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Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 09:39:33 -0500
From: "Philip E. Mirowski" <[log in to unmask]>
Machine Dreams:
Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science
Philip Mirowski
Cambridge University Press
0-521-77283-4 (hardcover)
0-521-77526-4 (paperback)
Table of Contents
1 Cyborg Agonistes
2 Some Cyborg Genealogies; or, How the Demon Got its Bots
3 John von Neumann and the Cyborg Incursion into Economics
4 The Military, the Scientists and the Revised Rules of the Game
5 Do Cyborgs Dream of Efficient Markets?
6 The Empire Strikes Back
7 Core Wars
8 Machines Who Think vs. Machines that Sell
Chapter 1: Cyborg Agonistes
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor
encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor
restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a
story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story
you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude
has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the
victim of a very old and terrible lie.
--Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
The first thing you will notice is the light. The florescent banks
in the high ceiling are dimmed, so the light at eye level is dominated
by the glowing screens set at intervals throughout the cavernous room.
There are no windows, so the bandwidths have that cold otherworldly
truncation. Surfaces are in muted tones and matte colors, dampening
unwanted reflections. Some of the screens flicker with strings of
digits the color and periodicity of traffic lights, but most beam
the standard dayglo palette of pastels usually associated with CRT
graphics. While a few of the screens project their photons into
the void, most of the displays are manned and womanned by attentive
acolytes, their visages lit and their backs darkened like satellites
parked in stationary orbits. Not everyone is held in the thrall of
the object of their attentions in the same manner. A few jump up and
down in little tethered dances, speaking into phones or mumbling at
other electronic devices. Some sit stock still, mesmerized, engaging
their screen with slight movements of wrist and hand. Others lean
into their consoles, then away, as though their swaying might actually
have some virtual influence upon the quantum electrodynamics coursing
through their station and beyond, to other machines in other places
in other similar rooms. No one is apparently making anything, but
everyone seems nonetheless furiously occupied.
I. Rooms with a View
Where is this place? If it happened to be 1952, it would be Santa
Monica, California, at a RAND study of the "man-machine interface"
(Chapman et al, 1958). If it were 1957, then it could only be one
place: the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Air Defense System
run by the US Air Force. By 1962, there were a few other such rooms,
such as the SAGA room for war-gaming in the basement of the Pentagon
(Allen, 1987). If it were 1967 instead, there were many more such
rooms scattered across the globe, one of the largest being the
Infiltration Surveillance Center at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, the
command center of US Air Force Operation Igloo White (Edwards, 1996,
pp.3, 106). By 1977 there are many more such rooms, no longer only
staffed by the military, but also by thousands of employees of large
firms throughout the world: the SABRE airline reservation system of
American Airlines (patterned upon SAGE); bank check and credit card
processing centers (patterned upon that innovated by Bank of America);
nuclear power station control rooms; the inventory control operation
of the American Hospital Supply Corporation (McKenney, 1995). In
1987, a room like this could be found in any suburban shopping mall,
with teenagers proleptically feeding quarters into arcade computer
games. It might also be located at the University of Arizona,
where "experimental markets" are being conducted with undergraduates
recruited with the help of money from the National Science Foundation.
Alternatively, these closed rooms also could just as surely be found
in the very pinnacles of high finance, in the tonier precincts of New
York and London and Tokyo, with high-stakes traders of stocks, bonds
and "derivatives" glued to their screens. In those rooms, "masters of
the universe" in pinstripe shirts and power suspenders make "killings"
in semi-conscious parody of their khaki-clad precursors. By 1997,
with the melding of home entertainment centers with home offices
and personal computers via the Internet (a lineal descendant of
the Defense-funded ARPANET), any residential den or rec room could
be refitted as a scaled-down simulacrum of any of the previous
rooms. It might be the temporary premises of one of the burgeoning
'dot-com' startups which captured the imaginations of Generation X.
It could even be promoted as the prototype classroom of the future.
Increasingly, work in America at the turn of the millennium means
serried ranks of Dilberts arrayed in cubicles staring at these
screens. I should perhaps confess I am staring at the glow now
myself. Depending upon how this text eventually gets disseminated,
perhaps you also, dear reader, are doing likewise.
These rooms are the "closed worlds" of our brave new world (Edwards,
1996), the electronic surveillance and control centers which were
the nexus of the spread of computer technologies and computer culture.
They are closed in any number of senses. In the first instance,
there is the obviously artificial light: chaotic 'white' sunlight
is kept to a minimum to control the frequencies and the reactions
of the observers. This is an ergonomically controlled environment,
the result of some concerted engineering of the man-machine interface,
in order to render the machines 'user-friendly' and their acolytes
more predictable. The partitioning off of the noise of the outer
world brings to mind another sort of closure, that of thermodynamic
isolation, as when Maxwell's Demon closes the door on slower gas
molecules in order to make heat flow from a cooler to a warmer room,
thus violating the second law of thermodynamics. Then again, there
is the type of closure that is more directly rooted in the algorithms
that play across the screens, a closure that we shall encounter
repeatedly in this book. The first commandment of the trillions of
lines of code that appear on the screens is that they halt; algorithms
are closed and bounded, and (almost never) spin on forever, out of
control.
And then the rooms are closed in another fashion, one resembling
Bentham's Panopticon: a hierarchical and pervasive surveillance which
is experienced as an automatic and anonymous expression of power
(Foucault, 1977). The range of things which the occupants of the
room can access, from your medical records to the purchases you made
three years ago with your credit card, from your telephone calls to
all the web pages you have visited, from your genealogy to your genome,
consistently outstrips the paltry imagination of movies haunted by
suggestions of paranoid conspiracies and fin-de-siecle science run
amok (Bernstein, 1997). Just as surely as death is the culmination
of life, surveillance raises the spectre of counter-surveillance,
of dissimulation, of penetration; and closure comes increasingly to
resemble prophylaxis. The language of viruses, worms and a myriad
of other creepy-crawlies evokes the closure of a siege mentality, of
quarantine, or perhaps the tomb.
The closure of those rooms is also radically stark in that implacable
conflicts of global proportions are frequently shrunk down to
something far less than human scale, to the claustrophobic controlled
play of pixilated symbols on screens. The scale of phenomena seems to
have become distended and promiscuously distributed. As the computer
scientist Joseph Weitzenbaum has once said, the avatars of artificial
intelligence tend to describe "a very small part of what it means
to be a human being and say that this is the whole". He quotes
the philosopher (and cheerleader for AI) Daniel Dennett as having
insisted, "If we are to make further progress in Artificial
Intelligence, we are going to have to give up our awe of living
things" (in Baumgartner & Payr, 1995, p.259). The quickest way to
divest oneself of an awe for the living in the West is to imagine
oneself surrounded instead by machines. Whatever may have once
been imagined the rich ambiguity of multiform experience, it seems
enigmatic encounters and inconsistent interpretations can now only be
expressed in this brave new world as information. Ideas are conflated
with things, and things like computers assume the status of ideas.
And although there is the widespread notion that as the global
reach of these rooms has been stretched beyond the wildest dreams of
the medieval magus or Enlightenment philosophe, the denizens of the
modern closed rooms seem to have grown more insular, less experienced,
perhaps even a trifle solipsistic. Closed rooms had held out the
promise of infinite horizons; but the payoff has been... more closure.
Who needs to venture any more into the inner city, the outer banks,
the corridors of the Louvre, the sidewalks of mean streets? Travel,
real physical displacement, has become like everything else: you
need special reservations and a pile of money to go experience the
simulacra that the screen has already conditioned you to expect.
More annual visitors to Boston seek out the mock-up of the fictional
bar "Cheers" than view Bunker Hill or Harvard Yard. Restaurants and
museums and universities and corporations and Walden Pond are never
quite as good as their web sites. Cyberspace, once a new metaphor
for spatial orientation, comes to usurp motion itself. No, don't get
around much any more.
II. Where the Cyborgs Are
Is this beginning to sound like just another pop sociology treatise on
"being digital" or the "information superhighway" or "the second self"
or denunciation of some nefarious cult of information (Roszak, 1994)?
Calm your fears, dear reader. What the world needs now is surely not
another panegyric on the cultural evils of cyberspace. Our whirlwind
tour of a few clean, well-lighted places is intended to introduce,
in a subliminal way, some of the themes that will structure a work
situated more or less squarely within a distinctly despised genre,
that of the history of economic thought. The novelty for most readers
will be to cross it with an older and rather more popular form of
narrative, that of the war story. The chronological succession of
closed rooms is intended to serve as a synecdoche for a succession
of the ways in which many economists have come to understand markets
over roughly the same period, stretching from World War II to the end
of the twentieth century. For while these closed rooms begat little
models of closed worlds, after the fashion of Plato's Cave, the
world as we had found it has rapidly been transubstantiated into the
architecture of the rooms. Modes of thought and machines that think
forged in British and American military settings by their attendant
mobilized army of scientists in the 1940s rapidly made their way into
both the natural and social sciences in the immediate postwar period,
with profound consequences for both the content and organization of
science.
The thesis that a whole range of sciences have been transformed in
this manner in the postwar period has come to have a name in the
literature of the history and sociology of science, primarily due
to the pioneering efforts of Donna Haraway: that name is "cyborg
science". Haraway (1991, 1997) uses the term to indicate something
profound that has happened to biology and to social theory and
cultural conceptions of gender. It has been applied to computer
development and industrial organization by Andy Pickering (1995a;
1997, 1999). Ian Hacking (1998) has drawn attention to the
connections of cyborgs to Canguilhem and Foucault. Explication of
the cyborg character of thermodynamics and information theory was
pioneered by Katherine Hayles (1990b), who has now devoted prodigious
work to explicating their importance for the early cyberneticians
(1994;1995a; 1999). Paul Edwards' (1996) was the first serious
across-the-board survey of the military's conceptual influence
on the development of the computer, although Kenneth Flamm (1988)
had pioneered the topic in the economics literature of industrial
organization. Steve Heims (1991) documented the initial attempts of
the first cyberneticians to reach out to social scientists in search
of a Grand Unified Teleological theory. Evelyn Fox Keller (1995) has
surveyed how the gene has assumed the trappings of military command;
and Lily Kay (1995, 1997a) has performed the invaluable service of
showing in detail how all the above played themselves out in the
development of molecular biology. Although all of these authors
have at one time or another indicated an interest in economic ideas,
what has been wanting in all of this work so far is a commensurate
consideration of the role of economists in this burgeoning
trans-disciplinary formation. Economists were present at the creation
of the cyborg sciences, and as one would expect, the cyborg sciences
have returned the favor by serving in turn to remake the economic
orthodoxy in their own image. It is my intention in this work
to provide that complementary argument, and to document just in
what manner and to what extent economics at the end of the second
millennium has become a cyborg science; and to speculate how this will
shape the immediate future.
Just how serious has the cyborg incursion been for economics? Given
that in all likelihood most economists have no inkling what "cyborgs"
are, or will have little familiarity with the historical narrative
which follows, the question must be confronted squarely. There are
two preliminary responses to this challenge: one short, yet readily
accessible to anyone familiar with the modern economics literature;
and the other, necessarily more involved, requiring a fair complement
of historical sophistication. The short answer starts out with the
litany that every tyro economist memorizes in their first introductory
course. Question: What is economics about? Answer: The optimal
allocation of scarce resources to given ends. This catechism was
promulgated in the 1930s, about the time that neoclassicism was poised
to displace rival schools of economic thought in the American context,
and represented the canonical image of trade as the shifting about
of given endowments so as to maximize an independently given utility
function. While this phrase still may spring effortlessly to the
lips-- this, after all, is the function of a catechism-- nevertheless,
pause and reflect how poorly this captures the primary concerns
of neoclassical economists nowadays. Nash equilibrium, strategic
uncertainty, decision theory, path dependence, network externalities,
evolutionary games, principal-agent dilemmas, no trade theorems,
asymmetric information, paradoxes of noncomputability, ... Static
allocation has taken a back seat to all manner of issues concerning
agents' capacities to deal with various market situations in a
cognitive sense. It has even once again become fashionable to speak
with confidence of the indispensable role of "institutions", although
this now means something profoundly different than it did in the
earlier heyday of the American Institutionalist school of economics.
This is a drastic change from the 1930s through the 50s, when it
was taboo to speculate about mind, and all marched proudly under the
banner of behaviorism; and society was thought to spring fully-formed
from the brow of an isolated economic man. So what is economics
really about these days? The New Modern Answer: The economic agent as
a processor of information.
This is the first, and only the most obvious, hallmark of the epoch of
economics as a cyborg science. The other attributes will require more
prodigious documentation and explication.
III. The Natural Sciences and the History of Economics
The other, more elaborate, answer to the query concerning the
relevance of cyborgs for economics requires some working familiarity
with the history of neoclassical economics. In a previous book
entitled More Heat than Light (1989a), I argued that the genesis of
the supposed "simultaneous discovery" of neoclassicism in the 1870s
could be traced to the enthusiasm for "energetics" growing out of the
physics of the mid-19th century. As was admitted by William Stanley
Jevons, Leon Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, Francis Edgeworth and Irving
Fisher, "utility" was patterned upon potential energy in classical
mechanics, as were their favored mathematics of extremum principles.
Their shared vision of the operation of the market (and the mind of
the agent, if they were willing to make this commitment) was avowedly
mechanical in an eminently physical sense of that term. Their shared
prescription for rendering economics a science was to imitate the
best science they knew, right down to its characteristic mathematical
formalisms. It was a science of causality, rigid determinism and
preordained order; in other words, it was physics prior to the
second law of thermodynamics, a science most assuredly innocent
of the intellectual upheavals beginning at the turn of the century
and culminating in the theories of quantum mechanics and statistical
thermodynamics.
Some readers of that volume demurred that, although it was undeniably
the case that important figures such as Jevons and Walras and Fisher
cited physics as an immediate source of their inspiration, this still
did not square with the neoclassical economics with which economists
were familiar in the 20th century. Indeed, a book by Bruna Ingrao
and Giorgio Israel (1990) asserted that the impact of physics upon
neoclassical economics was attenuated by the 1930s, precisely at
the moment when it underwent substantial mathematical development
and began its serious ascendancy. Others have insisted that a whole
range of orthodox models, from the modern Walrasian tradition to
game theory, betray no inspiration whatsoever from physics. The
historiographical problem which these responses highlight is the lack
of willingness to simultaneously examine the history of economics and
the history of the natural sciences as jointly evolving historical
entities, and not as fixed monolithic bodies of knowledge driven
primarily by their internally-defined questions, whose interactions
with other sciences can only be considered as irrelevant rhetoric
in whatever era in which they may have occurred. If you avert your
gaze from anything other than the narrowly-conceived entity called
the 'economy', then you will never understand the peripatetic path of
American economics in the 20th century.
This book could thus be regarded as the third installment in
my ongoing project to track the role and impact of the natural
sciences upon the structure and content of the orthodox tradition
in economics which is perhaps inaccurately but conventionally dubbed
"neoclassical". The first installment of this history was published
in 1989 as More Heat than Light, and was concerned with the period
from classical political economy up to the 1930s, stressing the role
of physics in the "marginalist revolution". The second installment
would comprise a series of papers co-authored over the 1990s with
Wade Hands and Roy Weintraub, which traced the story of the rise to
dominance of neoclassical price theory in America from early in the
century up through the 1960s. The present volume takes up the story
from the rise of the cyborg sciences, primarily though not exclusively
during World War II in America, and then traces their footprint upon
some important postwar developments in economics, such as highbrow
neoclassical price theory, game theory, rational expectations theory,
theories of institutions and mechanism design, the nascent program
of "bounded rationality", computational economics, "artificial
economies", "autonomous agents", and experimental economics. Since
many of these developments are frequently regarded as antithetical to
one another, or possibly movements bent upon rejection of the prior
Walrasian orthodoxy, it will be important to discern the ways in which
there is a profound continuity between their sources of inspiration
and those of the earlier generations of neoclassical economics.
One source of continuity is that economists, especially those seeking
a scientific economics, have always been inordinately fascinated by
machines. Francois Quesnay's theory of circulation was first realized
as a pump and some tubes of tin; only later did it reappear in
abstract form as the Tableau Oeconomique. Simon Schaffer has argued
that "Automata were apt images of the newly disciplined bodies of
military systems in early modern Europe... Real connections were
forged between these endeavors to produce a disciplined workforce,
an idealized workspace, and an automatic man" (1999, pp.135, 144).
It has been argued that the conception of natural order in British
classical political economy was patterned upon the mechanical
feedback mechanisms observed in clocks, steam engine governors, and
the like (Mayr, 1976). William Stanley Jevons, as we shall discuss
below in Chapter 2, proudly compared the rational agent to a machine.
Irving Fisher (1965) actually built a working model of cisterns
and mechanical floats to illustrate his conception of economic
equilibrium. Many of those enthralled with the prospect that the
laws of energy would ultimately unite the natural and social sciences
looked to various engines and motors for their inspiration (Rabinbach,
1990). However, as Norbert Wiener so presciently observed at the
dawn of the Cyborg Era: "If the seventeenth and the early eighteenth
centuries are the age of clocks, the later eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is
the age of communication and control" (1961, p.39). Natural order for
economists coming of age after WWII is still exemplified by a machine;
it is just that the manifestation of the machine has changed: it is
now the computer. "It may be hard for younger economists to imagine,
but nearly until midcentury it was not unusual for a theorist
using mathematical techniques to begin with a substantial apology,
explaining that this approach need not assume that humans are
automatons deprived of free will" (Baumol, 2000, p.23). Cyborg love
means never having to say you're sorry. Machine rationality and
machine regularities are the constants in the history of neoclassical
economics; it is only the innards of the machine that have changed
from time to time.
There is another, somewhat more contingent common denominator. The
history of economics has been persistently swept by periodic waves of
immigrants from the natural sciences. The first phase, that of the
1870s through the turn of the century, was the era of a few trained
engineers and physicists seeking to impose some analytical structure
upon the energetic metaphors which were so prevalent in their culture.
The next wave of entry came in the 1930s, prompted both by the Great
Depression's contraction of career possibilities for scientists, and
the great forced emigration of scientists from Europe to America due
to persecution and the disruptions of war. Wartime exigencies induced
physicists to engage in all sorts of new activities under rubrics
such as "operations research". We shall encounter some of these
more illustrious souls in the chapters below. The third phase of
scientific Diaspora is happening right now. The end of the Cold War
and its attendant shifts in the funding of scientific research has
had devastating impact upon physics, and upon the career patterns
of academic science in general (Slaughter & Rhoades, 1996; National
Science Board, 1995; Gruner et al, 1996; Ziman, 1994). Increasingly,
physicists left to their own devices have found that economics (or
perhaps more correctly, finance) has proven a relatively accommodating
safe haven in their time of troubles (Pimbley, 1997; Baker, 1999;
Bass, 1999; MacKenzie, 1999). The ubiquitous contraction of physics
and the continuing expansion of molecular biology has not only caused
sharp redirections in careers, but also redirection of cultural
images of what it means to be a successful science of epochal
import. In many ways, the rise of the cyborg sciences is yet another
manifestation of these mundane considerations of funding and support;
interdisciplinary research has become more akin to a necessary
condition of survival in our brave new world than merely the province
of a few dilettantes or Renaissance men; and the transformation of
economic concepts described in subsequent chapters is as much an
artifact of a newer generation of physicists, engineers and other
natural scientists coming to terms with the traditions established
by a previous generation of scientific interlopers dating from
the Depression and WWII, as it is an entirely new direction in
intellectual discourse.
And, finally, there is one more source of the appearance of
continuity. I shall argue in Chapters 4 and 5 below that the first
hesitant steps toward economics becoming a cyborg science were in fact
made from a position situated squarely within the Walrasian tradition;
these initially assumed the format of augmentation of the neoclassical
agent with some capacities to deal with the fundamental "uncertainty"
of economic life. The primary historical site of this transitional
stage was the RAND corporation and its ongoing contacts with the
Cowles Commission. Part of the narrative momentum of the story
recounted herein will derive from the progressive realization that
cyborgs and neoclassicals could not be so readily yoked one to
another, or even cajoled to work in tandem, and that this has led to
numerous tensions in fin-de-siecle orthodox economics.
IV. Anatomy of a Cyborg
So who or what are these cyborgs, that they have managed to spawn a
whole brood of feisty new sciences? A plausible reaction is to wonder
whether the term more correctly belongs to science fiction, rather
than to seriously practiced sciences as commonly understood. For
you, dear reader, it may invoke childhood memories of Star Wars or
Star Trek; if you happen to be familiar with popular culture, it
may conjure William Gibson's breakthrough novel Neuromancer (1984).
Yet, as usual, science fiction does not anticipate as much as reflect
prior developments in scientific thinking. Upon consulting the
Cyborg Handbook (Gray, 1995, p.29), one discovers that the term was
invented in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the scientific
journal Astronautics (Clynes and Kline, 1995). Manfred Clynes, an
Austrian emigre (and merely the first of a whole raft of illustrious
Austro-Hungarian emigres we shall encounter in this book), and one
of the developers of the CAT scanner technology, had been introduced
to cybernetics at Princeton in the 1950s, and was concerned about
the relationship of the organism to its environment as a problem of
the communication of information. As he reports, "I thought it would
be good to have a new concept, a concept of persons who can free
themselves from the constraints of the environment to the extent
that they wished. And I coined this word cyborg" (Gray, 1995,
p.47), short for cybernetic organism. In a paper presented to an
Air Force sponsored conference in 1960, Clynes and Kline assayed the
possibilities of laboratory animals which were augmented in various
ways in the interest of directly engaging in feedback stabilization
and control of their metabolic environment. The inquiry attracted
the attention of NASA, which was worried about the effects of long
term exposure to weightlessness and artificial environments in space.
NASA then commissioned a Cyborg Study, which produced a report in May
1963, surveying all manner of technologies to render astronauts more
resilient to the rigors of space exploration, such as cardiovascular
modules, hypothermia drugs, artificial organs, and the like.
This incident establishes the precedence of use of the term in the
scientific community; but it does little to define a stable referent.
In the usage we will favor herein, it denotes not so much the study
of a specific creature or organism as a set of regularities observed
in a number of sciences which had their genesis in the immediate
postwar period, sciences such as information theory, molecular biology,
cognitive science, neuropsychology, computer science, artificial
intelligence, operations research, systems ecology, immunology,
automata theory, chaotic dynamics and fractal geometry, computational
mechanics, sociobiology, artificial life, and last but not least,
game theory. Most of these sciences shared an incubation period in
close proximity to the transient phenomenon called "cybernetics".
While none of the historians cited above manages to provide a quotable
dictionary definition, Andy Pickering proffers a good point of
departure in his (1995a, p.31):
Cybernetics, then, took computer-controlled gun control and layered
it in an ontologically indiscriminate fashion across the academic
disciplinary board-- the world, understood cybernetically, was a
world of goal-oriented feedback mechanisms with learning. It is
interesting that cybernetics even trumped the servomechanisms line
of feedback thought by turning itself into a universal metaphysics,
a Theory of Everything, as today's physicists and cosmologists use
the term-- a cyborg metaphysics, with no respect for traditional
human and nonhuman boundaries, as an umbrella for the proliferation
of individual cyborg sciences it claimed to embrace.
So this definition suggests that military science and the computer
became melded into a Theory of Everything based upon notions of
automata and feedback. Nevertheless, there persists a nagging doubt:
isn't this still more than a little elusive? The cyborg sciences do
seem congenitally incapable of avoiding excessive hype. For instance,
some promoters of Artificial Intelligence have engaged in wicked
rhetoric about "meat machines", but indeed, where's the beef? After
all, many economists were vaguely aware of cybernetics and systems
theory by the 1960s, and yet even then, the prevailing attitude was
that these were 'sciences' that never quite made the grade, failures
in producing results precisely because of their hubris. There is
a kernel of truth in this, but only insofar as it turned out that
cybernetics never itself attained the status of a fully-fledged
cyborg science, but instead constituted the philosophical overture
toa whole phalanx of cyborg sciences. The more correct definition
would acknowledge that a cyborg science is a complex set of beliefs,
of philosophical predispositions, mathematical preferences, pungent
metaphors, research practices, and (let us not forget) paradigmatic
things, all of which are then applied promiscuously to some more or
less discrete pre-existent subject matter or area.
To define cyborg sciences, it may be prudent to move from the concrete
to the universal. First and foremost, the cyborg sciences depend
upon the existence of the computer as a paradigm object for everything
from metaphors to assistance in research activities to embodiment of
research products. Bluntly: if it doesn't make fundamental reference
to 'the computer' (itself an historical chameleon), then it isn't a
cyborg science. The reason that cybernetics was able to foresee so
much so clearly while producing so little was that it hewed doggedly
to this tenet. And yet, there has been no requirement that the
science necessarily be about the computer per se; rather, whatever the
subject matter, a cyborg science makes convenient use of the fact that
the computer itself straddles the divide between the animate and the
inanimate, the live and the lifelike, the biological and the inert,
the Natural and the Social, and makes use of this fact in order to
blur those same boundaries in its target area of expertise. One can
always recognize a cyborg science by the glee with which it insinuates
such world-shattering questions as: Can a machine think? How is a
genome like a string of binary digits in a message? Can lifeforms
be patented? How is information like entropy? Can computer programs
be subject to biological evolution? How can physicists clarify the
apparently political decision of the targeting of nuclear weapons?
Can there be such a thing as a self-sufficient "information economy"?
And most disturbingly: What is it about you that makes 'you' really
you? Or is your vaunted individuality really an illusion?
This breaching of the ramparts between the Natural and the Social,
the Human and the Inhuman, may be the most characteristic attribute
of the cyborg sciences. Prior to WWII, there were of course a surfeit
of research programs which attempted to 'reduce' the Social to the
Natural. Neoclassical economics was just one among many, which
also included Social Darwinism, Kohler's psychological field theory,
Technocracy, eugenics, and a whole host of others. However, the
most important fact about all of these early profiles in scientism
was that they implicitly left the barriers between Nature and Society
relatively intact: the ontology of Nature was not altered by the
reductionism, and controversies over each individual theory would
always come back sooner or later to the question of "how much"
of Society remained as the surd of Naturalism after the supposed
unification. With the advent of the cyborg sciences after WWII,
something distinctly different begins to happen. Here and there, a
cyborg intervention agglomerates a heterogeneous assemblage of humans
and machines, the living and the dead, the active and the inert,
meaning and symbol, intention and teleology, and before we know
it, Nature has taken on board many of the attributes conventionally
attributed to Society, just as Humanity has simultaneously been
rendered more machinelike. Whereas before WWII, the drive for
unification always assumed the format of a take-no-prisoners
reductionism, usually with physicists unceremoniously inserting
their traditions and formalisms wholesale onto some particular sphere
of social or biological theory, now it was the ontology of Nature
itself that had grown ambiguous. It was not just the bogeyman
of postmodernism which has challenged the previous belief in an
independent Nature: the question of what counts as Natural is now
regularly disputed in such areas as artificial life (Levy, 1992;
Helmreich, 1995), cognitive science (Dennett, 1995) and conservation
ecology (Cronon, 1995; Soule & Lease, 1995; Takacs, 1996).
Interdisciplinarity, while hardly yet enjoying the realm of Pareto
improving exchange, now apparently takes place on a more multilateral
basis. For instance, 'genes' now unabashedly engage in strategies
of investment, divestment and evasion within their lumbering somatic
shells (Dawkins, 1976); information and thermodynamic entropy are
added together in one grand law of physical regularity (Zurek, 1990);
or inert particles in dynamical systems 'at the edge of chaos' are
deemed to be in fact performing a species of computation.
This leads directly to another signal characteristic of cyborg
sciences, namely, that as the distinction between the Natural and
the Social grows more vague, the sharp distinction between 'reality'
and simulacra also becomes less taken for granted and even harder
to discern (Baudrillard, 1994). One could observe this at the very
inception of the cyborg sciences in the work of John von Neumann.
At Los Alamos, simulations of hydrodynamics, turbulence and chain
reactions were one of the very first uses of the computer, because of
the difficulties of observing most of the complex physical processes
that went into the making of the atomic bomb. This experience
led directly to the idea of Monte Carlo simulations, which came
to be discussed as having a status on a par with more conventional
"experiments" (Galison, 1996). Extending well beyond an older
conception of mathematical model building, von Neumann believed that
he was extracting out the logic of systems, be they dynamical systems,
automata, or "games"; thus manipulation of the simulation eventually
came to be regarded as essentially equivalent to manipulation of the
phenomenon (von Neumann, 1966, p.21). But you didn't have to possess
von Neumann's genius to know that the computer was changing the very
essence of science along with its ambitions. The computer scientist
R.W. Hamming once admitted:
The Los Alamos experience had a great effect on me. First, I
saw clearly that I was at best second rate... Second, I saw that
the computing approach to the bomb design was essential... But
thinking long and hard on this matter over the years showed me
that the very nature of science would change as we look more at
computer simulations and less at the real world experiments that,
traditionally, are regarded as essential... Fourth, there was
a computation of whether or not the test bomb would ignite the
atmosphere. Thus the test risked, on the basis of a computation,
all of life in the known universe. (in Duren, 1988, pp.430-1)
In the era after the fall of the Wall, when the Los Alamos atomic
weapons test section is comprised primarily of computer simulations
(Gusterson,1996), his intuition has become the basis of routinized
scientific inquiry. As Paul Edwards (1996) has observed, the entire
Cold War military technological trajectory was based upon simulations,
from the psychology of the enlisted men turning the keys to the
patterns of targeting of weapons to their physical explosion
profile to the radiation cross-sections to anticipated technological
improvements in weapons to the behavior of the opponents in the
Kremlin to econometric models of a post-nuclear world.
Once the cyborg sciences emerged sleek and wide-eyed from their
military incubator, they became, in Herbert Simon's telling phrase,
"the sciences of the artificial" (1981). It is difficult to overstate
the ontological import of this watershed. "At first no more than
a faster version of an electro-mechanical calculator, the computer
became much more: a piece of the instrument, an instrument in its
own right, and finally (through simulations) a stand-in for nature
itself... In a nontrivial sense, the computer began to blur the
boundaries between the 'self-evident' categories of experiment,
instrument and theory" (Galison, 1997, pp.44-5). While the mere fact
that it can be done at all is fascinating, it is the rare researcher
who can specify in much detail just "how faithful" is that particular
fractal simulation of a cloud, or that global climate model, or that
particular Rogetian simulation of a psychiatrist (Weizenbaum, 1976),
or that particular simulation of an idealized Chinese speaker in
John Searle's (1980) 'Chinese Room'. It seems almost inevitable that
as a pristine Nature is mediated by multiple superimposed layers of
human intervention for any number of reasons -- from the increasingly
multiply processed character of scientific observations to the
urban culture of academic life-- and as such seemingly grows less
immediate, the focus of research will eventually turn to simulations
of phenomena. The advent of the computer has only hastened and
facilitated this development. Indeed, the famous "Turing Test"
(discussed below in Chapter 2) can be understood as asserting that
when it comes to questions of mind, a simulation that gains general
assent is good enough. In an era of the revival of pragmatism, this
is the pragmatic maxim with a vengeance.
The fourth hallmark of the cyborg sciences is their heritage of
distinctive notions of order and disorder rooted in the tradition
of physical thermodynamics. While this will be a topic of extended
consideration in the next chapter, it will suffice for the present
to observe that questions of the nature of disorder, the meaning of
randomness, and the directionality of the arrow of time are veritable
obsessions in the cyborg sciences. Whether it be the description
of information using the template of entropy, or the description of
life as the countermanding of the tendency to entropic degradation,
or the understanding of the imposition of order as either threatened
or promoted by noise, or the depiction of chaotic dynamics due
to the 'butterfly effect', or the path dependence of technological
development, the cyborg sciences make ample use of the formalisms of
phenomenological thermodynamics as a reservoir of inspiration. The
computer again hastened this development, partly because the question
of the 'reliability' of calculation in a digital system focused
practical attention on the dissipation of both heat and signals;
and partly because the computer made it possible to look in a new way
for macro level patterns in ensembles of individual realizations of
dynamic phenomena (usually through simulations).
The fifth hallmark of a cyborg science is that terms such as
"information", "memory" and "computation" become for the first time
physical concepts, to be used in explanation in the natural sciences.
One can regard this as an artifact of the computer metaphor, but in
historical fact their modern referents are very recent and bound up
with other developments as well (Aspray, 1985; Hacking 1995). As
Hayles (1990a, p.51) explains, in order to forge an alliance between
entropy and information, Claude Shannon had to divorce information
from any connotations of meaning or semantics and instead associate
it with "choice" from a pre-existent menu of symbols. "Memory"
then became a holding-pen for accumulated message symbols awaiting
utilization by the computational processor, which every so often had
to be flushed clean due to space constraints. The association of this
loss of memory with the destruction of 'information' and the increase
of entropy then became salient, as we shall discover in Chapter 2
below. Once this set of metaphors caught on, the older energetics
tradition could rapidly be displaced by the newer cybernetic
vocabulary. As the Artificial Life researcher Tom Ray put it:
"Organic life is viewed as utilizing energy...to organize matter.
By analogy, digital life can be viewed as using CPU to organize
memory" (in Boden, 1996, p.113). Lest this be prematurely dismissed
as nothing more than an insubstantial tissue of analogies and just-so
stories, stop and pause and reflect on perhaps the most pervasive
influence of the cyborg sciences in modern culture, which is to treat
"information" as an entity which has ontologically stable properties,
preserving its integrity under various transformations.
The sixth defining characteristic of the cyborg sciences is that they
were not invented in a manner conforming to the usual haphazard image
of the lone scientist being struck with a brilliantly novel idea
in a serendipitous academic context. It is an historical fact that
each of the cyborg sciences trace their inception to the conscious
intervention of a new breed of science manager, empowered by the
crisis of WWII and fortified by lavish foundation and military
sponsorship. The new cyborg sciences did not simply spontaneously
arise; they were consciously made. The usual pattern (described in
Chapter 4) was that the science manager recruited some scientists
(frequently physicists or mathematicians) and paired them off with
collaborators from the life sciences and/or social sciences, supplied
them with lavish funding along a hierarchical model, and told them to
provide the outlines of a solution to a problem which was bothering
their patron. Cyborg science is Big Science par excellence, the
product of planned coordination of teams with structured objectives,
expensive discipline-flouting instrumentation and explicitly retailed
rationales for the clientele. This military inspiration extended far
beyond mere quotidian logistics of research, into the very conceptual
structures of these sciences. The military rationale often imposed
an imperative of "command, control, communications and information"--
shorthand, C3 I-- upon the questions asked and the solutions proposed.
Ultimately, the blurred ontology of the cyborg sciences derives from
the need to subject heterogeneous agglomerations of actors, machines,
messages and (let it not be forgotten) opponents to a hierarchical
real-time regime of surveillance and control (Galison, 1994;
Pickering, 1995a; Edwards, 1996).
The culmination of all these cyborg themes in the military framework
can easily be observed in the life and work of Norbert Wiener.
Although he generally regarded himself as an anti-militarist, he was
drawn into war work in 1941 on the problem of anti-aircraft gunnery
control. As he explained it in 1948, "problems of control engineering
and of communication engineering were inseparable, and...they centered
not around the techniques of electrical engineering but around the
more fundamental notion of the message...The message is a discrete
or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time--
precisely what is called a time series by statisticians" (1961 [1948],
p.8). Under the direction of Warren Weaver, Wiener convened a small
research group to build an antiaircraft motion predictor, treating
the plane and the pilot as a single entity. Since the idiosyncrasies
of each pilot could never be anticipated, prediction was based on the
ensemble of all possible pilots, in clear analogy with thermodynamics.
In doing so, one had to take into account possible evasive measures,
leading to the sorts of considerations which would now be associated
with strategic predictions, but which Wiener saw as essentially
similar to servomechanisms, or feedback devices used to control
engines. Although his gunnery predictor never proved superior
to simpler methods already in use, and therefore was never actually
implemented in combat, Wiener was convinced that the principles he
had developed had much wider significance and application. His report
on the resulting statistical work, The Interpolation and Control of
Stationary Time Series (1949), is considered the seminal theoretical
work in communications theory and time series analysis (Shannon
& Weaver, 1949, p.85fn). Yet his manifesto for the new science
of Cybernetics (1961[1948]) had even more far reaching consequences.
Wiener believed his melange of statistical, biological and
computational theories could be consolidated under the rubric
of 'cybernetics', which he coined from the Greek word meaning
"steersman". As he later wrote in his biography, "life is a perpetual
wrestling match with death. In view of this, I was compelled to
regard the nervous system in much the same light as a computing
machine" (1956, p.269). Hence military conflict and the imperative
for control were understood as a license to conflate mind and machine,
Nature and Society.
While many of the historians (Haraway, Pickering, Edwards, et al.)
I have cited at the beginning of this chapter have made most of
these same points about the cyborg sciences at one time or another
in various places in their writings, the one special aspect they
have missed is that the early cyberneticians did not restrict their
attentions simply to bombs and brains and computers; from the very
start, they had their sights trained upon economics as well, and
frequently said so. Just as they sought to reorient the physical
sciences towards a more organicist modality encompassing mind,
information and organization, they also were generally dissatisfied
with the state of the neoclassical economic theory which they had
observed in action, especially in wartime. Although the disdain was
rife amongst the cyborg scientists, with John von Neumann serving
as our star witness in Chapter 3 below, we can presently select one
more quote from Wiener to suggest the depths of the dissatisfaction:
From the very beginning of my interest in cybernetics, I have been
well aware that the considerations of control and communications
which I have found applicable in engineering and in physiology were
also applicable in sociology and in economics... [However,] The
mathematics that the social scientists employ and the mathematical
physics they use as their model are the mathematics and mathematical
physics of 1850. (1964, pp.87, 90)
V. Attack of the Cyborgs
It is always a dicey proposition to assert that one is living in an
historical epoch when one conceptual system is drawing to a close
and another rising to take its place; after all, even dish soaps are
frequently retailed as new and revolutionary. It may seem even less
prudent to attempt the sketch of such a scenario when one is located
in a discipline such as economics, where ignorance of history
prompts the median denizen to maintain that the wisdom du jour is the
distilled quintessence of everything that has ever gone before, even
as they conveniently repress some of their own intellectual gaffes
committed in their salad days. Although the purpose of this volume
is to provide detailed evidence for this scenario of rupture and
transformation between early neoclassicism and the orthodoxy after
the incursion of the cyborgs, it would probably be wise to provide
a brief outline up front of the ways in which the cyborg sciences
marked an epochal departure from rather more standard neoclassical
interpretations of the economy. The bald generalizations proffered
in this section will be documented throughout the rest of this volume.
As we have noted, economists did not exactly lock up their doors
and set the guard dogs loose when the cyborgs first came to town.
That would have gone against the grain of nearly 70 years of qualified
adherence to a model of man based upon the motion of mass points in
space; and anyway it would have been rude and ungracious to those
physical scientists who had done so much to help them out in the
past. Economists in America by and large welcomed the physicists
exiled by war and persecution and unemployment with open arms into
the discipline in the 1930s and 1940s; these seemed the sorts of
folks that neoclassicals had wanted to welcome to their neighborhood.
The first signs of trouble were that, when the cyborgs came to town,
the ideas they brought with them did not seem to conform to those
which had represented "science" to previous generations of economists,
as we shall recount in Chapters 5 and 6. Sure, they plainly
understood mechanics and differential equations and formal logic and
the hypothetico-deductive imperative; but there were some worrisome
danger signs, like a nagging difference of opinion about the meaning
of 'dynamics' and 'equilibrium' (Weintraub, 1991), or suspicions
concerning the vaunting ambitions of 'operations research' and
'systems analysis' (Fortun & Schweber, 1993), or wariness about
von Neumann's own ambitions for game theory (Chapter 6 below).
For reasons the economists found difficult to divine, some of the
scientists resisted viewing the pinnacle of social order as the
repetitive silent orbits of celestial mechanics or the balanced
kinetics of the lever or the hydraulics of laminar fluid flow.
If there was one tenet of that era's particular faith in science, it
was that logical rigor and the mathematical idiom of expression would
produce transparent agreement over the meaning and significance of
various models and their implications. However, this faith was sorely
tested when it came to that central concept of 19th century physics
and of early neoclassical economics, energy. When the neoclassicals
thought about energy, it was in the context of a perfectly reversible
and deterministic world exhibiting a stable and well-defined
'equilibrium' where there was no free lunch. The cyborg scientists,
whilst also having recourse to the terminology of 'equilibria', seemed
much more interested in worlds where there was real irreversibility
and dissipation of effort. They seemed less worried whether lunch
was paid for, since their thermodynamics informed them that lunch was
always a loss leader; hence they were more concerned over why lunch
existed at all, or perhaps more to the point, what functions did lunch
underwrite which could not have been performed in some other manner?
For the cyborgs, energy came with a special proviso called 'entropy'
which could render it effectively inaccessible, even when nominally
present; many arguments raged in this period how such a macroscopic
phenomenon could be derived from underlying laws of mechanics which
were apparently deterministic and reversible.
The premier language which had been appropriated and developed to
analyze macroscopic phenomena in thermodynamics was the theory of
probability. The cyborg scientists were convinced that probability
theory would come to absorb most of physics in the near future;
quantum mechanics only served to harden these convictions even
further. By contrast, neoclassicals in the 1920s and 1930s had
been fairly skeptical about any substantive role for probability
within economic theory. Since they had grown agnostic about what,
if anything, went on in the mind when economic choices were made,
initially the imposition of some sort of probabilistic overlay
upon utility was avoided as a violation of the unspoken rules of
behaviorism. Probability was more frequently linked to statistics,
and therefore questions of empiricism and measurement; an orthodox
consensus on the appropriate status and deployal of those tools had
to await the stabilization of the category "econometrics", something
which did not happen until after roughly 1950. Thus once the cyborg
sciences wanted to recast the question of the very nature of order
as a state of being which was inherently stochastic, neoclassical
economists were initially revulsed at the idea of the market as an
arena of chance, a play of sound and fury which threatened to signify
nothing (Samuelson, 1986).
These two predispositions set the cyborg sciences on a collision
course with that pursued by neoclassical economics in the period of
its American ascendancy, roughly the 1940s through the 1960s. Insofar
as neoclassicals believed in Walrasian general equilibrium (and many
did not), they thought its most admirable aspect was its stories
of Panglossian optimality and Pareto improvements wrought by market
equilibria. Cyborg scientists were not averse to making use of the
mathematical formalisms of functional extrema, but they were much less
enamored of endowing these extrema with any overarching significance.
For instance, cyborg science tended to parse its dynamics in terms
of basins of attraction; due to its ontological commitment to
dissipation, it imagined situations where there were a plurality
of attractors, with the codicil that stochastic considerations could
tip a system from one to another instantaneously. In such a world,
the benefits of dogged optimization were less insistent and of
lower import, and thus the cyborg sciences were much more interested
in coming up with portrayals of agents that just 'made do' with
heuristics and simple feedback rules. As we have seen, this prompted
the cyborg sciences to trumpet that the next frontier was the mind
itself, which was conceived as working on the same principles of
feedback, heuristics, and provisional learning mechanisms that had
been pioneered in gun-aiming algorithms and operations research. This
could not coexist comfortably with the prior neoclassical framework,
which had become committed in the interim to a portrayal of activity
where the market worked 'as if' knowledge were perfect, and took as
gospel that agents consciously attained pre-existent optima. The
cyborg scientists wanted to ask what could in principle be subject to
computation; the neoclassicals responded that market computation was a
fait accompli. To those who complained that this portrait of mind was
utterly implausible (and they were legion), the neoclassicals tended
to respond that they needed no commitment to mind whatsoever. To
those seeking a new theory of social organization, the neoclassicals
retorted that all effective organizations were merely disguised
versions of their notion of an ur-market. This set them unwittingly
on a collision course with the cyborg sciences, all busily conflating
mind and society with the new machine, the computer.
Whereas the neoclassicals desultorily dealt in the rather intangible
ever-present condition called "knowledge", the cyborg scientists were
busy defining something else called information. This new entity was
grounded in the practical questions of the transmission of signals
over wires and the decryption of ciphers in wartime; but the
temptation to extend its purview beyond such technical contexts proved
irresistible. Transmission required some redundancy, which was given
a precise measure with the information concept; it was needed because
sometimes noise could be confused with signal, and perhaps stranger,
sometimes noise could boost signal. For the neoclassicals, on the
other hand, noise was just waste; and the existence of redundancy was
simply a symptom of inefficiency, a sign that someone somewhere was
not optimizing. The contrast could be summed up in the observation
that neoclassical economists wanted their order austere and simple
and their a priori laws temporally invariant; whereas the cyborg
scientists tended to revel in diversity and complexity and change,
believing that order could only be defined relative to a background of
noise and chaos, out of which the order should temporally emerge as a
process. In a phrase, the neoclassicals rested smugly satisfied with
classical mechanics, while the cyborgs were venturing forth to recast
biology as a template for the machines of tomorrow.
These sharply divergent understandings of what constituted "good
science" resulted in practice in widely divergent predispositions as
to where one should seek interdisciplinary collaboration. What is
noteworthy is that while both groups essentially agreed that a prior
training in physics was an indispensable prerequisite for productive
research, the directions in which they tended to search for their
inspiration were very nearly orthogonal. The most significant litmus
test would come with revealed attitudes towards biology. Contrary
to the impression given by Alfred Marshall in his Principles, the
neoclassical economists were innocent of any familiarity with biology,
and revealed miniscule inclination to learn any more. This did
not prevent them from indulging in a little evolutionary rhetoric
from time to time, but this never adequately took into account any
contemporary understandings of evolutionary theory (Hodgson, 1993),
nor was it ever intended to. In contrast, from their very inception,
the cyborg scientists just knew in their prosthetic bones that the
major action in the 20th century would happen in biology. Partly
this prophecy was self-fulfilling, since the science managers
both conceived and created 'molecular biology', the arena of its
major triumph. Nevertheless, they saw that their concerns about
thermodynamics, probability, feedback and mind all dictated that
biology would be the field where their novel definitions of order
would find some purchase.
Another agonistic field of interdisciplinary intervention from the
1930s onwards was that of logic and metamathematics. Neoclassical
economists were initially attracted to formal logic, at least in part
because they believed that it could explain how to render their
discipline more rigorous and scientific, but also because it would
provide convincing justification for their program to ratchet up the
levels of mathematical discourse in the field. For instance, this
was a major consideration in the adaptation of the Bourbakist approach
to axiomatization at the Cowles Commission after 1950 (Weintraub
& Mirowski, 1994). What is noteworthy about this choice was the
concerted effort to circumvent and avoid the most disturbing aspects
of metamathematics of the 1930s, many of which revolved around Godel's
incompleteness results. In this regard, it was the cyborg scientists,
and not the neoclassicals, who sought to confront the disturbing
implications of these mathematical paradoxes, and turn them into
something positive and useful. Starting with Alan Turing, the
theory of computation transformed the relatively isolated and sterile
tradition of mathematical logic into a general theory of what a
machine could and could not do in principle. As described in the next
chapter, cyborgs reveled in turning logical paradoxes into effective
algorithms and computational architectures; and subsequently,
computation itself became a metaphor to be extended to fields outside
of mathematics proper. While the neoclassical economists seemed
to enjoy a warm glow from their existence proofs, cyborg scientists
needed to get out and calculate. Subsequent generations of economists
seemed unable to appreciate the theory of computation as a liberating
doctrine, as we shall discover in Chapter 7. Hence the Bourbakist
strain of neoclassicism ended up in the dead end of the Sonnenschein/
Mantel/Debreu and no-trade theorems, whereas computational theory gave
rise to a whole new vibrant field of computer science.
These are just a few of the ways in which cyborg science came into
conflict with neoclassical economics over the second half of the 20th
century. We will encounter many others in the chapters which follow.
VI. The New Automaton Theatre
Steven Millhauser has written a lovely story contained in his
collection The Knife Thrower called "The New Automaton Theatre", a
story which in many ways illustrates the story related in this volume.
He imagines a town where the artful creation of lifelike miniature
automata has been carried far beyond the original ambitions of
Vaucanson's Duck or even Deep Blue -- the machine that defeated Gary
Kasparov. These automata are not 'just' toys, but have become the
repositories of meaning for the inhabitants of the town:
So pronounced is our devotion, which some call an obsession, that
common wisdom distinguishes four separate phases. In childhood we
are said to be attracted by the color and movement of these little
creatures, in adolescence by the intricate clockwork mechanisms that
give them the illusion of life, in adulthood by the truth and beauty
of the dramas they enact, and in old age by the timeless perfection
of an art that lifts us above the cares of mortality and gives
meaning to our lives... No one ever outgrows the automaton theatre.
Every so often in the history of the town there would appear a genius
who excels at the art, capturing shades of human emotion never before
inscribed in mechanism. Millhauser relates the story of one Heinrich
Graum, who rapidly surpasses all others in the construction and
staging of automata. Graum erects a Zaubertheatre where works of the
most exquisite intricacies and uncanny intensity are displayed, which
rival the masterpieces of the ages. In his early career Graum glided
from one triumph to the next; but it was "as if his creatures strained
at the very limits of the human, without leaving the human altogether;
and the intensity of his figures seemed to promise some final vision,
which we awaited with longing, and a little dread".
And then, at age thirty-six and without warning, Graum disbanded his
Zaubertheatre and closed his workshop, embarking on a decade of total
silence. Disappointment over this abrupt mute reproach eventually
gave way to fascinations with other distractions and other artists
in the town, although the memory of the old Zaubertheatre sometimes
haunted apprentices and aesthetes alike. Life went on, and other
stars of the Automata Theatre garnished attention and praise. Then
after a long hiatus, and again without warning, Graum announced he
would open a Neues Zaubertheatre in the town. The townsfolk had no
clue what to expect from such an equally abrupt reappearance of a
genius who had for all intents and purposes been relegated to history.
The first performance of the Neues Zaubertheatre was a scandal,
or as Millhauser puts it, "a knife flashed in the face of our art".
Passionate disputes broke out over the seemliness or the legitimacy of
such a new automaton theatre.
Those who do not share our love of the automaton theatre may find
our passions difficult to understand; but for us it was as if
everything had suddenly been thrown into question. Even we who have
been won over are disturbed by these performances, which trouble us
like forbidden pleasures, secret crimes... In one stroke his Neues
Zaubertheatre stood history on its head. The new automatons can
only be described as clumsy. By this I mean that the smoothness
of motion so characteristic of our classic figures has been replaced
by the jerky abrupt motions of amateur automatons.... They do not
strike us as human. Indeed it must be said that the new automatons
strike us first of all as automatons... In the classic automaton
theatre we are asked to share the emotions of human beings, whom in
reality we know to be miniature automatons. In the new automaton
theatre we are asked to share the emotions of the automatons
themselves... They live lives that are parallel to ours, but
are not to be confused with ours. Their struggles are clockwork
struggles, their suffering is the suffering of automatons.
Although the townsfolk publicly rushed to denounce the new theatre,
over time they found themselves growing impatient and distracted with
the older mimetic art. Many experience tortured ambivalence as they
sneak off to view the latest production of the Neues Zaubertheatre.
What was once an affront imperceptibly became a point of universal
reference. The new theatre slowly and inexorably insinuates itself
into the very consciousness of the town.
It has become a standard practice in modern academic books to provide
the impatient modern reader with a quick outline of the argument
of the entire book in the first chapter, providing the analogue of
fast food for the marketplace of ideas. Here, Millhauser's story
can be dragooned for that purpose. In sum, the story of this book
is the story of the New Automaton Theatre: the town is the American
profession of academic economics, the classic automaton theatre
is neoclassical economic theory, and the Neues Zaubertheatre is the
introduction of the cyborg sciences into economics. And Hienrich
Graum -- well, Graum is John von Neumann. The only thing missing
from Millhauser's parable would a proviso where the military would
have acted to fund and manage the apprenticeships and workshops of
the masters of automata, and Graum's revival stage-managed at their
behest.
end
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