We all know of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game” which should serve as the test if a machine can think: we communicate with two computer interfaces, asking them any imaginable question; behind one of the interfaces, there is a human person typing the answers, while behind the other, it is a machine. If, based on the answers we get, we cannot tell the intelligent machine from the intelligent human, then, according to Turing, our failure proves that machines can think. What is a little bit less known is that in its first formulation, the issue was not to distinguish human from the machine, but man from woman, why this strange displacement from sexual difference to the difference between human and machine? Was this due to Turing’s simple eccentricity (recall his well-known troubles because of his homosexuality)? According to some interpreters, the point is to oppose the two experiments: a successful imitation of a woman’s responses by a man (or vice versa) would not prove anything, because the gender identity does not depend on the sequences of symbols, while a successful imitation of man by a machine would prove that this machine thinks, because “thinking” ultimately is the proper way of sequencing symbols… What if, however, the solution to this enigma is much more simple and radical? What if sexual difference is not simply a biological fact, but the Real of an antagonism that defines humanity, so that once sexual difference is abolished, a human being effectively becomes indistinguishable from a machine.
The further thing one should emphasize here is Turing’s blindness to the distinction between doing and saying: as many an interpreter has noticed, Turing simply had no sense for the properly SYMBOLIC domain of communication in sexuality, power politics, etc., in which language is used as a rhetorical device, with its referential meaning clearly subordinated to its performative dimension (of seduction, coercion, etc.). For Turing, there were ultimately only purely intellectual problems to be solved - in this sense, he was the ultimate “normal psychotic,” blinded for the sexual difference. The crucial intervention of the Turing test appears the moment we accept its basic dispositif, i.e. the loss of a stable embodiment, the disjunction between actually enacted and represented bodies: an irreducible gap is introduced between the “real” flesh-and-blood body behind the screen and its representation in the symbols that flicker on the computer screen. Such a disjunction is co-substantial with “humanity” itself: the moment a living being starts to speak, the medium of its speech (say, voice) is minimally disembodied, in the sense that it seems to originate not in the material reality of the body that we see, but in some invisible “inferiority” - a spoken word is always minimally the voice of a ventriloquist, a spectral dimension always reverberates in it. In short, one should claim that “humanity” as such ALWAYS-ALREADY WAS “posthuman” - therein resides the gist of Lacan’s thesis that the symbolic order is a parasitical machine which intrudes into and supplements a human being as its artificial prosthesis.
Of course, the standard feminist question to ask here is: is this erasure of the bodily attachment gender neutral, or is it secretly gendered, so that sexual difference does not concern only the actual enacted body behind the screen, but also the different relationship between the levels of representation and enactment? Is the masculine subject in its very notion disembodied, while the feminine subject maintains the umbilical cord to its embodiment? In “The Curves of the Needle,” a short essay on gramophone from 1928. [16] Adorno notes the fundamental paradox of recording: the more the machine makes its presence known (through obtrusive noises, its clumsiness and interruptions), the stronger the experience of the actual presence of the singer - or, to put it the other way round, the more perfect the recording, the more faithfully the machine reproduces a human voice, the more humanity is removed, the stronger the effect that we are dealing with something “inauthentic”. [17] This perception is to be linked to Adorno’s famous “antifeminist” remark according to which a woman’s voice cannot be properly recorded, since it demands the presence of her body, in contrast to a man’s voice which can exert its full power as disembodied - do we not encounter here a clear case of the ideological notion of sexual difference in which man is a disembodied Spirit-Subject, while woman remains anchored in her body? However, these statements are to be read against the background of Adorno’s notion of feminine hysteria as the protest of subjectivity against reification: the hysterical subject is essentially in-between, no longer fully identified to her body, not yet ready to assume the position of the disembodied speaker (or, with regard to mechanical reproduction: no longer the direct presence of the “living voice,” not yet its perfect mechanical reproduction). Subjectivity is not the immediate living self-presence we attain when we shed away the distorting mechanical reproduction; it is rather that remainder of “authenticity” whose traces we can discern in an imperfect mechanical reproduction. In short, the subject is something that “will have been” in its imperfect representation. Adorno’s thesis that a woman’s voice cannot be properly recorded, since it demands the presence of her body, thus effectively asserts feminine hysteria (and not the disembodied male voice) as the original dimension of subjectivity: in woman’s voice, the painful process of disembodiment continues to reverberate, its traces are not yet obliterated. In Kierkegaard’s terms, sexual difference is the difference between “being” and “becoming”: man and woman are both disembodied; however, while a man directly assumes disembodiment as an achieved state, feminine subjectivity stands for the disembodiment “in becoming.”
From
Masturbation, or Sexuality in the Atonal World