solve equations; it is ordered to perform steps like clerks
blindly calculating with Prony’s tables.
In that often omitted final sentence, the expressed purpose of the engine—“to assist us”
in merely “making available” the already known—skips over the actual labor of the machine,
erasing the difference between commands given and tasks completed. Similar to how the LISP
function “Hello, World” delivers input to output without ever “reading” what’s bracketed within
quotation marks, according to Lovelace here the Engine does not ever interpret its input data: it
is mere pattern recognition without consciousness. It is an amanuensis exactly remediating the
intellectual product of its author. In this instance, Lovelace seems to agree with Babbage and
Menabrea that the Analytical Engine has reduced mathematics to a kind of frictionless, algebraic
stenography. It is the “brawn” which serves as the seamless extension of the mathematician’s
“master” mind, so limited in its capacity to shape the process along the way that it can only

70
Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 450.
152
“make available” that which a human already dictated. The “science of operations” which it
embodies is a holy grail of secretarial functions.

The Ghost Writer
Lovelace often positioned herself, at least on the surface, as a servile clerk. Her correspondence
with Babbage between 1835 and 1852 paints a deferential role to the mathematician. When she
first offers him her services with the Analytical Engine on January 12, 1841, Lovelace hopes that
“my head may be made by you subservient to some of your purposes & plans,” framing herself
as an object, a tool—a brain just like the Engine is a brain.
71
Upon completing her Notes, she
writes again to say: “I give to you the first choice & offer of my services & my intellect.”
72
A
letter of unknown date reads: “I am willing to give myself wholly to your interests.” These words
often undermine her own contributions to his project. Plant writes that Lovelace is “remembered
as Charles Babbage’s voice, expressing his ideas with levels of clarity, efficiency and accuracy
he could never have mustered himself.”
73
She wrote his ideas down; she was his “interpretess.”
She was the custodian of his work, but in Lovelace’s correspondence it was usually his work, his
ideas, written in her hand. She perhaps felt as Shelley did while working for Byron: “under filial
and philosophical obligation to subordinate her personal pain—and her own talent—to assisting
the man of genius.”
74
And just as Shelley did with her father, when writing the Notes, Lovelace

71
Lovelace during her life, possibly influenced by Babbage’s Leibnizian tendencies, gestures to cybernetics. For
instance, Lovelace discusses the Engine’s capacity for “analysis” as a process originally engaged only “through the
human brain instead of through the medium of inanimate mechanism”; and in a letter to Augustus de Morgan,
Lovelace posits that, “if I had made my own head, I would have proportioned its wishes & ambition a little more to
its capacity” (September 13, 1840). Both fantasies—the Engine and her improved intellect—reflect contemporary
meditations on the biological world as a clockwork metaphor, a proto-computational universe which warrants a
separate exploration of her writing (and perhaps Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia).
72
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, August 15, 1843.
73
Plant, “The Future Looms,” 47.
74
Stabler, “1816,” 56.
153
would read them aloud to Babbage at his home so that he may doublecheck that they reflected
his ideas—to perfect their mediation.
75
But the partnership between Lovelace and Babbage was
also, beneath the surface, a complicated labor relationship. This section will show that while her
intentions as an ideal clerical assistant might be true, like Shelley, Lovelace’s imagination cannot
but find its way into her contributions, too.
Perfect mediation was also the initial goal of her translation: to get across Menabrea’s
words as accurately and with as little editorial paraphrasing as possible. According to those
involved, Lovelace’s proficiency in French was such that she was able to do just that—at least,
by the standards of translation. Like a “ghostwriter”—that phenomenon which arises with the
figure of the secretary—Lovelace at first seemed content to write for but give the full credit of
authorship to Menabrea in language and Babbage in concept.
76
As Babbage explains later in his
autobiography, Lovelace never intended to do more than play their unseen handmaiden; after she
finished the translated portion of the “Sketch,” Babbage “asked why she had not herself written
an original paper on a subject with which she was so intimately acquainted? To this Lady
Lovelace replied that the thought had not occurred to her.”
77
She had intuitively erased herself
from the publication of these men’s ideas. Partly due the social limitations conditioned into her
gender—even at her station she was not allowed to attend college and was criticized for having
opinions about mathematics—and partly due to the opinion amongst her class that putting one’s
name on literary work was overly commercial, she hadn’t considered writing her own paper or

75
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, July 10, 1843.
76
Price, “From Ghostwriter to Typewriter,” 2003. The Oxford English Dictionary records 1884 as the first instance
of “ghost” being used to mean “one who secretly does artistic or literary work for another person, the latter taking
the credit.” Leah Price argues that, long before the term was coined, “spectrality had provided a traditional image for
anonymous publication,” and that it was no coincidence that the rise of a female secretarial class saw also a rise in
the realist genre of the ghost story (p. 220). Even the office secretary, while remaining anonymous, was employed to
work with and contribute to documents signed by their (usually male) boss.
77
Babbage, Passages, 2019.
154
appendices. She only decided to add her initials to the published document after her husband’s
encouragement.
78
Outside of “A.A.L.,” the only evidence of her presence in the Notes is the use
of the pronoun “we”: “We have dwelt considerably […] We are desirous […] We refer the
reader […]” (“Note A”). For the most part, she is a ghostly figure which haunts the text in effort
to better usher forth its message.
It is no coincidence that interest in the paranormal increases as new technologies turn
cultural transmission invisible. Galvan identifies the 1830s as the moment when these interests
spike; with the telegraph and photography also came the rise, due to their “sympathetic excess”
and capacity for automatism, of “mediating women” both occult and occupational.
79
This context
is necessary to understand much of Lovelace’s correspondence, in which she repeatedly refers to
herself in supernatural terms. In a letter to Babbage which she signs, “Your fairy for ever,”
Lovelace claims that she possesses a quality which she terms “Fairyism.”
80
When she writes to
him after the translation was finished, she uses the term again: “I wonder if you will choose to
retain the lady-fairy in your service.”
81
Scholars disagree how to interpret this self-fashioning.

78
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, July 4, 1843.
79
Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium, 17. Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke patented their needle
electric telegraph in 1837. This invention, among others, introduced the capacity to deliver messages across space
without visual evidence, which found cultural expression in occult practices such as seances. Galvan compares the
female practitioners of the occult to telecommunication practices to show how and why feminization occurs to the
labor of both fields. Meanwhile, Thurschwell expands this discussion to psychical research. Both studies suggest
that innovation in telecommunications is necessary context for works such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, George Du
Maurier, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Dickens (“The Rapping Spirits”; “The Signal Man”). Thurschwell writes that
“occult ways of imagining cultural transmission and communication […] are used by a wide variety of writers of the
period to create phantasmatic spaces in which they redefine intimate, sexual, familial and national ties between
people against the usual patriarchal models of inheritance and community via marriage and the nuclear family”
(Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 2).
80
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, July 5, 1843.
81
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, August 15, 1843. According to Plant, Babbage called her his fairy for “her dexterous
mind and light presence” (“The Future Looms,” 48). On September 9, 1843, impressed by the Notes, Babbage both
calls Lovelace an “Enchantress of Number” in a letter to her and, to Michael Faraday, “that enchantress who has
thrown her magical spell around the most abstract Sciences.” In another letter to Lovelace, he wrote that he
“regret[ted] not having earlier explored so rich a vein of the noblest metal” (July 2, 1843)—the clerical woman as
precious material resource and virgin nature to be mined.
155
James Essinger argues that “Fairyism” here refers to “herself as his helper.”
82
While he also
suggests that the word hints at a romantic relationship between the two—drawing on Lovelace’s
teenage affair with a tutor—others have suggested the opposite: that such self-labeling fends off
Babbage’s possible sexual interest in her. Julia Marcus further remarks on Lovelace’s tendency
to refer to herself as something airborne—she was “the thrush” or “little birdie” to her husband,
and as a child wanted to design a steam-powered flying machine—as a metaphor for “reaching”
her distant mother.
83
Probably the most common suggestion is that Fairyism referred to her often
invisible and (due to her physical and mental health) unreliable assistance. And I would suggest
that, from time to time at least, Fairyism also described her seeming ability to understand high-
level mathematical concepts without having mastered the basics. Whatever Lovelace meant, she
seemed to find some usefulness in the ambiguities of the word “fairy.” I would argue that this
flexible self-image, and her secretarial service to Babbage more broadly, is reflected in her
approach to the Analytical Engine.
One possible interpretation of Fairyism describes an affinity between Lovelace as a writer
and the technical details of the machine she imagined. For instance, consider this description of
herself as a “Prophetess”; in a later letter to her mother, as her health deteriorated and medication
increased, Lovelace annihilates her own presence in her work:
You know I am not a bit my own agent as to my scientific progress & objects. I am
simply the instrument for the divine purposes to act on & thro’; [...] Like the Prophets of
old, I shall but speak the voice I am inspired with. [...] The only merit that can ever be
due to me, is that of putting myself, & maintaining myself, in such a state (physically &
mentally) that God & His agents, can use me as their vocal organ for the ears of
mortals.
84

82
Essinger, Ada’s Algorithm, 184.
83
Julia Marcus, Lady Byron and Her Daughters (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 144.
84
Lovelace, Letter to Lady Byron, November 11, 1844.
156
Like psychography, Lovelace here imagines herself as both writing surface and stylus (“on &
thro’”). She is the blank sheet of female nature and the unthinking stylus that only communicates
the “voice” dictated to her, a phonetic functionary for the discourse of “God & His agents”
(carried out, like the Wrens, without her knowing the message). She is only the medium, the
“vocal organ” for these ghostly geniuses. Most stunning is the reduction of her own abilities—
her energetic writing style, her mathematical knowhow, and her reportedly flawless French—to a
knack for entering and “maintaining” a series of automated “states,” a description eerily similar
to the Analytical Engine by her own writing. Her script is her inspiration, and her “merit” is her
ability to unwaveringly follow its instructions.
Not only does this language reduce Lovelace’s head to its cybernetic utility; due its
similarity to the object of her Notes, Lovelace’s figurative ghostwriting suggests a cultural
exchange between fantasies around gendered secretarial labor, calculating engines, and even
Romantic literature. While Lord Byron used amanuenses, other poets preferred a different kind
of remediation. Imogen Forbes-Macphail has written on the way constructions of imagination in
Romantic poetry share affinities with Lovelace’s approach to mechanism: “Lovelace recognizes,
in the Analytical Engine, the Romantic dream.”
85
Forbes-Macphail points out, for instance, how
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “poetic sensibility” has at times been defined as a kind of automation
in which the poet has “nothing to do with it,” “it” being composition; the poet “only looked on,
while the blind causes, the only true artists, were unfolding themselves.” (William Blake claimed
that Milton was written “without Premeditation & even against my Will.”) Forbes-Macphail

85
Imogen Forbes-Macphail, “‘I Shall in Due Time Be a Poet’: Ada Lovelace’s Poetical Science in Its Literary
Context,” in Ada’s Legacy: Cultures of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital Age (Morgan & Claypool,
2016), 153. See: Michael C. Jaye, “Wordsworth’s Alfoxden Notebook: 1798,” in The Evidence Imagination: Studies
of Interactions Between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, eds. Donald H. Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, B.
Bennett, D. Fischer, R. Herzfeld (NYU Press, 1978), 43. Jaye describes the act of “transcription” as “the stilling of
creative energy into verbal symbol […]. The physical and mechanical act of the driving hand preserves but also
turns that creative flow into the stasis of a rigid inscription alien to its source.”
157
suggests further that this poetic sensibility “lies not in the active will of the poet or thinker, but
rather in the passive qualities of their constitution which allow them to be more receptive” and
thus more perfect a mediation of that poetic input. Lovelace’s statement that the Engine “cannot
originate” is thus inseparable from notions of a “blind” poetic receptibility. Here the intelligent
design of the poet, the technical design of the Engine, and the capacity of women or clerical
figures for “sympathetic excess” converge. What’s important here is not originality, but the
notion that in any “science of operations,” in poetry or engineering, data are processed and then
delivered as output. The minimization of that process—when the output nearly matches the input
(e.g., “Hello, World”)—is for these poets, for the Engine, and for Lovelace in the above self-
imagining, a mode of virtuous authorship.

Fairy-Guidance
But Lovelace’s labor also rejects clerical ideals. Her mediation is, notably, imperfect. Before
starting the Notes, she sent a translation she’d written to Lord Lovelace (of a German ballad by
Friedrich Schiller), adding the following disclaimer: “I cannot call it either a translation; for
(except the first stanza, which is rather close), it is entirely different from the original.”
86
Like
Shelley’s tortured manuscripts of Byron’s scribbles, Lovelace’s translations “emerge as creative
acts in their own right.”
87
The same writerly intervention can be said of Menabrea’s memoir; the
translation of Menabrea’s original text is around 8,000 words, but the Notes are around 20,000.
Plant suggests that Lovelace’s “footnotes” are meant to retain the “hierarchal divisions between

86
Lovelace, Letter to Lord Lovelace, April 1842.
87
Stabler, “1816,” 58. Mary Shelley’s copying of Byron’s poems were often inaccurate. Scholars suggest many
reasons for this, including Byron’s poor penmanship, Freudian slips, and slanders toward her character. Jerome
McGann suggests that Shelley had an “inclination to de-physicalize Byron’s language,” such as changing “breast” to
“heart” in Canto IV, Stanza 67 of Don Juan. Stabler argues that she often performs a “melancholic misreading” (p.
62) of Byron which reflects her loneliness and grief: “the slight differences in Mary’s journal copy might signify not
carelessness or haste, but a creative re-working of separation and feelings” (p. 72).
158
centers and margins, authors and scribes,” but also that paratextual spaces have historically
allowed female typists to deviate from the communication of men’s thoughts.
88
In those Notes,
Lovelace excels the imagination of Babbage and Menabrea. She, as Doris Langley Moore put it,
“weave[s] daydreams into seemingly authentic calculations.”
89
She crosses the threshold
between the machine’s capacity for only calculation and, due the symbolic substitution of any
kind of information in place of numbers, the possibility of general-purpose computing—what is
called “Lovelace’s Leap.”
90
A reconsideration of Lovelace’s positionality complicates whether
the “interpretess” can call her Notes a “translation.” She gives her “service” and “intellect” to
Babbage’s “interests,” “purposes & plans,” but the master she serves, if we look closely at her
choice of words, is more the Engine than the man; she hopes to help unfold the “blind causes” of
automated calculation itself. Reading across her letters, “my services & my intellect” and “the
lady-fairy” refer to the mediating “instrument,” the poetic sensibility she seemed to possess far
more than the men with whom she worked.
When I refer to Lovelace as a secretarial figure, I am invoking not the ideal clerical
function that Babbage and Menabrea imagined the Engine to embody but the more ambiguous
figure—the one who is imagined as an ignorant operator but instead threatens the authority of the
“genius” by virtue of her own contributions. The short story “The Amanuensis” provides a
similar narrative switch; it turns out Miss Alford, “the mere transcriber, the jotter-down of the

88
Plant, Zeros + Ones, 9-10.
89
Moore, Ada, 216.
90
Responding to claims of emotional instability and mathematical amateurism, scholars who defend Lovelace’s
historical significance refer to the creative thinking which she provided and which Babbage lacked. “Lovelace’s
Leap” usually describes her impulse to ask what if. Even Doron Swade, who has marginalized Lovelace’s role in the
past, argued in an interview for the documentary To Dream Tomorrow that “What Lovelace saw […] was that
number could represent entities other than quantity” (Jo Francis and John Fuegi, “Lovelace & Babbage and the
Creation of the 1843 Notes,” in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 24, no. 4 (2003), 24). She suggests that
because the Engine might act upon non-number variables, it might produce things besides number if those original
variables (notes, colors, et al.) shared a relationship expressible by algebraical operation.
159
treasures of [another’s] mind,” in fact had many ideas of her own.
91
It was Alford who was
writing the poetry, not the authoress who claimed the credit. Lovelace, too, is an author. She is
an author in the tradition of women who translated works by men to enter masculine spaces.
92

She was similar in position to her close friend, Mary Somerville, who described her work as a
translator not unlike Lovelace’s “instrument”: as mediation. Such rhetoric is arguably a strategy
for assuming authority over a subject while calling its authorship by another name. Women had
to choose between a limited readership, mediumship, or other forms of anonymity—as another
of Lovelace’s friends, Joanna Baillie, knew well—each allowing self-expression within their
limited literary avenues. Lovelace wrote poems, hoped to write books on flying machines, and
pitched more articles after her Notes. She referred to her own writing style, likely with her father
in mind, as “pithy & vigorous” with a “half-satirical & humorous dryness.”
93
She wrote to her
mother that she will “in due time be a Poet.”
94
Likely she feigned sympathetic excess or humility
as cover for her desire to write what she thought.
Her contribution—the impish “why not?” which pointed to the limitations of the men’s
ideas—was more than its incredible foresight. It was Lovelace that kept a contract with the
printer, who had the final call on what would be included in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs (and

91
ABDY, “The Amanuensis,” 443.
92
I am referring to the women, such as Elizabeth Cary, who translated Italian plays in Early Modern England, as
well as works of science from one European language to another; famously, Emilie du Chatelet translated Isaac
Newton, Clemence Royer translated Charles Darwin, Anna Helmholtz translated Tyndall, and Marie-Anne Paulze
Lavoisier translated her husband. Mary Somerville’s entry into the elite scientific societies of London was based on
her translation of Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Traité de mécanique celeste (or The Mechanism of the Heavens, 1831),
only after which she was able to publish her own work, starting with the very successful On the Connexion of the
Physical Sciences (1834). See also: Robyn Arianrhod, Seduced by Logic: Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Somerville and
the Newtonian Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2012).
93
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, Undated. Predictably and unfortunately, due to her father’s fame, often Lovelace’s
writing is compared to Byron’s (and often Lovelace is the one making the comparisons). Under the entry, “Lady
Lovelace—the Proto-Computer,” Autumn Stanley writes: “The least interesting thing about Augusta Ada, Lady
Lovelace (1815-52) […] is that she was Lord Byron’s child” (Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a
Revised History of Technology (Rutgers University Press, 1995), 630).
94
Lovelace, Letter to Lady Byron, January 11, 1841.
160
exercised that power to exclude a note Babbage wanted to add). She was nobility to his nouveau
riche and, frankly, Babbage was an impulsive genius who needed reining in. She even fixed his
errors.
95
She was both writer and editor and, as such, referred to the Notes as her own, including
once as a “child of mine.”
96
Kuskey argues that the outsized involvement of Joseph Clement in
the drafting of the Engine troubled conceptualizations of authorship at the intersection of design
and production in industrial society
97
; Lovelace’s Leap(s), not to mention the vantage of her
positionality, complicates further any attempt to boil down the invention of the Engine to any
single “great man.”
98
She, too, drafted Babbage’s Engine beyond his instructions; where Clement
did so with measurements and materials, Lovelace (to be further discussed below) designed a
user experience with both analytical and imaginative faculties. She is, with Babbage, Clement,
and Menabrea, an author of the virtual machine. Despite her gender, Lovelace’s class and fame
afforded her power. She even had her own copyist. She designed the diagrams in pencil and, as
she wrote to Babbage, “They have been made out with extreme care and all the indices most
minutely and scrupulously attended to. Lord L is at this moment kindly inking it all over for
me.”
99
In this moment (and presumably others), hers is the intellectual work, and her husband
becomes the automatic hands.
In an essay she wrote on January 5, 1841, Lovelace asks, “What is Imagination?” In
language that seems to echo Babbage’s introduction of the Analytical Engine, she writes that

95
Babbage remembered that Lovelace sent back the Bernoulli calculations he had done for her, “having detected a
grave mistake which I had made in the process” (2019, p. 136). The nature of this mistake is not known, but this
anecdote reaffirms why the machine was invented. She had also once criticized the published work of her tutor,
Augustus de Morgan, and was proven correct years later.
96
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, July 27, 1843.
97
Jessica Kuskey, “Math and the Mechanical Mind: Charles Babbage, Charles Dickens, and Mental Labor in Little
Dorrit,” in Dickens Studies Annual (2014): 247-274.
98
Per Matthew L. Jones, Babbage relied on Joseph Clement because Clement eventually had a better material
understanding of the machine than he did. In the end, like Lovelace, Clement “had the ideas in his head” (Reckoning
with Matter, 51-3, 124, 201).
99
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, July 2, 1843.
161
imagination is “that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the world of science”
and that scientists are “those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds.”
The sentiment echoes other essays from this period which find affinities between the new pursuit
of knowledge and Romanticism; Babbage’s friend John Herschel, for instance, names “scientific
inquiry […] an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations.”
100
If, as Babbage
claimed, his punch card system was a “bridge” from the known to the unknown, then it seems for
Lovelace that such mechanisms of automation could be harnessed as tools for imagination
itself.
101
For her, the tables of the Difference Engine are full of “beauty & symmetry.” Rainbows
were proof that science provided metaphysical answers.
102
To her mother, she wrote that she
believed herself “to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me
pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature.” When she ghostwrote for the “true
artists” (providing mechanisms of automation on her own), she needed to unveil what was
otherwise hidden: to express the inexpressible. Indeed, she believed science, metaphysics, and
poetry were synonymous practices; and so, she considered herself as imaginative as her father.
103

Lovelace famously asks in “Note A”: what if “the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the
science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of [the punch card system’s]
expression and adaptations”? This digression, one of her more powerful “leaps,” counters the

100
Judith Bailey Slagle, “Joanna Baillie and Sir John Herschel,” in The Wordsworth Circle 49, no. 2 (2018): 85-92.
Slagle traces Herschel’s friendship with poets and quotes his “Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural
Philosophy” (1830) as well as Adam Smith’s “History of Astronomy,” which makes similar remarks.
101
See also: John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon (University of
Chicago Press, 2012); Richard C. Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism (JHU Press, 2018).
102
On March 15, 1834, Lovelace wrote a letter to William Frend asking him to provide her explanations for the
physics of rainbows. Later she wrote a poem titled “The Rainbow,” an ode to the natural world as a site of emotional
renewal. See: Sam Illingworth, A Sonnet to Science: Scientists and Their Poetry (Manchester UP, 2019), 58-60.
103
I mean this in two ways: by her own announcement, Lovelace claimed in a July 30, 1843 letter to Babbage that
she did “not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (&
Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly;” and she even describes her writing style in ways that
trouble many of the binaries put forth in this paper—that “it is especially unlike a woman’s style surely; but neither
can I compare it with any man’s exactly” (Lovelace, Letter to Charles Babbage, Undated).
162
idea that the Engine will only “assist us in making available what we are already acquainted
with.” It implies the possibility of new expressions.
It is worth noting that Babbage did not ask Lovelace to produce a translation. Like
Mephistopheles offering to become Faust’s assistant, Lovelace did not inform Babbage until a
draft was finished. Her “Fairyism,” unlike the machine which “has no pretenses,” is not a made-
to-order tool. “I am a Fairy you know,” she wrote to Babbage in January 1845, “I have my own
fairy resources, which none can judge of.” She was more a ghost in the machine, agential and
spectral, than a cog in the discourse machinery Kittler describes. Like computers, her intellectual
processes could only be taken on faith. As she wrote to Babbage years earlier, “You are a brave
man to give yourself wholly up to Fairy-Guidance!—I advise you to allow yourself to be
unresistingly bewitched.”
104
This bewitching suggests an impish challenge to truth and order;
rather than the fairy as obedient helper, it is the “certain sprites & fairies” who, as Lovelace
writes to her tutor Augustus de Morgan, are “in one shape now, & the next minute in a form
most dissimilar,” that are to blame for any mistakes in one’s mathematics and “in the world of
Fiction.”
105
Here is the fairy is almost a gremlin, a creature invented to blame for the goings
wrong in a machine. But bewitching is also about power. When Babbage calls Lovelace the
“Enchantress of Number”—when she refers to herself, in a letter to her mother, as the “High-
Priestess of Babbage’s Engine”—she assumes the role of the inspired mind.
106
In the same letter
in which Babbage calls her “Ever my fair Interpretress,” he refers to himself as “Your faithful
slave,” placing her on a different kind of pedestal than his Silver Lady.
107
The mad scientist

104
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, September 1843.
105
Lovelace, Letter to Morgan, January 1841.
106
Lovelace, Letter to Lady Byron, September 15, 1843.
107
Babbage, Letter to Lovelace, September 12, 1843.
163
depends on his fairy secretary, the translator excels her translated, and the power binary which
later is used to define Turing and his Wrens is reversed.
Lovelace’s Fairy-Guidance transcends any “automatic” mode of labor; but this creative
streak is not separate from mathematical ability. Though some critics have accused Lovelace of
amateurism, she had, according to Babbage (via poet Henry Reed), a “peculiar capability, higher
he said than that of anyone he knew, to prepare the descriptions connected to his calculating
machines.”
108
Her Fairyism was a kind of genius. To describe the Engine in her Notes, she had to
guess at Babbage’s intent, drawing on their conversations, public lectures, and his contradictory
and incomplete blueprints. When she made errors, they were missed guesses at Babbage’s mind,
not bad math; much of what she was surmising in the Notes was “impossible […] to know by
intuition.”
109
Like programmers executing scripts in a test environment, Lovelace tested her ideas
against the inventor’s whims. She designed without a script the innerworkings of the virtual
machine, an exercise John Fuegi and Jo Francis describe as being “of almost inconceivable
difficulty,” and she did so well enough that Babbage learned something new about his own
invention.
110
Lovelace possessed a clarity of technological vision, a (dare I say poetic) talent for
translating imagination into clearly articulated technical documents. By deliberate collaboration
or by the subversive power dynamics of Fairyism, by virtue of having written the Notes with
such “peculiar capability,” Lovelace resists becoming the clerical function she describes herself
as serving. Such oscillations from Babbage’s interpreter to his “guide” parallel debates around
Lovelace’s contributions to computer science—a positionality which destabilizes her historical
memory and is embodied in her “science of operations.”

108
Padua, “Picturing Lovelace,” 217.
109
Babbage, Letter to Lovelace, July 2, 1843.
110
Jo Francis and John Fuegi, “Lovelace & Babbage and the Creation of the 1843 ‘Notes,’” in IEEE Annals of the
History of Computing Vol. 25, No. 4 (2003), 19-21.
164

The Meaning of Note G

A

B

Variables
acted upon

Variables
receiving
results

…

Data

Working Variables

Result Var.

1
V 1

1
V 2

1
V 3

0
V 4

0
V 5

0
V 6

…

1
V 21

…

1

×

1
V 2 ×
1
V 3

1
V 4,
1
V 5,
1
V 6

2

n

2n

2n

2n

…

Figure 4. Ada Lovelace’s Diagram of Operations.
A = “Number of Operation”; B = “Nature of Operation”; source: the “Diagram of Operations.”
111

“Note G” defines a virtual engine with a series of mathematical operations: “the steps through
which the engine could compute the Numbers of Bernoulli” and specifically “the value (either
numerical or algebraical) of any nth Number of Bernoulli B2n-1, in terms of all the preceding
ones, if we but know the values of B1, B3…B2n-3.” Those steps are visualized by a large table
with columns that represent the input (“Data”), process (“Nature of Operation”), intermediate
results (“Working Variables”) and output (“Result Variables”) that would occur during the
calculation of B7 (according to a hypothetical scenario in which the Engine had just completed
the calculations of B5). The table’s rows, except for certain repetitions (as discussed below),
represent every step, or change of state. The variables (V) each represent a location in the “store”
where which a value is pulled or inscribed; in Figure 4, for instance, after
1
V2 and
1
V3 are
multiplied in the “mill,” the result is designated to be inscribed onto three separate locations,
1
V4,
1
V5, and
1
V6, to be used again in a future step. At first glance, what this program does is
culturally uninteresting. As an expression, the eighth Bernoulli number (
-1
/30) does not mean

111
For a high-resolution image of the full diagram: https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/figures/menat6_2k.png.
165
much. But, because Lovelace is not the cybernetic brain she once imagined, and because she
writes the “diagram” for human readers, even at its most technical “Note G” remains a text with
embedded extra meanings. Unsurprisingly, the program has been studied extensively for its
affinities to today’s software. Curious programmers, for instance, have translated the diagram
into modern programming languages (including C, Python, and FORTRAN).
112
But while these
studies venture into human contexts, imagining a social history of computer programming that
begins before the twentieth century, none consider the gendered labor structures built into that
“code” and inherited from the inchoate secretarial figure.
To start, it’s worth considering why Lovelace chose this equation over others. She wrote
to Babbage: “I want to put in something about Bernoulli’s Numbers in one of my Notes as an
example of how an implicit function may be worked out by the engine without having been
worked out by human head or hands first.”
113
She was familiar with the equation because she had
studied it during her lessons with de Morgan, and she knew the Engine could in theory manage
the calculation because Babbage boasted as much.
114
The aim was to demonstrate, beyond mere
“facility of computation,” how a many-step calculation would look without the possibility of

112
In a 1979 Russian study titled “The Babbage Machine and the Origins of Programming,” A. K. Petrenko and O.
L. Petrenko translate the algorithm into a 65-line FORTRAN program. More recently, Jim Randell translated the
diagram into Python, which he describes in a blog post titled “Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage and the First
Computer Program” (December 8, 2015): http://jimpulse.blogspot.com/2015/12/ada-lovelace-charles-babbage-and-
first.html. Sinclair Target translated the program into C for his blog Two Bit History, in a post titled “What did Ada
Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?” (August 18, 2018): https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-
g.html. Following Lovelace’s comment on music, D. De Roure and P. Willcox built a web-based app for the Engine
to produce music: http://numbersintonotes.net/. And John Walker for Fourmilab Switzerland developed a web
emulator for the Engine in Java: https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/emulator.html.
113
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, July 10, 1843. The Notes were a collaborative effort: Babbage and Lovelace
“discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced.” He remembers in his autobiography that “I
suggested several, but the selection was entirely her own. So, also, was the algebraic working out of the different
problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace
the trouble” (Passages). But even if Babbage had provided her with the original equations, it was Lovelace who
translated the algebra into a step-by-step algorithm of her own design—an achievement which, as Thomas J. Misa
outlines extensively, is “reasonably clear” and “clearly indicated” in her letters (Misa, Ada’s Legacy, 14, 26).
114
In a January 1842 letter, Babbage told Alexander von Humboldt that the Engine would have the capacity to
“handle” Bernoulli numbers (Fuegi et al., “Lovelace & Babbage,” 21).
166
human error. In some ways this “example” is yet another expression of the Engine as a clerical
substitute; but it is an extreme case, chosen because the faculties required to quickly calculate
this equation exceeded “human head or hands.” The Bernoulli numbers jumpstarted the clerical
function beyond stenography and arithmetic to the start of something new, a precipice of real
computation. As Daston writes, “the analytical intelligence applied to making human machine
cooperation in calculation work was a rehearsal for an activity that would become known first as
Operations Research and later computer programming.”
115
As Chun writes about a different
moment in time, “One could say that programming became programming and software when the
command structure shifted from commanding a ‘girl’ to commanding a machine.”
116
But this
conclusion, in which software is defined as feminine and clerical, does not seem to apply to
Lovelace as unambiguously as it might have Turing’s Wrens. This section asks: What can be
said differently about the command structures built into code’s origins if those origins can be
traced back to the diagram of Lovelace?
There is something of Lovelace’s Fairy-Guidance in “Note G,” too. Even the selection of
the Bernoulli numbers seems to bear on her life and foresight. Lovelace would have known the
equation’s application for predicting random probability, herself having been quite interested in
the potential for mathematics to solve games of chance. Today, the equation is used to calculate
the flow of air or liquid across space, specifically for determining the value of points along the
path of that motion. Since the equation’s discovery at the end of the seventeenth century, its
application had only grown in importance, from building dams to estimating the structures of
stars and galaxies—as Lovelace defined the scientific imagination, “penetrat[ing] into the unseen
worlds around us.” Pertinent to Lovelace, who once wanted to write a book on “flyology,” the

115
Daston, “Calculation,” 28.
116
Chun, “Sourcery,” 29.
167
equation would become integral for determining the airflow across the wing of an airplane and
designing the exhaust of the Apollo rockets. “Note G” forecasts the ability of machines to make
calculations at scales large enough to accomplish such innovations. It is a demonstration of the
Engine’s universality. As Lovelace qualifies, “by the word operation, we mean any process
which alters the mutual relation of two or more things […]. This is the most general definition,
and would include all subjects in the universe” (“Note A”). The expression of an equation as
real-world applicable as Bernoulli’s via mechanical “operation” opens the utility of the Engine to
those unfathomable futures. It is the taming of “all subjects in the universe” into mere “things,”
the sublime movements of sound and stars into punched cards.
But is it code, really? The question is definitional. Herman H. Goldstine and John von
Neumann argue that code is not simply a translation from the language of mathematics—“the
numerical procedure by which [the programmer] has decided to solve a problem”—into machine
instruction.
117
Others have defined code as a symbolic set of signals given meaning only once
compiled or executed. On the one hand, as Alexander Galloway writes, “code is machine first,”
whereas Lovelace’s diagram is only linguistic. On the other hand, Galloway notes that hardware
alone “cannot do anything,” so any set of instructions which causes the machine to act and iterate
must be at least code-like.
118
Thomas J. Misa, to avoid these semantics, describes the Engine as
“reconfigurable.” Lovelace might have used the word “regulatable.” Scholars, citing the text of

117
Herman H. Goldstine and John von Neumann, “Planning and Coding Problems for an Electronic Computing
Instrument,” in “Report on the Mathematical and Logical Aspects of an Electronic Computing Instrument,” Part II,
Vol. 1 (Institute for Advanced Study, 1947), 2.
118
Chun, “Sourcery,” 42. These are the main arguments against the diagram’s definition as “code,” and they are
contested positions. For one, the difference between machine and higher-level code—the difference between an
algorithm to solve an equation and an abstracted, linguistic command—is mostly about proximity to hardware. The
idea that code is only code if it is executable may make some theoretical sense; a programmer “is produced through
the act of programming” and a “source code only becomes a source after the fact” (Chun, “Sourcery,” p. 23-24). But
in practice, code is often not executed and sometimes designed as such (e.g., code poetry). Alexander Galloway,
“Language Wants to Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology,” in Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 3 (2006), 326.
168
“Note G,” refer to the diagram as an “execution trace,” a log of the sequence of operations
performed by the Engine; indeed, Lovelace described it as “a complete simultaneous view of all
the successive changes [necessary] to perform the computation.”
119
Others, attending more to the
program’s intent, compare the table to “opcode,” or the parts of assembly language which pertain
to machine instruction. Each of these positions is defensible—and the anachronism prevents any
conclusion. But at the very least, the program shares both purpose and behaviors with computer
programming. The latter is best illustrated by its famous error:

A

B

Variables
acted upon

Variables
receiving
results

Indication
of change
in the value
on any
Variable

Statement
of Results

…

Working Variables

0
V 4

0
V 5

…

0
V 11

…

2

−

1
V 4 −
1
V 1

2
V 4

{
1
V 4 =
2
V 4}
{
1
V 1 =
1
V 1}

= (2n − 1)

2n − 1

3

+

1
V 5 +
1
V 1

2
V 5

{
1
V 5 =
2
V 5}
{
1
V 1 =
1
V 1}

= (2n + 1)

2n + 1

4

÷

2
V 5 ÷
2
V 4

1
V 11

{
2
V 5 =
0
V 5}
{
2
V 4 =
0
V 4}

= (2n − 1)
(2n + 1)

0

0

(2n − 1)
(2n + 1)

Figure 5. Ada Lovelace’s Famous Error.
A = “Number of Operation”; B = “Nature of Operation.”

For the fourth operation, as recorded in Figure 5, Lovelace lists the “Variables acted upon” as
2
V5 ÷
2
V4, or the resulting value of the third operation (as saved in the second position of the fifth
Variable column) divided by the result of the second operation (saved in the second position of
the fourth column). As many mathematicians have pointed out, this equation should be written

119
Thomas J. Misa, “Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the Bernoulli Numbers,” in Ada’s Legacy: Cultures of
Computing from the Victorian to the Digital Age (Morgan & Claypool, 2016), 22; M. Campbell-Kelly, and W.
Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (HarperCollins, 1986).
169
the other way around:
2
V4 ÷
2
V5. The error is likely one of typesetting—maybe even a copying
mistake by Lord Lovelace—because the other columns, both the “Statement of Results” and the
“Working Variable” (
0
V11), reflect the correct order: (2n-1) ÷ (2n+1). Perhaps for that reason, the
arbitrarily misplaced letter or number, rather than a mistake in mathematics, we might consider
this typo in “Note G” the “oldest bug in computing.”
120

The error highlights similarities between the subjectivity of Lovelace and future coders.
In interviews, multiple programmers have shared that “Note G” resembles “the experience of
programming”; Sinclair Target, for instance, told me the exercise reminded him of introductory
programming classes (just with different variables), that even today many early lessons in
computer programming ask students to write code for the calculation of a sequence (usually
Fibonacci).
121
Code’s abstraction from hardware means there is always some level of ignorance
in programming; the coder simultaneously occupies the subject position of both commander and
guesser—as Lovelace must, due the Engine’s technical obscurity. Arguably, the programmer’s
“ignorance” of “the path of decision-making within [her] own program” later becomes definitive
to how software works.
122
It is a mix of “pattern recognition without consciousness” with the
“inspired mind,” not unlike the way Lovelace describes her own work. Babbage, in accordance
with Enlightenment notions of experiential knowledge, invites audiences to watch his Difference
Engine grind and gnaw from the outside. In “Note G,” Lovelace flips the reader’s position such
that they share her own, like the Romantic poet, thinking the machine from within. We join with
Lovelace as she remains servile to Babbage’s designs yet also contributes creatively to those

120
Sinclair, “What did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?” Hans Moravec reminds that “Lady Lovelace, the
first programmer, never had a working computer to trouble her programs” (Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent
Mind (Oxford University Press, 1999), 85).
121
Sinclair, Target. Interview by Zachary M. Mann. Video call, 2020.
122
Hayles, My Mother, 28. Hayles is paraphrasing Joseph Weizenbaum.
170
designs and writes commands for the virtual machine. We can see that there is room for her
imagination, that any programmer creates their own unknown worlds even as they are burdened
by the designed worlds of others. Lovelace thus inaugurates in “Note G” a strange, new labor
position, a relationship between humans and machines that threads the needle between multiple
levels of authorship and clerical functions.

Fairy-Fountains
The actual code implied by “Note G”—the decks of punch cards which input data and inform the
Engine to change state—was never produced. Lovelace writes a program without a programming
language, but one which anticipates its translation; her Notes describe in detail the interplay of
Operation Cards with Variable Cards, Number Cards, et al.
123
At its most elementary level, the
Operation Cards determine the state—e.g., “divide” or “add”—while Variable Cards identify
the “Variables acted upon” and the “Variables receiving results.” For instance, in Figure 2, the
fourth operation required an Operation Card to activate the “divide” state, two Variable Cards to
pull the values
2
V5 and
2
V4 from the “store,” another Variable Card to deliver the operation

123
The following endnotes, an explanation of the punch card system, is a paraphrase of Lovelace’s translation, both
her and Menabrea’s words (with help from other works cited in this paper). While Babbage only describes two types
of punch cards in his journals, by the time the Notes are written, there are at least three. Operation Cards determine
the algebraic state (add, multiply, et al.). Variable Cards inform the machine which columns (V’s) in the “Store” to
fetch values from and deliver intermediate results to. These are alternately expressed by Lovelace as either
Supplying Cards or Receiving Cards, of which there are usually three per operation. For instance, if the machine
needs to add together variables A + B to make C, an Operation Card will activate the “addition” state, two Variable
Cards will “supply” A and B by designating the two columns where they are stored, and a third Variable Card will
identify a third column to “receive” the calculated sum C (at which point the calculation will end, or C can be
further used as a new variable in a future operation). These Variable Cards contain additional information, such as
whether the column should be reset to zero after the calculation is complete, whether the number should be toggled
between positive and negative, and whether the column should be treated as a quantity or, in the case of indices of
power, types of “operations” (in which case Variable Cards are called upon to act as Operation Cards). Rather than
pointing to columns, Number Cards, Menabrea explains, specify an actual number (or algebraic expression); these
cards are used for timesaving: for example, by having a complex value such as Pi already expressed by punch card,
the Engine is saved from calculating Pi every time it is needed to determine a circumference. This would allow the
Engine to, for instance, calculate the next Bernoulli number without having to calculate the preceding one.
171
result to
0
V11, and two more Variable Cards to instruct the Engine to reset V4 and V5 once the
operation is complete (by returning their values to zero). This punch card system makes possible
the separation of memory from operations, a bifurcated design which lets the “store” and “mill”
speak to each other independently. The ability to generate and save calculated values was, per
Plant, an “unprecedented simulation of memory.”
124
But this was far from the most advanced
capability of Babbage’s design. The reason the diagram is considered a forerunner to modern
programming is the Engine’s capacity (using a fourth kind of punch card, Combinatorial Cards)
to designate sequences of prior punch cards to repeat on command: to cause “the prism over
which the train of pattern-cards is suspended to revolve backwards instead of forwards” in order
to “bring the card or set of cards in question into play a second time” and thus re-perform a
sequence of operations (“Note C”). These cycles, like the aforementioned “states,” are executed
automatically, reducing the number of total cards required and allowing “more symmetry and
simplicity in the arrangements” (“Note G”). Babbage called this “eating its own tail.”
125
All used
input cards function as an accessible memory bank, a cache or library of performable operations
that can be re-accessed again without human intervention.

124
Plant, “The Future Looms,” 52.
125
A possible fourth type of punch card, called Combinatorial Cards, are the least explained in published materials
but probably the closest approximate to code. These cards are instructions to the Engine for manipulating the other
processes. If all punch cards used in a calculation enter a “library”—a sort of holding area, or cache—Combinatorial
Cards can manipulate the prism to re-access those already used cards and/or skip others. As Lovelace explains in the
Notes, because punch cards are entered into the Engine in a particular order, the Combinatorial Cards essentially do
two things: (1) enter the prism into a “reverse” or “forward” state, and (2) set an end variable so the machine knows
when to return to normal function. As Plant points out, “The cards were selected by the machine as it needed them
and effectively functioned as a filing system, allowing the machine to store and draw on its own information” (“The
Future Looms,” 52). This greatly reduced the number of cards required; whereas the Jacquard loom required 24,000
punch cards, executed in a single order, to produce the famous 1839 silk portrait of Jacquard, by rough estimate the
calculation of the eighth Bernoulli number would require less than 100.
172
Number of
Operation
Nature of
Operation
Variables
acted upon
Variables
receiving
results
…
13
{
{
−
1
V 6 −
1
V 1
2
V 6
14 +
1
V 1 +
1
V 7
2
V 7
15
÷
2
V 6 ÷
2
V 7
1
V 8
16
×
1
V 8 ×
3
V 11
4
V 11
17
{
−
2
V 6 −
1
V 1
3
V 6
18 +
1
V
1
+
2
V
7

3
V
7

19
÷
3
V 6 ÷
3
V 7
1
V 9
20
×
1
V 9 ×
4
V 11
5
V 11
21
×
1
V 22 ×
5
V 11
0
V 12
22 +
2
V 12 +
2
V 13
3
V 13
23 −
2
V 10 −
1
V 1
3
V 10
Here follows a repetition of Operations thirteen to twenty-three

Figure 6. Ada Lovelace’s Loop.

It is this mnemonic structure that makes possible the Engine’s capacity, to use a modern
parlance, to perform a “while” LOOP. When programmers praise Lovelace’s diagram, they refer
to the GO-TO statements and IF-THEN branching in its logic, but especially the capacity of the
diagram to repeat a pattern based on external input (iteration) and internal logic (recursion) for
predetermined durations.
126
Lovelace’s diagram lists 25 operations but, as indicated by the three

126
As Wilfried Hou Je Bek points out, the term LOOP denotes a vast chain of beings (iterators, GO TO statements
with passing arguments, count-controlled loops, condition-controlled loops, collection-controlled loops, tail- end
recursion, enumerators, continuations, generators, Lambda forms, et al.) (“Loop,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon,
edited by Matthew Fuller (MIT Press, 2008), 182). It includes two parts that are no different in function but different
in cause and feel: iteration and incursion. The PERL glossary defines “iteration” as “doing something repeatedly.”
The entry for “recursion” begins: “The art of defining something in terms of itself,” and ends: “[Recursion] often
173
braces ({) in Figure 3, some of those operations (13-23) are designated to be performed twice,
with operations 13-16 and 17-20 each repeating within the parent LOOP. The diagram implies
but does not explicate the use of Combinatorial Cards, added to operations 16, 20, and 23, which
would activate the Engine’s “reverse” state for a predetermined number of rotations. Indeed, the
necessary repetitions for computing a number of Bernoulli required Lovelace, as she intended, to
show just how flexible the punch card system could be. As she writes in “Note G,” the equation
was “a rather complicated example of its powers.” Dana Angluin suggests that the equation’s
complexity “led to the development of some of the more subtle and powerful concepts, e.g.,
looping and indexing.”
127
While the Engine’s capacity for recursion might not resemble software
today, the flexibility of the punch card system—the programmer’s ability to set the variables
determining the parameters of the LOOP: when to start and stop rewinding or skipping—allows
for infinite “free play” between the Engine’s library and its operations. The idea that a machine
could, like woodblock or jacquard cards, retain information, but also alter that information—
reorder or partially repeat—was a century ahead of its time; this was both stylus and a writing
pad, which self-erased and self-inscribed. Lovelace’s approach to the challenge of the equation
illustrated and developed the Engine’s potential as a general-purpose machine.
128
It is no windup
danseuse; once preset, it could be let loose.

works out okay in computer programs if you’re careful not to recurse forever, which is like an infinite loop with
more spectacular failure modes.”
127
Dana Angluin, “Lady Lovelace and the Analytical Engine,” in Newsletter of the Association for Women in
Mathematics Vol. 6 (1976), 7.
128
Babbage is credited with inventing the general-purpose computer for the same reason the Analytical Engine is
different than the Difference Engine, the Jacquard loom, and the Silver Lady. Those automatons each have single
states: add, cross-weave, dance. The first two allow for input data (“variables acted upon”), while the Silver Lady
does not; but the Analytical Engine allows for both variables and different states. While a washing machine allows
for settings (hot and cold) and uses multiple states (rinse and spin), the Engine, due the programmer’s ability to set
values, branch, and loop, allows for an infinite amount of “free play” between variables and states. It is that quality
which, in addition to her Leap, Lovelace expresses so beautifully in the Notes—an illustration of the Engine as “the
material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity” (“Note A”). As Angluin
put it, “There in [the 1843 paper], a century before its time, is the concept of a general-purpose digital computer,
developed to an amazing degree of sophistication” (“Lady Lovelace,” 6-7).
174
Of course, this is all theoretical—or, as Lovelace terms it, “experimental.” When asked
whether the Engine is “really even able to follow” such a program, she responds that only seeing
is believing (“Note G”). Per Goldstine and Neumann, it is impossible to “foresee in advance and
completely the actual course” of a program; coding is “the technique of providing a dynamic
background to control [only] the automatic evolution of a meaning.”
129
To put it another way: the
Engine’s pathways are rigid, but full of so many twists and turns that it becomes abstracted, that
it resembles thought enough to give the impression of taking control, of becoming its own (fairy)
guidance system. The artist Wilfried Hou Je Bek describes a LOOP as that “gargoyle of cyclical
imagination in computation.”
130
Like Lovelace, he sees new possibilities in this part of machine
programming. Quoting William Hazlitt’s character sketch of Coleridge in The Spirit of the Age,
Hou Je Bek refers to the capacity of a program to LOOP infinitely as that by which Coleridge,
after his mind was turned cold by mathematical study, finds his salvation: when he “wandered at
eve by fairy-stream or fountain,” guided by the light of poetry. This fountain is a source which is
not limited by rules, only by restrictions for behavior which can be manipulated (or tapped into
via poetic sensibility) to think outside the bounds of known reality. Between the equations of
“Note G” are the “hidden realities” that a scientist-poet seeks to discover. As Lovelace’s virtual
design taught Babbage something new about his own invention, the machine can “discover” new
understandings of mathematics: “the relations and the nature of many subjects in that science are
necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated,” leading to “collateral
influences” (“Note G”). This is a far cry from merely “making available” what is already known.
Here again the performing object guides the inspired mind.

129
Goldstine and Neumann, “Planning and Coding,” 2.
130
Hou Je Bek “Loop,” 179.
175
While the Engine was designed for a clerical function, sometimes when it is personified
by Lovelace and Babbage, it comes off as much more. Lovelace, for instance, at one point writes
to Babbage, “Surely the machine allows you a holiday sometimes.”
131
The Notes may have been
her “child,” but the machine takes on a life of its own, and some of that imagined subjectivity is
due the Engine’s capacity for remembering past processes and reacting to the new variables it
produces. Lovelace explains that the Engine anticipates what it needs not be instructed: “The
engine is capable, under certain circumstances, of feeling about to discover which of two or more
possible contingencies has occurred, and of then shaping its future course accordingly.”
132

Babbage himself imagined that he was “teaching the Engine to foresee and then act upon that
foresight.”
133
It is not the algebraicist but the Variable Cards who “furnish the mill with its
proper food” (“Note B”), not the mathematician but the Combinatorial Cards who reshape “its
future course.” It is a design that echoes the way Turing imagines the possibility of real machine
intelligence: when computers are not programmed with explicit instructions on how to behave in
given circumstances, but instead are taught in some fashion.
134
This is not unlike how we think
about A.I. today, as that which we teach to let guide us. And it is perhaps something akin to the
end of “The Amanuensis,” when Miss Alford imagines “the character of the authoress […]
merged in that of the Amanuensis.”
135
At the very least, the Engine, like Lovelace, contributes
beyond its secretarial position. Though “Lovelace’s Objection” looms large in computer history,
her Notes trouble its message again and again; the Engine does what it is ordered to perform, but
it also “feels” and “discovers” the “possible.”

131
Lovelace, Letter to Babbage, March 24, 1839.
132
Lovelace, “A Sketch,” footnote.
133
Charles Babbage, “Of the Analytical Engine,” in Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engines: Selected
Writings, edited by P. Morrison and E. Morrison (Dover Publications, 1961), 53.
134
D. Abramson, “Turing’s Responses to Two Objections,” in Minds & Machines Vol. 18 (2008), 156.
135
ABDY, “The Amanuensis,” 452.
176

Conclusion
More than a century later, Turing stood on a similar precipice as Babbage. His improvement on
the design Lovelace left for history was the notion that subprograms could be added to rewrite
others and themselves—that programs could be programmers, too.

His view was a future where
it is the “masters who are liable to get replaced” rather than the “servants,” and that the future of
software would be the eventual transfer of authority and control from the human to a program
stored in the machine.
136
These realizations coincide with the invention of the ENIAC, the first
electronic computer and “a computer of the Babbage type.”
137
In 1945, an ENIAC subprogram
called the “master programmer”—a different kind of “thinking” guidance system—sent change
orders to the still human computers. This new labor structure persisted with the digital turn; as
Chun explains, there remains a “sense that we are slaves, rather than masters, clerks rather than
managers—that, because ‘code is law,’ the code, rather than the programmer, rules.” For Chun,
“code as law” flips the command structures of human and machine; it “establishes a perpetual
oscillation between the two positions: every move to empower also estranges”—like the fairy, it
helps but also tinkers and obscures.
138
Anne Balsamo expands this role reversal more broadly, to
“the doubled nature of technology: as determining and determined, as both autonomous and

136
Alan Turing, “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society on 20 February 1947,” in MD COMPUTING Vol. 12
(1947). The labor organization that Chun describes at Bletchley Park persisted until the invention of automatic
computer programming allowed coders to communicate with these new subprograms instead of the machine
directly. Ironically, this sparked fear that the “manly” practice of coding was becoming de-skilled. Instead of
suffering through machine language like a “real man,” shortcuts allowed programmers to write without knowing
how the subroutines worked (p. 43). The development of such languages ended up displacing mostly female
computers and ushering in a male-dominated era of computer science. Chun points out that the very anxieties around
feminized software have, more recently, “paradoxically led to the romanticization and recuperation of early female
operators of the 1946 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) as the first programmers, for they,
unlike us, had intimate contact with and knowledge of the machine” (“Sourcery,” 19).
137
Neumann, qtd by Fuegi and Francis, “Lovelace & Babbage,” 18.
138
Chun “Sourcery,” 19-20.
177
subservient to human goals.”
139
And Hayles argues that the human and the machine are neither
mutually exclusive nor overlapping subject positions; instead, subjectivity is generated by a
feedback loop between the two states.
140
I argue that this feedback loop was there from the
beginning, embedded within Lovelace’s 1843 Notes. Though born of a desire for an ideal clerk,
the “thinking machine” shares with its fellow secretarial figures a tendency to think beyond (and
for) the inspired minds who imagine them as servile.
J. Chuan Chu, one of the hardware engineers for the ENIAC, called “software […] the
daughter of Frankenstein”—hardware’s feminine counterpart.
141
If hardware was Frankenstein’s
creature, software is an Eve born of Adam’s hardware rib. The metaphor mirrors the relationship
between Babbage and Lovelace, too; he, the man with a machine in his mind, and she who came
later, the only person who communicated with that machine directly.
142
Shelley, who in the novel
Frankenstein reduced the Enlightenment-educated man to the servant of his hardware creation,
had Dr. Frankenstein destroy his daughter. But computing history tells a different story. Software
replaces the man. Though the modern computer was not influenced by Lovelace’s writing, it was
“a striking case of design convergence.”
143
Software eventually inherited the same structures of
co-authorship which Lovelace embodied and described. Building on the secretarial workforce at
the end of the nineteenth century, itself built on the clerical labor of the previous century, women
would make up the bulk of human computing labor. Lovelace beget the Wrens and the so-called
“ENIAC girls,” the “brawn” to the corporate “brain” of twentieth-century computing innovation.

139
Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke University Press, 2011), 31.
140
Hayles, My Mother, 20.
141
Qtd in Chun, Programmed Visions, 33.
142
Lord Byron once wrote to John Murray, “I suppose Ada is the feminine of Adam” (Byron, Letter to Mr. Murray,
1820). Even here she seems torn between Adam and Eve—originator and duplicator.
143
Mark Priestley, “Babbage’s Engine,” in A Science of Operations (Springer, 2011), 49. According to Fuegi and
Francis, Howard Aiken referenced Babbage’s designs in 1937 while working on the electric calculator for IBM, and
Konrad Zuse encountered Babbage’s designs the same year (“Lovelace & Babbage, 18). Actual software would not
be theorized until Turing or fully realized until the Manchester Baby in 1948.
178
Even after WWII, this idea of clerical labor was so fundamental to the structure of the industry
that IBM measured production by “girl hours” not “man hours.”
144
Goldstine and Neumann,
whose work on the ENIAC essentially coined the verb “to program,” defined computing as a
relationship between scientists, who posit algorithms, and female programmers, who inscribe
them. Software replaced this structure with one just like it: subroutines that are both automatic
and authoritative, both mindless and full of high-level abstraction, as it was embodied in the first
computer programmer and her virtual object of desire.
“Lady Lovelace’s Objection” was not one of Lovelace’s leaps. It was a response to a
question in the air in the nineteenth century: can machines be authors? Will, as Leibniz carved
into his calculating device, “a machine built by human hands” ever be “greater than man”?
Babbage’s machines were a lightning rod for this idea. In 1844, the satirical magazine Punch
credits a “J. Babbage” with the invention of a “New Patent Mechanical Novel Writer” which
“adapted to all styles, and all subjects; pointed, pathetic, historic, silver-fork, and Minerva.” In
the article an “Author of Waverly” wants another machine, a “Patent Thinker, to suggest ideas;
in which he finds himself singularly deficient.”
145
And an 1851 flight of fancy in Blackwood’s
Magazine pictures the Analytical Engine as “infinitesimal” corridors of cogwheels, “subject to
comical crashes and bad puns.”
146
Despite the fact that Babbage’s engines aimed to replace only
a certain kind of intelligence (and, in fact, ended up producing another “wearisome,” specialized
kind of “mechanical mindfulness,” one that resembled more machinic than creative thinking), it
must have seemed possible that other machines might one day perform “origination.”
147
After

144
Hicks, Programmed Inequality, 21. See also: Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers,
Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (MIT Press, 2010).
145
“The New Patent Novel Writer,” Punch Vol. 7 (1844), 268.
146
Padua, “Picturing Lovelace,” 218.
147
Daston, Calculation, 22-29.
179
all, it was already a common belief that machines could “reason”; Lovelace was not alone in
claiming machines “could synthesize and analyze,” and thus could on their own reach the same
“sublime discoveries of Newton.”
148
It was not so far a leap to John Clark’s “Eureka Machine,” a
machine exhibited in 1845 which “composed” Latin hexameters by randomly supplying words to
fill a pre-arranged grammatical structure.
149
This was the slippery slope at the end of Lovelace’s
Notes, a promise that John Peter’s poetical mill, Walter Scott’s novel-writing loom, and Jonathan
Swift’s Laputan engine had become possible futures—that the punch card unlocked the power of
authorship in the machine.

148
Jones, Reckoning, 215-221. Jones quotes Charles Mahon, the third Earl of Stanhope, who invented his own
Analytical Machine and echoes many of the same beliefs as Babbage.
149
Forbes-Macphail, “I Shall in Due Time Be a Poet,” 162. A later review describes the Eureka Machine as “entitled
to take place with Babbage’s Calculating Machine, and inventions of that class” in terms of its curiosity” (“A Latin
Hexameter Machine,” Athenæum, No. 921 (June 21, 1945), 621).
180
CHAPTER 4

Generating @uthors
1
: The Lovelace Test, J. M. Coetzee, and the Future of Reading

In 1963, in the University of Cape Town student magazine The Lion & The Impala, the future
novelist J. M. Coetzee published a poem titled “Computer Poem” in two parts. On the left is the
version made by a “line generator” Coetzee designed for the IBM 1401; on the right is a version
of the same poem after it was edited by him:
Poem (ex computer)
Dawn Birds Stream
Calm-Mornings
You) Stand-Among
Forest
Alone Tense
You) Cry
You) Spend-The-Nights
I) Away-From
Terrified Rapt
Owls Blackmen
You) Hope Violence
Poem (edited)
Dawn, birds, a stream, a calm morning.
You stand among the trees alone and tense.
You have cried.
You spend the nights away from me,
Terrified, rapt,
Among owls and black men,
Hoping for violence.
2

In his pseudo-autobiography Youth (2002), Coetzee misremembers which company he worked
for when he composed the above lines, probably confusing this poem with a second computer-
generated poem (which I will return to in a moment). Before 1964, Coetzee still worked for the
International Business Machines (IBM) offices in London, bouncing between the 1401 and the
room-sized 7090 computer, surrounded by a 1960s ecosystem of punch cards, magnetic tape, and

1
As Matthew Kirschenbaum writes in “What is an @uthor?” today the “landscape of social documentation and
medial interaction [...] collectively generates an algorithmically amplified real-time archive of authorial presence.”

This chapter repurposes this term for an era before social media allows William Gibson to hop on Twitter and nix
interpretations of his novel. Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is an @uthor?” (Los Angeles Review of Books, 2015).
2
J. M. Coetzee, “Computer Poem,” in The Lion & The Impala (University of Cape Town, March-April 1963).
181
console keyboards.
3
However, likely the circumstances described in Youth reflect some truth; the
narrator “used the dead hours of the night to get [the 1401] to print out thousands of lines in the
style of Pablo Neruda, using as a lexicon a list of the most powerful words in The Heights of
Macchu Picchu.”
4
Coetzee probably stayed afterhours at the IBM offices, where he translated a
program—generator and lexicon—into punched cards, fed the cards into the 1401, and brought
home the results as sheets of continuous printer paper. On the one hand, this was not so strange;
IBM at the time made a point of targeting poets as programmers.
5
On the other hand, a South
African newspaper reprinted the above poem, and Coetzee earned notoriety as “a barbarian who
want[ed] to replace Shakespeare with a machine.”
6

Before leaving IBM, Coetzee’s relationship to the computing industry was challenged by
a project much more serious than poetry. He was assigned to assist one of the clients who rented
time on the 7090: a man working for the Royal Air Force on the TSR-2 bomber. Coetzee, tasked
with testing whether any of the cards—a program for calculating wind-tunnel data—had been
“mispunched,” wondered if he was “participat[ing] in evil.” Like U.S. protesters burning punch
cards around the same time, Coetzee began to consider the client’s “suitcase full of cards” as
symbolic of the government’s intention to commit violence.
7
(Indeed, IBM was also hired by the
Apartheid state for purposes of population control.
8
) Then, after IBM, the stakes were raised

3
Coetzee worked as an applications programmer at IBM while remotely finishing his work on a master’s thesis for
the University of Cape Town, on the prose style of Ford Madox Ford. At IBM, he helped develop programs for the
7090 (but because time on the mainframe was valued, most of his time was spent on the 1401). Rebecca Roach, “J.
M. Coetzee’s Aesthetic Automatism,” in Modern Fiction Studies Vol. 65 No. 2 (2019).
4
J. M. Coetzee, Youth (Penguin, 2002), 160. Roach points out that the above poem was more accurately based on
800 words from Roget’s Thesaurus (“Aesthetic Automatism,” 10).
5
The challenge of early programming languages required creative linguistics and logic more than pure mathematics
or engineering. That said, Coetzee was both; per Youth, a mathematician “disciple of Ezra Pound” (p. 20). He even
quits IBM, he admits, “in order to become a poet” (p. 109). Most scholarship on Youth focuses on its relationship to
Modernism, place, and Coetzee’s critical representation of his younger self.
6
Coetzee, Youth, 161.
7
Ibid., 83.
8
As I mention in the Introduction, punched cards transitioned to governmental functions such as the census,
population control (death and internment camps), and the military industrial complex.
182
even higher. From 1964 to 1965, Coetzee worked for International Computers and Tabulators
(ICT), assigned to the Atlas project. The Atlas 2, at the time the fastest computer in the world,
was a cutting-edge prototype being developed at Cambridge University; one of the computers,
the one Coetzee was assigned to, was intended for the Atomic Weapon Research Establishment
in Aldermaston, a politically charged Cold War symbol and the subject of multiple marches by
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Every other week, Coetzee traveled to Cambridge with
a roll of punched tape, pajamas, and a toothbrush to work through the night on the Atlas; godlike,
he watched his code deliver instructions to the most powerful computer in the world, forced it to
produce lines of poetry during downtime, and pondered his role in a world increasingly beholden
to “computationalism” and the inhumane acts it sponsors.
9

Most scholarship on this period of Coetzee’s life tends to focus on the ways that these
experiences lead to the anti-computationalism of his award-winning novels. The recent work of
Rebecca Roach, for instance, argues that his time at IBM and ICT were foundational for his
understanding of “the interdependence of the computer industry and global politics,” and that his
later writing would “seek autonomy from the excesses of computationalism as embodied in the
Apartheid state.”
10
By the end of the 1960s, Coetzee was marching against Aldermaston and the
Vietnam War. He contributed to revolutionary rhetorics that rose in opposition, as Fred Moten
suggests, to a parallel rise of cybernetic structures, from Leibniz to Babbage to Norbert Weiner.
11

9
David Golumbia, in The Cultural Logic of Computation (Harvard University Press, 2009), defines
“computationalism is a “set of beliefs” (p. 2) which “benefit and fit into established structures of institutional
power” (p. 3); He notes that “computers aid institutions in centralizing, demarcating, and concentrating power” (p.
4), are politically conservative and harken back to Enlightenment rationalism. N. Katherine Hayles, in My Mother
Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (University of Chicago Press, 2005), calls the combination of
computationalism and computational instrumentality a “regime of computation.”
10
Rebecca Roach, “Hero and Bad Motherland: J. M. Coetzee’s Computational Critique,” in Contemporary
Literature Vol. 59 No. 1 (2018), 82-3. In addition to Roach’s work and Youth, I am referring to the recent biography
by J. C. Kannemeyer, J. M. Coetzee: A Life in Writing (Scribe, 2012).
11
Fred Moten, “The Touring Machine (Flesh Thought Inside Out),” in Plastic Materialities, edited by Brenna
Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (Duke University Press, 2015), 181.
183
And he would argue that the computing industry had created a world in which “freedom” has
become defined as “a sequence of YES-NO decisions”
12
; computers, he writes in Youth, “burn
either-or paths in the brain of its users and thus lock them irreversibly into its binary logic.”
13
It
is now, he writes in 2016, “up to the poets.”
14
To that end, the few scholars who have written on
Coetzee’s computer poems argue that his editing aims to resist binary logics. For instance, the
final form of his computer poem “Hero and Bad Mother in Epic, a poem”—this one actually
generated by the Atlas 2, the same operating system that would eventually be used to perform
nuclear weapons research—seeks to deprogram his mind, to free his thinking of the “dominant
semiotic regime.”
15
Published in the South African Black consciousness magazine Staffrider, the
poem is made up of seemingly nonsense phrases chosen for the way they run astray from “the
process of language formalization” occurring at the level of code.
16

This chapter is less interested in the content of these—and, in fact, any poems. Assigning
meaning to the output of computer poetry, as this chapter will explore from technical rather than
literary aspects, is often a lose-lose scenario. Instead, I am interested in what Espen J. Aarseth
phrases as “how meaning struggles to produce itself through the cyborg activity of writing.”
17

Consider, for instance, the conditions under which Coetzee composed “Hero and Bad Mother.”
Atlas 2 was a brand-new kind of machine, equipped with the first ever operating system—the
“Supervisor.” The Supervisor allowed multiple programs and users to work at the same time,

12
J. M. Coetzee, “On Literary Thinking,” in Textual Practice Vol. 30 No. 7 (2016), 1152.
13
Coetzee, Youth, 160.
14
Coetzee, “On Literary Thinking,” 1153.
15
J. M. Coetzee, “Hero and Bad Mother in Epic, a poem,” in Staffrider Vol. 1 No. 1 (1978). Roach invokes the
writing of Rita Raley on Tactical Media.
16
Roach, “Aesthetic Automatism,” 7. In this view Coetzee arguably generates lines not “through protocol,” as
Alexander Galloway describes computational production, but against it; Protocol: How Control Exists After
Decentralization (MIT Press, 2004), 17. As the e-poet Loss Pequeño Glazier writes, code’s “lack of fixity” causes
contradictions between abstraction and protocol: “a dance between possibilities of representation” Digital Poetics:
Hypertext, Visual-Kinetic Text, and Writing in Programmable Media (University of Alabama Press, 2002), 15.
17
Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 57.
184
except in “Supervisor mode,” the override setting in which Coetzee did most of his day job. It
was this deep level of code where Coetzee wrote the “Generate Index” which produced the lines
used in “Hero and Bad Mother.”
18
Ignoring for a moment that he might have crashed a top-secret
computer to generate what was essentially text babble, Coetzee is producing poetry in the same
space, register, and syntax as the code he is writing for an operating system intended for nuclear
weapons research. It is reasonable to assume this extracurricular programming aided or altered
his approach to his actual job: writing the subroutine which prompted the Supervisor to check in
on its own process “at the end of each swing of the magnetic tape,” what Coetzee describes as its
“self-consciousness.”
19
This was a particularly difficult kind of programming because, prior to
the release of FORTRAN 66 (in 1966), programming languages were not standardized. Coetzee
had the “mental ingenuity” for working across languages, juggling magnetic tape, punch cards,
early FORTRAN, and even assemble (machine) code.
20

To complicate this further, Coetzee generated thousands of pages of text, stacks of cheap
paper still with the perforated edges attached, now boxed at the Ransom Center at the University
of Texas, Austin.
21
He brought them with him when he began a doctoral program in Literature in
1965 and left them untouched until he finished. From 1971 to 1975, he pored over the printouts,
like the students working for Jonathan Swift’s Laputan Professor, underlining phrases here and
there until finally, years later, he composed “Hero and Bad Mother.” If that labor isn’t broken
enough, it should be noted that Coetzee wrote three texts—a Random Number Generator (RNG),
which used prime numbers to create the semblance of randomness; a data set that made up the

18
J. M. Coetzee, “Generate Index,” 1965. Part of file labelled “Computer Poetry, Dot Matrix printout. 1965,”
Container Obs 143. Roach informs that the code “126” in the printout of the line generator identifies the mode.
19
Coetzee, Youth, 143.
20
Ibid., 144.
21
J. M. Coetzee Papers. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin. Accessed June 2018 and January 2020.
185
available vocabulary; and the Generate Index, prescribing strict subject-object grammar—which
interact only within the abstraction of the Atlas and disappear (becoming “source text after the
fact”) upon their execution.
22
This is the human-machine co-authorship of pseudo-poems, written
with pseudo-code, delivered via a punch card reader that electronically detects holes: a jumble of
the era’s storage and inscription technologies, with every part of it separate from the other across
space, time, and materiality. (Contra the Analytical Engine, the electronic computer has its own
internal memory; here, punch cards deliver but do not need to store the programs or data.) And
here, like the master programmer of the ENIAC, arguably it is the “Supervisor” which protocols
Coetzee’s creative thought; do we thus shift the blame for the babble to the machine, as we might
Coetzee’s role in nuclear weaponry?
23
Do we read the words differently knowing that they were
produced via the “misuse” of the platform?
I am asking a larger question: What is the real text? Who is the real author (or per Roland
Barthes, the “mediator […] born simultaneously with his text,” whom we need to close the text’s
possible meanings)?
24
N. Katherine Hayles argues that definitions of “the work” need to change
today; text is now a “process that includes the data files, the programs that call these files, and
the hardware on which the programs run, as well as the optical fibers, connections, switching
algorithms, and other devices necessary to route the text from one networked computer to
another.”
25
She advocates for a media-specific analysis that in the above case might include a

22
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Sourcery and Source Codes,” in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT
Press, 2011). Also at the Ransom Center are other line generators, mostly written for an IBM 1401, each a variation
of the other. One, for instance, accesses a library of 1000 words, of 5 grammatical types, to produce 5-word lines.
Another used an 800-word library and allowed for any combinations. All of them used rudimentary programming
(needing to, for instance, instruct the machine to ignore spaces. “Line Generator,” May 30, 1963, Part of file labelled
“Computer Poetry, Dot Matrix printout. 1965.” Container Obs 143.
23
I am thinking here of Tara McPherson’s “US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and
UNIX,” in Race After the Internet (Routledge, 2013). McPherson writes that the modular structure of software
design at the birth of the software era aids the depoliticizing of tech innovation and occludes intersectional thinking.
24
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, translated by Heath (Fontana, 1977), 144-147.
25
Hayles, My Mother, 93.
186
study of the Atlas platform, the lines of pseudo-code, the briefcases of punch cards and magnetic
tape, the card and tape readers, and the “event” which marks their interaction. As Aarseth writes
of Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, Roman (1962), a novel written on cards that the reader
shuffles before reading, “this breaks down concepts such as ‘the text itself’ into two independent
technological levels: the interface and the storage medium.”
26
Is the “work” one or the other, or
is it the algorithm—the act of shuffling?
27
Attending to such material processes of composition
renders absurd what Michel Foucault has pointed out is our tendency to consider “an author and
their work” a contiguous unit.
28
We struggle reading elsewise because, as Leah Hendrickson
argues, we assume all texts embody a totalizing human agency, what she calls a “hermeneutic
contract” into which we enter with the presumed communicator.
29
Old definitions of text remain
beholden to readers who want to accept works at face value “so that they can get on with the
work of interpreting.”
30
All nonhuman elements are conceptualized as handmaidens to the
author—including in copyright law.
31
But what if those nonhuman “artifices of intelligence”
contribute more to the act of authoring?
32

26
Aarseth, Cybertext, 11.
27
Umberto Eco, upon encountering Saporta’s “novel,” wrote that he had no need or desire to read it: “despite its
promise to yield a different story every time it was shuffled [...] the book had exhausted all its possible readings in
the very enunciation of its constructive idea.” Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Harvard University Press, 1989), 170.
But what about, say, Zach Whalen’s “How to Make a Twitter Bot with Google Spreadsheets (Version 0.4)” (from
zachwhalen.net, 2015). This document is the equivalent of IKEA furniture instructions, even though, if followed
closely, it produces what are essentially a series of combinatory poems.
28
Michel Foucault, “What is An Author?” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault
1954-1984, Vol. 2 (Penguin, 2019), 211.
29
Leah Hendrickson, “Computer-Generated Fiction in a Literary Lineage: Breaking the Hermeneutic Contract,” in
Logos Vol. 29 No. 2-3 (2018).
30
Hayles, My Mother, 94. Jerome McGann remarks that reading only the material surface of a text is now outdated,
in Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies After the World Wide Web (Springer, 2001).
31
Annemarie Bridy notes that legal bodies use an expedient logic to conflate the author’s author (“people-who-
write-programs-that-make-art”) with a work’s origin (and thus legal owner); “Coding Creativity: Copyright and the
Artificially Intelligent Author,” in the Stanford Technology and Law Review (2012), 22.
32
In a separate article, Leah Hendrickson argues that the advent of natural language generation (machine learning
software) has tipped the scales, such that generative software should be considered agential; “Tool vs. Agent:
Attributing Agency to Natural Language Generation Systems,” in Digital Creativity Vol. 29 Nos. 2-3 (2018). But
even in the case of a simple Python function, such as Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge” poem generator, as other
artists repurpose the code, eventually it is the code that behaves as the author-function. Nick Montfort, “Taroko
187
The history of imagined generative literature has been gestured to over the course of this
dissertation, from Swift’s and Alexander Pope’s composition engines to Walter Scott’s novel-
weaving machine in The Betrothed and Punch’s “The New Patent Novel Writer”
33
; this tradition
has accelerated in twentieth-century science fiction.
34
There is a long history, too, of actual
generative methods, from John Peters’ table for writing Latin verses and John Clark’s famous
1845 “Eureka machine” to the use of dice games for producing music or cut-ups to make
poetry.
35
These methods become adapted for computers between the 1950s and the 1990s
36
; and,
of course, today “Electronic Literature,” events such as NaNoGenMo, and the rise of social

Gorge,” posted at nickm.com on January 8, 2009 (https://nickm.com/taroko_gorge/). To see the full code of the
poem, you can use your browser’s equivalent of right click and “view source.”
33
“The New Patent Novel Writer,” Punch Vol. 7 (1844): 268; “The Speaking Machine,” Punch Vol. 11 (1846), 83.
34
Two of the more famous early science fictions on the topic, which come out around the same time that artificial
intelligence forms as an area of study, are Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “EPICAC” (1950), a retelling of Cyrano
where a machine pens the love letters, and Roald Dahl’s “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1954), a story of a
machine that uses math to produces stories at the press of a button. Matthew Kirschenbaum, in Track Changes: A
Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard University Press, 2017), includes a great list of later such (38-40):
Fritz Leiber’s The Silver Eggheads (1961), in which “wordmills” have replaced authors; Michael Frayn’s The Tin
Men (1965), in which a program for computer-generated newspaper stories is used to automate fiction; Stanislaw
Lem’s “U-Write-It” (1971) provides a would-be author with “building elements” to construct their own story from
snippets; Italo Calvino created the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works
(OEPHLW) in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979); Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Steam Powered Word Processor”
(1986), in which a reverend invents the Word Loom, which automates the writing of sermons for him; John Varley’s
“The Unprocessed Word” (1985), a mock letter to a publisher about a writer unsatisfied with MacWrite, who
purchases MacConflict and MacClimax so that the stories write themselves; and I’m sure, many more. Janis Svilpis,
“The Science-Fiction Prehistory of the Turing Test,” in Science Fiction Studies Vol. 35 No. 3 (Nov. 2008): 430-449.
35
Examples beyond Peters’ pamphlet, discussed in Chapter One, are provided by Imogen Forbes-Macphail in “‘I
Shall in Due Time Be a Poet’: Ada Lovelace’s Poetical Science in Its Literary Context,” in Ada’s Legacy: Cultures
of Computing from the Victorian to the Digital Age (2016), 162-4: “A Latin Hexameter Machine,” Athenæum No.
921, June 21, 1945, 621. Some famous uses of dice for music include those by Johann Phillipp Kirnberger (1757)
and Nikolaus Simrock (1792), the latter of which produced 45 trillion different waltzes without “understanding
anything about music or composition”; Burkhard Schafer, David Komuves, Jesus Manuel Niebla Zatarain, and
Laurence Diver, “A Fourth Law of Robotics? Copyright and the Law and Ethics of Machine Co-Production,” in
Artificial Intelligence and Law Vol. 23 No. 3 (2015), 222. The most famous cut-out poem is probably Tristan
Tzara’s “To Make a Dadaist Poem” (1920). I should also mention the I Ching here.
36
The earliest known computer-generated prose is a series of love letters that Christopher Strachey programmed a
Ferranti Mark I computer to generate; “M.U.C. Love Letter Generator” (1952). The first(ish) example of computer
poetry is Theo Lutz’s “Stochastische Texte” (1959), which uses Franz Kafka’s The Castle as a lexicon. Some of the
more famous examples from the 1960s include Raymond Queneau’s “Mille Milliards de Poemes” (1961); Emmett
Williams’s “IBM” (originally formulated in 1956); Alison Knowles and James Tenney’s “A House of Dust” (1968);
Margaret Masterman and Robin McKinnon Wood’s “Computerized Japanese Haiku” (1968); and Jackson Mac
Low’s LACMA “PFR-3 Poems” (1969). Starting in the 1970s, there are too many to count. See: Christopher T.
Funkhouser and Sandy Baldwin, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995 (The University
of Alabama Press, 2007), 78. (Coetzee worked with Masterman while on the Atlas project.)
188
media bots have reimagined what’s possible. The questions this dissertation poses must now be
rephrased, or at least pulled back to account for the complexities of authorship in the digital era.
More pertinent now, perhaps, is how should we read? When the moving parts of composition
become more complex than Coetzee’s computer poetry, when we can no longer even point to
material objects in briefcases which are fed into readers plugged into hardware, how do we do
anything but “get on with the work of interpreting” the words on the screen? This chapter—as
much a rebuttal to as a synthesis of the chapters before it—will explore how strategies for
reading coevolve with technologies adjacent to punch cards in the twentieth century, at the onset
of computer science as a discipline, with the adoption of the Turing Test as a guiding model. The
chapter then turns to Coetzee’s career—not as an author, but as a reader and a scholar engaged
indirectly in conversation with Ada Lovelace and her famous objection: that machines have “no
pretensions to originate anything.”

The Lovelace Tests
When it comes to reading the output of machines, the most famous model is the imitation game
proposed by software pioneer Alan Turing. In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing
reinvents the question “Can machines think?” as an interactive exercise: a human judge engages
in text-based conversation with two agents, one human and one machine. If the judge cannot
distinguish between the two agents with an accuracy significantly better than 50%, the machine,
in Turing’s view, has achieved the semblance of thought.
37
Turing here treats machine thinking
as “adequate storage,” “speed of action,” and “an appropriate programme” by which it might
seem “cleverer” than some humans.
38
He does not—as many have believed since—define the

37
Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in Mind Vol. 59 (1950): 433-460.
38
Ibid., 450.
189
standards of artificial intelligence. It was not meant to be applied practically, something we do
daily by filling out CAPTCHA’s or reading online.
39
Rather, it is a rhetorical scenario meant to
raise questions: what do we look for when we are trying to detect intelligence in the nonhuman
other?
40
Do we, like Leibniz, Babbage, and those subscribing to computationalism, measure the
complexity of the other’s machinery—or its lack? For example, one way Turing suggests we
might judge intelligence is fallibility. As Turing writes in 1947, “if a machine is expected to be
infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”
41
This conceptualization of intelligence has changed
since the nineteenth-century; Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, suggests that if Maelzel’s Chess-
Player were truly intelligent, like Babbage’s engines, it would never lose a game.
42
Turing
instead suggests that “infallibility” is more a measure of a machine’s inability to respond to
complex questions without giving single, definitive answers.
This measure of a machine’s inflexibility relates, for Turing, to what he terms “Lady
Lovelace’s Objection”: her claim in “Note G” that Babbage’s Analytical Engine can only “do
whatever we know how to order it to perform.” By this measure, for Turing, a machine will seem
intelligent if it does something he did not anticipate. In a 1951 BBC interview, Turing comments
on Lovelace’s objection by saying that, if a program “results in its doing something interesting
which we had not anticipated, I should be inclined to say that the machine had originated”—
because otherwise originality lie entirely with the programmer.
43
Another way to phrase this is
that an unintelligent machine can “never take us by surprise.”
44
This rephrasing (and, of course,

39
CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”
40
A useful retrospective resource is the 50th anniversary issue of Minds and Machines Vol. 10 No. 4 (2000).
41
Alan M. Turing, “Lecture to the London Mathematical Society on 20 February 1947,” in MD COMPUTING Vol.
12 (1947), 394.
42
Edgar Allan Poe’s “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (1836) is a derisive review of the Automaton Chess-Player originally
invented in 1769, by Baron Kempelen, which was touring through the United States at the time.
43
Quoted in Darren Abramson, “Turing’s Responses to Two Objections,” in Minds & Machines Vol.18 (2008), 160.
44
Daniel Peter Berrar and Alfons Schuster, “Computing Machinery and Creativity: Lessons Learned from the
Turing Test,” in Kybernetes Vol. 43 No. 1 (2014), 84.
190
the word “origination”) equates intelligence with creativity; machines that are not creative, you
might say, are also not intelligent. Due to this simple observation, many scholars since 1950 have
noted that Turing’s exercise (now known colloquially as a Turing Test) “fails at taking creativity
into account.”
45
And some scholars have proposed a new test which does, named after the person
Turing credits for raising the issue. For instance, in 2001, Selmer Bringsjord, Paul Bello, and
David Ferrucci, inventors of the story-generator BRUTUS, proposed a “Lovelace Test [1.0]”
which augmented the Turing Test by accounting for origination.
46
And in 2015, Mark Reidl
responded with the Lovelace Test 2.0, a more targeted inquiry into whether “a computational
system can originate a creative artifact.”
47

Like conceptions of intelligence, those of creativity have a long history, some of which
this dissertation addresses: if in the eighteenth century, creativity was defined against the rise of
automatism and proceduralism (Chapter One), in the nineteenth it was defined against copying
technologies, privileging authenticity and personality over novelty (Chapter Two). In each case,
origination is defined as a quality of human consciousness—and yet, for centuries, people have
tried to mechanize it. The oldest method is randomization, from dice to Coetzee’s RNG. Emile
Borel theorized that a thousand monkeys would “almost surely” produce the complete works of
Shakespeare, and Italo Calvino would write that “the true literature machine will be one that […]
produce[s] disorder.”
48
Few believe randomization alone accounts for origination, but many do

45
Selmer Bringsjord, Paul Bello, and David Ferrucci, “Creativity, the Turing Test, and the (better) Lovelace Test,”
in Minds and Machines Vol. 11 (2001), 11.
46
In “Creativity, the Turing Test, and the (better) Lovelace Test,” Bringsjord et al. demonstrate their test on their
own invention, BRUTUS, as well as LETTER SPIRIT and COPYCAT, two “creative” systems designed by
Douglas Hofstadter, the world’s leading authority on computational creativity.
47
Mark O. Riedl, “The Lovelace 2.0 Test of Artificial Creativity and Intelligence,” which can be found at arXiv
(2014). Multiple tests of this nature have been proposed, and some others were also named after Ada Lovelace. The
most notable, probably, is Teresa M. Amabile’s 1982 Consensual Assessment Technique.
48
Robin Collingwood and Jorge Luis Borges each respond to Borel’s 1913 theorem; the former argues that nothing
produced via randomness can be considered artwork, whereas the latter, via his fictional, totalizing libraries, would
191
suggest that it can be generative via disruption—if human judgment serves as its editor. More
recently, with credit often given to the Oulipo collective, artists have imposed arbitrary rules of
composition, like Coetzee’s line generators, to automate new works. The most famous Oulipian
methods are N+7 (replacing each noun with another from a chosen lexicon) and the Lipogram,
which forces the author to write without one letter of choice.
49
Eventually these methods result in
accidental semantic connections, and Coetzee is not alone in suggesting that poetry and math are
the “two rarefied forms of symbolic activity.”
50
It is often observed that creativity has always
been inherently algorithmic but, as Annemarie Bridy correctly observes, the “humanization of
the author figure prevents us from confronting openly both the rulish nature of human creativity
and the potential unruliness of machine production.”
51

The above mentioned “Lovelace Tests” transform this vague, transhistorical definition of
“creativity” into an object that can be interpreted. For instance, to counter Turing’s notion that a
machine may seem intelligent if it “surprises,” the first rule of the Lovelace Test 1.0 requires that
any machine output must be repeatable; it states that “[the machine’s] outputting [text] is not the
result of a fluke hardware error, but rather the result of processes [the machine] can repeat.”
52
It
legislates away the use of random generators in any computation considered creative. The second
rule then addresses rule-based forms of composition, stating: “[the machine’s creator or someone
with same knowledge and resources] cannot explain how [the machine] produced [output text]

suggest that indeed, eventually, randomization would produce everything, art and not art combined. Italo Calvino,
The Uses of Literature (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987), 13.
49
Gerard Genette defines Oulipianism as “a game of roulette” and “ludic.” The most famous of the Lipograms is
Georges Perec’s La Disparition (1969), a novel which uses no E’s. Alison James, “Automatism, Arbitrariness, and
the Oulipian Author,” in French Forum Vol. 31 No. 2 (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 113, 120.
50
J. M. Coetzee, review of Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, edited by Sarah Glaz and Joanne
Growney, in Notices of the American Mathematics Society 56.8 (2009), 944.
51
Bridy, “Coding Creativity,” 12.
52
Bringsjord, et al., “Creativity,” 12. Marcus du Sautoy proposes a Lovelace Test so identical to this one in strategy
that I am assuming there is a relationship between them; The Creativity Code (Harvard University Press, 2019), 6.
192
by appeal to [the machine’s] architecture, knowledge base, and core functions.”
53
Going by this
measure, too, Coetzee’s program for the Atlas 2 would not pass; Coetzee can point to the source
text, RNG, and algorithm, and explain how the lines were generated. But if such a creator, with
adequate time, cannot explain how the machine produced the text, the machine is considered
“autonomous,” therefore creative, and therefore intelligent. Reidl remarks that the 1.0 Test’s
parameters pit machines against the cognitive abilities of humans (and thus, due to the second
rule especially, would always be unbeatable). The Lovelace Test 2.0 measures the machine
output not against human capacity, but against expectations related to artistic genre; a “human
evaluator” chooses a genre and an arbitrary constraint (e.g., a poem about a bird); then a “human
referee” decides whether the machine’s output is not “unrealistic for an average human.” It need
only satisfy the requirement of resemblance.
These assessment criteria provide two new definitions of computational creativity: one
which remains tethered to human consciousness, and one which leaves room for the possibility
of nonhuman authors (attending to the surface of a work separate from “how was it made?”). I
want to push back on both models. The first, by choosing as evaluator someone with intimate
knowledge, misunderstands the intent of Turing’s imitation game. When playing the role of the
reader, not the programmer, one can easily be seduced by the variances caused by disruptive
nonhuman actors: RNG’s or, as Coetzee proposes, “algorithms for the production of original
metaphors.”
54
In a 1979 essay, Coetzee writes that, since line generators so easily manufacture
form, the challenge of computer poetry is to generate metaphors, and he defines metaphors as
“low-level violations of semantic rules.” The violations that we can decode we call metaphoric;
those we cannot, we call nonsense; and those which teeter between the two we call “surreal,”

53
Ibid., 12.
54
J. M. Coetzee, “Surreal Metaphors and Random Processes,” in Journal of Literary Semantics Vol. 8 (1979), 23.
193
providing an affective, subjective register unmeasured by the 1.0 Test. Rather, the test is a self-
assessment, like Coetzee’s reflections on computer poetry in Youth:
If he cannot, for the present, write poetry that comes from the heart, if his heart is not in
the right state to generate poetry of its own, can he at least string together pseudo-poems
made up of phrases generated by a machine, and thus, by going through the motions of
writing, learn again to write? Is it fair to be using mechanical aids to writing—fair to
other poets, fair to the dead masters? […] Do his huge resources—what other poet in
England, in the world, has a machine of this size at his command—turn quantity into
quality? Yet might it not be argued that the invention of computers has changed the
nature of art, by making the author and the condition of the author’s heart irrelevant?
55

Here, the question of “quality”—or “value,” as similar tests for creativity by Marcus du Sautoy
and Margaret Boden attempt to quantify
56
—relates to “heart.” It is a view of creative expression
as emotional expression, and perhaps, Coetzee muses, one that is out of date; in fact, he identifies
“an escape from emotion” as a condition of Modernism.
57
The Lovelace Test 1.0 doesn’t look for
either “heart” or “quality” in the produced work; following Boden’s premise that creativity tests
require a moral and political decision, it determines whether to “dignify the computer […] with
the respect we feel for fellow human beings.”
58
It looks for a heart in the same way that Coetzee
finds self-consciousness in the Supervisor.
The Lovelace Test 2.0, on the other hand, treats the game as a subjective exercise; it is a
model for reading creative works produced by machines, not for “quality” (as “good” does not
mean creative), but for aesthetic classification. That said, the addition of the arbitrary constraint
(e.g., add a bird), which Reidl adds to render it “resistant to Chinese Room Arguments,” turns
the game too prescriptive to function as a heuristic for the larger question “what is creativity?”
The point of Turing’s imitation game is that intelligence is performative, that its “likeness” can

55
Coetzee, Youth, 161,
56
Margaret Boden, in The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (Routledge, 2004), proposes that creative systems
be able to produce artifacts that are valuable, novel, and surprising; Du Sautoy, The Creativity Code, 6.
57
Coetzee, Youth, 61. He is referring to T. S. Eliot.
58
Boden, The Creative Mind, 11.
194
be achieved through the manipulation of signs alone.
59
Machines which “pass” the Turing Test
do so by deception, by constructing an authentic, intelligent subject. As Peter Kugel points out,
this could potentially even include adding “delays to simulate human calculation times.”
60
In
other words, Turing’s imitation game is not so different than the original parlor game it is based
on; in blind teletyped conversation, a judge asks questions of two individuals claiming to be
women (of which one is a man) and guesses which is the “real” woman on the basis of their text
responses. On the one hand, this speaks to the gendering of some technologies, from Lovelace’s
clerical machine to Coetzee’s sexualized “punch operators” to the ELIZA chat bot, Alexa, and
Siri.
61
The games ask us to identify how we define gender or intelligence removed from body
and voice, throwing doubt on all parties involved. In the end, these tests say more about us, the
judge, than the subject. Indeed, as soon as a machine proves it can be intelligent by one metric,
humans change that metric (something we see happening with gender today). As a heuristic,
then, the Lovelace Test 2.0 teaches us only what we believe are the parameters of certain artistic
genres. This chapter asks, along the lines of the imitation games, what might a truly heuristic
Lovelace Test 3.0 look like?

The Author-Algorithm
When I originally visited the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, it was to examine
the material evidence of Coetzee’s computer poetry: the authorship as archive. However, there,

59
John Searle (1980) describes a scenario in which a non-Chinese-speaking person translates Chinese through direct
symbol manipulation and table look-up procedures. Searle argues that, in this case, the person has knowledge only
of syntax, and cannot be seen to have any knowledge of semantics—appearing to communicate in Chinese without
really knowing the Chinese language.
60
Peter Kugel, “Computing Machines Can’t Be Intelligent (…And Turing Said So),” in Minds and Machines Vol.
12 No. 4 (2002), 565. Despite the title, Kugel agrees with Turing that machines will one days be able to “fake
intelligence well enough to fool human beings.”
61
In Youth, the narrator often watches the IBM “punch operators” and assesses them as romantic or sexual objects.
195
my interest turned more to the nature of Coetzee’s scholarship, which was also computational.
Building on his master’s thesis on Ford Madox Ford, Coetzee studied the role of style in prose
writing, something he described in Youth as “making patterns on the surface.”
62
At Austin, he
began using what was called at the time “stylostatistics”: “the branch of stylistics concerned with
those features of a text’s style that can be subjected to numerical analysis,” meant to strip away
the subjective nature of literary criticism (what Coetzee calls “intuitive criticism”).
63
His doctoral
work focuses mainly on Samuel Beckett. Scholarship about this part of Coetzee’s career is thin,
because the author later turned away from the kinds of formalism that stylostatistics sponsors.
Stylostatistics, because quantitative methods of literary analysis would go in a different direction
by the 1990s, is mostly lost to academic history.
64
However, I am interested in this moment for
what it might say about the relationship between poststructuralist formulations of the author (as
textually invented) and the heart’s irrelevance after “the invention of computers.”
65
As Coetzee
writes in 1976, “Automatized speech is speech that speaks its speaker. The phenomenon of
automatized speech explains how it comes about that sometimes a book can be conceived of
without an author.”
66
However, like the Turing Tests, stylostatistics—examining only the surface

62
Coetzee, Youth, 61.
63
This definition is provided by Peter Johnston, “J. M. Coetzee’s Work in Stylostatistics,” in Digital Humanities
Quarterly Vol. 8 No. 3 (2014), paragraph 6. Coetzee, following Bernard Bloch, conceptualized an author’s prose
style as “the message carried by the frequency distributions and the transitional probabilities of its linguistic
features, especially as they differ from those of the same features in the language as a whole”; “The English Fiction
of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis,” PhD dissertation (University of Texas at Austin 1969), 1.
64
David Attridge writes that, at the time, “the burgeoning field of theoretical linguistics seemed to hold out the hope
of purely quantitative methods of literary analysis”; in “Sex, Comedy and Influence: Coetzee’s Beckett,” in J.M.
Coetzee in Context and Theory, ed. Elleke Boehmer, Robert Eaglestone, and Katy Iddiols (Bloomsbury, 2009), 74.
See also: Hunter Dukes, “Cybernetic Syntax: Beckett’s ‘Rhythm of Doubt’ in J. M. Coetzee’s Early Novels,” in
Samuel Beckett Today Vol. 31 (2019).
65
This is the beginning, I suggest, of what Ellen Lupton describes as the “Birth of the User”; Thinking with Type: A
Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students (Chronicle Books, 2010), 73.
66
J. M. Coetzee, “The First Sentence of Yvonne Burgess’ The Strike,” reprinted in Doubling the Point: Essays and
Interviews (Harvard University Press, 1992 [1976]), 48.
196
of texts using “indices” designed by the scholar—encounter a “meaning problem”
67
; in the end,
they say more about the method than the work of literature.
Coetzee is a contradiction. In the blockquote above, he ponders the morality of using
computers to compose poetry. On the one hand, the narrator in Youth “has no respect for any
version of thinking that can be embodied in a computer’s circuitry”
68
; on the other hand, his
scholarship responds to a “revolt against reason” in the humanities.
69
My interest in this part of
Coetzee’s career is his persistent belief in the power of computation; computers, he writes in the
dissertation, “have the power to condense information which language seldom equals.”
70
They
bring “accuracy,” “speed,” and “replicability” to the study of literature.
71
What he proposes, only
half facetiously, is “the replacement of the human analyst by the computer.”
72
Rather than a
parody, such as one by Italo Calvino a decade later in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979),
Coetzee suggests analogies to more recent computer models might actually fix the way we think
of texts.
73
He suggests that our reading methods have become too linear, fortified by “an input
system which reads linear strips to coded information” (i.e., punch cards); a better model, then, is
the programming he wrote for the Supervisor, a multi-reading that forks and rereads in recursive
loops—because, Coetzee writes, “the experience of a work of literature is not necessarily linear
in time, i.e., the analogy of reader to [mere] decoding device is misleading.”
74
Such approaches

67
Alan Liu argues that digital methods interpret not the text, but the symbols that were first programmed to adjust
for human-computer translation; “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities,” in PMLA Vol. 128 No. 2 (2013), 418.
68
Coetzee, Youth, 149.
69
Coetzee opens his dissertation with this quote from Joshua Whatmough, and another, from David Hilbert:
“everything that can be an object of scientific thought at all, as soon as it is ripe for the formation of a theory, falls
into the lap of the axiomatic method and thereby indirectly of mathematics”; “The English Fiction,” 1.
70
Ibid., 148.
71
Ibid., 61-2.
72
Ibid., 6.
73
In Calvino’s novel, it is suggested that “a suitably programmed computer can read a novel in a few minutes and
record the list of all the words contained in the text, in order of frequency”; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
(translated by William Weaver, Harcourt, Inc., 1981), 186.
74
Coetzee, “The English Fiction,” 160. See also Roach, “Aesthetic Automatism,” 15.
197
work because the text, too, can be conceptualized as machinic. The words of a text, for instance,
“act like well-behaved mathematical functions,” such that its computation might “supply insights
which the literary critic, working intuitively, cannot.”
75

In his dissertation prospectus, Coetzee distinguishes his method of stylostatistics from
others because his, he claims, considers the whole work. His dissertation, “The English Fiction of
Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysis,” explores Beckett’s approach to literary style in
the novel Watt.
76
It is inspired by Hugh Kenner’s prior work on Beckett, which had framed the
author’s work as “some computation, doing a thousand things but only necessary ones,” and
compared Beckett’s prose to the product of binary algorithms.
77
The challenge of the project,
Coetzee seems to think, is that Beckett is an especially difficult author to classify because he so
purposefully resists style, which he does through mathematics. I liken the goals of this project to
a Lovelace Test 3.0: to determine whether the text has authorship. I mean this not in the sense of
visiting, say, Jane Austen’s writing desk and book collection, but whether the surface of the text
suggests there is a thinking subject behind it, something that cannot be reduced to mere pattern
or algorithm. It is a game which interrogates what Coetzee believes that kind of authorship looks
like. Beckett’s “writing without style” makes for a good subject because it presents as machine
written.
78
Seb Franklin demonstrates that the patterns in Watt are “uncannily commensurate with

75
Ibid., 40. In Calvino’s novel, again, the “Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary
Works,” armed with an author’s “formula”—or “the stylistic and conceptional models of the author”—can produce
new works by that author (122, 179, 118).
76
J. M. Coetzee, “Dissertation Abstracts,” 1967 and 1969. Container 121.1.
77
Quoted by Coetzee, “The English Fiction,” 10. A comprehensive view of Kenner’s work on Beckett can be found
in The Mechanic Muse (Oxford University Press, 1987). His work—and indeed, Beckett’s mathematical approach to
literature—has inspired similar works (including the translation of Beckett’s prose into actual computer programs):
Baylee Brits, “Ritual, Code, and Matheme in Samuel Beckett’s Quad,” in Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 40 No.
4 (2017); Treena Balds, “Krapp’s Last Tape and Breath as Performance Algorithms: A Heuristic,” in TDR Vol. 63
No. 4 (2019); Richard Coe, ‘Beckett’s English’ in Samuel Beckett: Humanistic Perspectives (edited by Morris Beja,
S.E. Gontarski, and Pierre Aster, Ohio State University Press, 1983); Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haar, “Lessness:
Randomness, Consciousness and Meaning,” http://www.random.org/lessness/paper/, last accessed April 12, 2022.
78
Coetzee, “The English Fiction,” 3.
198
the early developments in electronic digital computation” and Coetzee, in one of the articles he
would publish related to this dissertation, calls Beckett’s sentences “miniature mechanisms for
switching themselves off.”
79
The dissertation, as Coetzee confesses, fails to prove a pattern.
Beckett’s anti-style stripped away all semblance of linguistic choice unique to him alone, and
thus, the capacity of a reader to assign him authorship based on voice. But neither was Beckett’s
use of mathematics consistent enough to define its whole.
I confess I have an image in my own mind of Coetzee in a suit, with a briefcase full of
punch cards and a toothbrush, on his way to spend the night at some computing lab calculating
words, morphemes, and other points in probabilistic space—an updated version of the human-
machine co-authorship that Lovelace imagines in Note G’s own probability equation. Coetzee
would eventually publish three articles from his dissertation.
80
And while I am unsure about the
material details for some of the calculations, we do know how Coetzee approached his essay on
Beckett’s short fiction Lessness, because he included a citation: “The FORTRAN programming
is quite elementary. Total running time on a Univac 1106 is about 30 minutes.”
81
The 1106, a
low-cost alternative to earlier computers, was released in 1969 with a card reader for 80-column
punch cards that are, unfortunately, not among his collected papers; if they were, like jacquard
cards, they might represent the following scholarly activity: Coetzee considers Lessness, due to
its finiteness in vocabulary, conducive to “a mathematical approach […] via the mathematics of
indeterminacy, namely probability theory [and] combinatorial mathematics.”
82
From a purely
affective interpretation, he considers “the subject of Lessness” to be “the plight of consciousness

79
Seb Franklin, “Humans and/as Machines: Beckett and Cultural Cybernetics,” in Textual Practice Vol. 27 No. 2
(2013), 120; J. M. Coetzee, “Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style,” in Doubling the Point, 49.
80
In addition to “Samuel Beckett and the Temptations of Style,” Coetzee published “Statistical Indices of
‘Difficulty’,” in Language and Style Vol. 2 No. 3 (196), and “Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in
Decomposition,” Computers and the Humanities Vol. 7 No. 4 (1973).
81
Coetzee, “Lessness,” 198.
82
Ibid., 195.
199
in a void, compelled to reflect on itself, capable of doing so only by splitting itself and
recombining the fragments in wholes which are never greater than the sums of their parts.”
83
He
recognizes in that subjectivity—indeed, he determines there is a subject—perhaps something
familiar: the programmed “self-consciousness” of the Supervisor, which his own code had
compelled to “reflect on itself” despite the operating system’s incapacity to string together those
nested consciousnesses into anything like sentience.
Coetzee searches for Lessness’s algorithm by reverse engineering Beckett’s procedural
rules for composing his near nonsensical prose. While Coetzee points out that “there are no
determinate principles of ordering among phrases, sentences, or paragraphs,” on the surface it
seems clear that Lessness is an algorithmic text. The work consists of 120 sentences; or rather,
the text consists of 166 lexical items in the first 60 sentences and not a single new one in the
second half: “words 770-1,538 of the text turn out to be nothing but words 1-769 in a new
order.”
84
By structuring Lessness thusly, Beckett establishes a finite number of phrases; the first
half of the text is the source text for the second, and the second half essentially “grows out of”
the first.
85
Lessness thus self-perpetuates and also erases its own meaning. Charmingly, Coetzee
writes that “the two halves of the book reciprocally cancel each other, and we are left with a
fiction of net zero.”
86
It can also be said that, if what Beckett has done is create a 60x106 matrix
of phrases, there might ostensibly be an algorithm which could extend Lessness for another 60
sentences—and another, and if Beckett had the same computer Coetzee was using, thousands
and thousands of times more. Because there is a defined source text, Lessness assumes a preset
number of possible permutations. And yet, Coetzee never figures out the algorithm. He finds no

83
Ibid., 198.
84
Ibid., 195.
85
Ibid., 197.
86
Ibid., 198.
200
hierarchy, priority, or ordering principle. Like in the case of Watt, and in a much shorter text,
there is no totalizing pattern; arguably, then, Coetzee does find an author. He can’t quantify that
thinking subject either, but he can measure its effects on the text around it—like measuring the
area around a black hole. Bluntly, the New York Times Review of Books, remarking on this essay,
announced “Beckett Safe from Computers.”
87

In Coetzee’s mind, both his dissertation and his investigation of Lessness were failures.
He confesses, in “Statistical Indices of ‘Difficult,’” that literature is often more the result of
“chance phenomena” than “a matter of design,” making it resistant to computation.
88
To put it
another way: Beckett passes the Lovelace Test, and Coetzee redefines the “human author” as that
which cannot be solved. His reasoning, as his dissertation concludes, is that literature “will
remain haphazard and fragmentary,” and in the 1960s, not even the Atlas 2 could account for that
kind of variability. Turing believed that eventually machines would be powerful enough, if they
“could modify its instruction tables by itself, without following a uniform method,” to “reach,
and perhaps surpass, the intelligence of human mathematicians’’
89
; a younger Coetzee seemed to
think that the same could be said of computational text analysis—a future in which all authors
could be solved. The heuristic of his method reveals that his view of authorship is that whole,
unbroken, and cohesive entity, not like William Blake, working alone in his workshop, but like
the next generation of supercomputer, one that sheds the rest of the elements described at the top
of this chapter: the cards, tape, readers, and human programmers. I argue that such unity is
impossible. The Lovelace Test is a trick question; there is no get-knowledge- or produce-

87
John Leonard, “Last Word: Beckett Safe from Computers,” in The New York Times Review of Books (August 19,
1973), 27.
88
Coetzee, “Statistical Indices,” 231. Beckett, too, at one point concludes that the “Proustian equation is never
simple”; Proust and Three Dialogues, with Georges Duthuit (John Calder, 1999 [1931]).
89
Alan M. Turing, “Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals,’’ in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society Vol.
2 No. 45 (1939), 39.
201
creativity-quick scheme cooked up on the island of Laputa, no bundle of punched cards that
contain in its pattern the entire technique and personality of an artist, no infallible and fully
automatic thinking machine. Authors are algorithms and platforms. They are the cultural
knowledge that went into their design and the human “lifeworld” with which they engage. And,
for now, they are still human, too.
90
Heart intact. And that’s how we should read: recursively,
sure, but also with an image of that briefcase full of punch cards and continuous printer paper—
the author with the wheelwork behind their words.

90
Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 6.
202
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Creator Mann, Zachary Michael (author)

Core Title The punch card imagination: authorship and early machine programming

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/18/2024

Defense Date 05/02/2022

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Tag Automation,British literature,calculating engine,computing,history of technology,jacquard,loom,media archaeology,OAI-PMH Harvest,punch card,Textile industry,Weaving

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Advisor Gambrell, Alice (committee chair), Anderson, Emily Hodgson (committee member), Griffiths, Devin (committee member), McPherson, Tara (committee member)

Creator Email zmann@usc.edu,zmmann@gmail.com

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