Jessica Riskin

The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life

599 Except where otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. This essay and another, “Eighteenth-Century Wetware” (Representations, no. 83 [Summer 2003]) are parts of a larger project on the early history of artificial life and intelligence, hence the frequent references in each essay to the other. 1. JacquesVaucanson, “Letter to the Abbé Desfontaines” (1742 [1738]), Le Mécanisme du fluteur automate, trans. J. T. Desaguliers (Buren, TheNetherlands, 1979), p. 21; hereafter abbreviated “L.” This edition of Vaucanson’s treatise includes both the original French version andDesaguliers’s English translation. For the sake of consistency, all page numbers refer to the English translation. 2. Rodney A. Brooks, “Elephants Don’t Play Chess,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems 6 (1990): 9. 3. By artificial life, here and throughout, I mean all attempts to understand living processes by usingmachinery to simulate them. Artificial Life, with capital letters, will refer specifically to the research field that arose in the mid-twentieth century in which computer scientists, engineers, cognitive and neuroscientists, and others have tried to use information-processingmachinery to simulate living processes, such as reproduction and sensation. 4. See André Doyon and Lucien Liaigre, Jacques Vaucanson, mécanicien de génie (Paris, 1966), pp. 33, 61; hereafter abbreviated JV. The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life

Machines in the Garden

Ideas are inseparable from things and vice versa. Intellectual history and the history of material culture, accordingly, are not discrete endeavors: they are conjoined. Here is a guiding principle of our volume and the focus of the current section, “Things.” This chapter demonstrates these propositions for what is arguably the hardest case, the idea most reputed to have detached modern philosophy from the objects of daily experience: Descartes’s philosophical revolution cleaving mental self from mechanical body. A particular kind of machine, proliferating across the landscape of late medieval and early modern Europe, closely informed this philosophical revolution. Moreover, to approach the revolutionary philosophy in terms of the devices that informed it is to arrive at a kind of instability, a fault-line running through its very core.

Striving Machinery: The Romantic Origins of a Historical Science of Life

A core principle of modern science is that one must explain natural phenomena without ascribing purposeful agency to them, without attributing the descent of a rock, for example, to its desire to reach the center of the earth. This scientific principle originated in the seventeenth century conjoined with a theological principle, the argument from design, which gave a monopoly on purposeful agency to a supernatural Designer, leaving behind a passive mechanical cosmos. The ban on appeals to agency in nature, and the passive mechanical world that it entailed, have been very successful as the predominant modern models of science, theology and the natural world. Nevertheless, from the first, they have inspired resistance as well as adherence, often in the same person (Isaac Newton, for instance, whose hesitations over the cause of gravity provided the Enlightenment with material to last the century). This essay considers an episode in the struggle over the presence or absence of agency in nature, and its results: the emergence of a historical science of life during the Romantic period. The story should really begin this way: once upon a time, the poets conducted electrical experiments and rushed to attend chemistry lectures, while the physicists and physiologists offered their theories in verse. An intimacy between poetry and natural science was a defining characteristic of the Romantic Movement. While practitioners of the natural sciences wrote poetry, reciprocally, poets and novelists busied themselves with electrical studies, flocked to physics demonstrations and pored over the latest results in physiology. Immanuel Kant offered formal grounds for this intimacy in his last major work, the Critique of Judgment (1790). Here he argued that living nature must be regarded as intrinsically “purposive” and that people were only able to apprehend it as such, in the first instance, by means of an act of aesthetic judgment, a feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Judgments in relation to natural objects, therefore, all began with an aesthetic response. Goethe, whose discovery of Kant’s Critique of Judgment inaugurated “a wonderful period in my life,” rejoiced in the union of science and poetry he found there. Goethe was persuaded that his own efforts to combine science and poetry constituted a lone act of rebellion, remarking in frustration that “[n]owhere would anyone grant” the essential oneness of scientific and poetic knowledge. He was mistaken. Natural philosophers of this period were by default also poets, often presenting their scientific findings in poetic form. They did tend, like Goethe, to suggest that their poetic approach to nature constituted a rebellion. If so, it was a large rebellion.

Cottage in a Boudoir

One day in 1344 or 1345, the Sienese painter, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, must have had a momentous idea: it occurred to him that he could paint a boat. He did so. The boat sits at the edge of a small lake. There is a castle on the shore, a field and several trees. The painting is called Un castello in riva a un lago (Castle by a Lakeshore). Around the same time, Lorenzetti also painted a city overlooking the ocean and called it Una città vicino al mare (City by the Sea). The two paintings hang with understated drama in the Pinacoteca nazionale in Siena, amidst a blizzard of images of saints and angels, the Annunciation, the Madonna and Child, the Adoration of the Magi, the Coronation of the Virgin, the Death of the Virgin, the Assumption of the Virgin, Christ on the Cross, the Passion. Making one’s way among the crucifixions and nativities, the martyrs, the allegories of humility, suffering, faith and redemption, one comes abruptly upon a small Author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment, Jessica Riskin teaches in the History Department at Stanford University. She is writing a book on the body-machine from Descartes to Darwin. jriskin@stanford.edu +