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a quarterly of art and culture and art of quarterly a ABINET C cabinet Cabinet is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) magazine published by Immaterial Incorporated. 181 Wyckoff Street Contributions to Cabinet are fully tax-deductible. Our survival is dependent on Brooklyn NY 11217 USA such contributions; please consider supporting us at whatever level you can. tel + 1 718 222 8434 Donations of $25 or more will be acknowledged in the next possible issue. Dona- fax + 1 718 222 3700 tions above $100 will be acknowledged for four issues. Checks should be made out email [email protected] to “Cabinet.” Please mark the envelope, “You may already be a winner!” www.cabinetmagazine.org Cabinet wishes to thank the following visionary foundations and individuals for Fall 2005, issue 19 their support of our activities during 2005. Additionally, we will forever be indebted to the extraordinary contribution of the Flora Family Foundation from 1999 to Editor-in-chief Sina Najafi 2004; without their generous support, this publication would not exist. Thanks Senior editor Jeffrey Kastner also to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their two-year grant in Editors Jennifer Liese, Christopher Turner 2003-2004. We would also like to acknowledge David Walentas/Two Trees for Associate editor Sasha Archibald their generous donation of an office in DUMBO, Brooklyn. All contact information Art director Brian McMullen remains unchanged. Senior assistant editor Ryo Manabe Assistant editor Courtney Stephens $15,000 Graphic designer Leah Beeferman The Greenwall Foundation UK editor Brian Dillon The National Endowment for the Arts Editors-at-large Saul Anton, Naomi Ben-Shahar, Mats Bigert, Brian Conley, Christoph Cox, Jesse Lerner, Frances Richard, Daniel Rosenberg, David Serlin, $10,000 – $14,999 Debra Singer, Margaret Sundell, Allen S. Weiss, Eyal Weizman, Margaret Stina & Herant Katchadourian Wertheim, Gregory Williams, Jay Worthington The Peter Norton Family Foundation Website directors Liza Ezbiansky, Luke Murphy, Kristofer Widholm The American Center Foundation Circulation director Laura Howard Editorial assistants Vanessa Badino, Julian Gantt, Janet Min Lee, Michael Sanchez, $5,000 – $9,999 Javid Soriano, Chaya Thanhauser The New York State Council on the Arts Contributing editors Joe Amrhein, Molly Bleiden, Eric Bunge, Pip Day, Charles Helen & Peter Bing Green, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Dejan Krsic, Roxana The Frankel Foundation Marcoci, Phillip Scher, Lytle Shaw, Cecilia Sjöholm, Sven-Olov Wallenstein Cabinet National Librarian Matthew Passmore $3,000 or under Prepress Zvi Lanz @ Digital Ink The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Founding editors Brian Conley & Sina Najafi Steven Rand
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Contents © 2005 Immaterial Incorporated and the authors and artists. All rights in the magazine reserved by Immaterial Incorporated, and rights in the works contained herein reserved by their owners. Fair users are of course free to do their Page 3: A single home survives a wildfire in Laguna Beach, California, on 28 thing. The views published here are not necessarily those of the writers and artists, October 1993. Courtesy Associated Press. Photo by Doulgas C. Pizac. Thanks to let alone the unpredictable editors of Cabinet. Jocko Weyland. COLUMNS MAIN
7 COLORS / silver 19 LOOking forward Priscilla becker paul maliszewski A little night music King Camp Gillette and the dream of Metropolis
10 INVENTORY / peel, pucker, pinch, puncture 24 Artist Project: Events louise harpman & scott specht moyra davey The efflorescence of American drink-through lids 28 evolving Out of the Virtual Mud: 14 INgestion / why architects look sick at An Interview with Ed Burton building dedication ceremonies margaret wertheim mark morris The imaginary Galapagos of sodaconstructor The edible complex
32 16 Leftovers / a revolutionary aim? Artist project: “INspyre” and “love” barbara penner Kevin okada a.k.a. kevino Out of the water closet 34 Extraordinary Voyages christopher turner The first daredevils of Niagara Falls
37 Harnessing Niagara Falls sasha archibald Lighting the Path of Progress
39 ARTIST PROJECT: Reconstructions (Middle east) caitlin masley
43 The difference engine samantha hunt Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the birth of the computer
46 The Old Curiosity Shop peter thomashow The philosophical instruments of Benjamin Pike, Jr. chance AND
51 rolling the dice: an interview with postcard: victoria falls jackson lears julian gantt david serlin Luck in America bookmark: from the archives of chance 55 ARTIST PROJECT: accidental graffiti John Colle Rogers
58 Stumbling Over/Upon Art dario gamboni Chance as a creative ally
62 A Machine for constructing Stories: AN introduction
63 Breakfast Francine Prose Temperance, The Star, The Hanged Man, Four of Wands, Ace of Pentacles, Ten of Cups
64 Beelzebub Radio—The World Has Been Saved Denis Johnson The Devil, Ten of Cups, Strength, Nine of Wands, The Empress, Two of Pentacles
66 nevada’s most unwanted christopher turner The story of the gambling capital’s Black Book
68 cherry, cherry, cherry marshalL fey How the slot machine got its fruit
69 why Ask Why?: An Interview with Alison Gopnik Courtney Stephens The origin of the idea of chance in children
73 the language of birds dale pendell Some notes on chance and divination
82 bet the House Javid Soriano The Assinoboine game of Cossoo
84 What’s Luck Got to Do With It? sasha Archibald & courtney stephens The genius of cheating
86 ARTIST PROJECT: some letters from bookmakers james peel
89 Notes on Structure René Morales & Erik Henriksen Sphish-packing, gestalt sensations, and the wonders of buckminsterfullerene
94 be ready! nicolas herman The existential prerogative of the Go Bag
96 Editor-by-Chance! Win dominion over two pages in Cabinet’s Summer 2006 issue
99 Artist Project: Two Buffons (An Interview and a Problem) mariana castillo deball
Contributors
Sasha Archibald is associate editor of Cabinet. Mark Morris is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, where he teaches design and theory. He previously worked Priscilla Becker’s book of poems, Internal West (Zoo Press, 2001), won The Paris at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and Architec- Review book prize. She teaches writing at Columbia University and writes record tural Association while completing his doctorate at the London Consortium. reviews for several music magazines. His book, Models, is forthcoming from Wiley-Academy in 2006.
Ed Burton is an artist and computer programmer and director of research and James Peel is a graduate of the Royal College of Art. He is a multimedia concep- development at Soda Creative in London. tual artist who has exhibited at Tate Liverpool and The Henry Moore Institute. He has been working on a series of color-music paintings—informed by the Moyra Davey is an artist living in New York. She is the editor of Mother Reader: eighteenth-century Jesuit Louis-Bertrand Castel’s chromatic code for an Ocular Essential Writings on Motherhood (Seven Stories Press, 2001), an anthology Harpsichord—for Co-ordinates on view in Leeds in September. on maternal ambivalence and the intersection of motherhood and creative life, and the author of The Problem of Reading (Documents Books, 2003). She is Dale Pendell is the author of Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, & Herb- a member of Orchard, a cooperative gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. craft (Mercury House, 1995), Living with Barbarians, A Few Plant Poems (Wild Currently she teaches in the Programme d’Ètudes Critical Curatorial Cyber- Ginger Press, 1999), and Pharmako/Dynamis: Stimulating Plants (Mercury media in Geneva. House, 2002). He’s been paid to be a botanist, a computer scientist, and a vacuum cleaner salesman. At the latter job he failed miserably. He was the edi- Mariana Castillo Deball is a Mexican artist based in Amsterdam and Berlin. tor of Kuksu: Journal of Backcountry Writing. His performance group, Oracular Recent projects include Interlude: the reader’s traces, an intervention at the Madness, most recently appeared at Burning Man. Dale joined a conversation National Library in Paris, the Public Library in New York, and the National Library with Peter Lamborn Wilson and David Levi Strauss for Cabinet No. 8. in Berlin; Institute of Chance at the International Institute of Social Studies, Amsterdam; and Never Odd or Even. In 2004, she was awarded the Prix de Barbara Penner is a Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University Rome/Netherlands. College London. She is currently co-editing Toilet Papers: the Gendered Construction of Public Toilets. Marshall Fey is the grandson of Charles Fey, the inventor of the original Liberty Bell slot. His book, Slot Machines: America’s Favorite Gaming Device (Liberty Francine Prose’s most recent novel is A Changed Man (HarperCollins, 2005). Belle Books, 2002) is available from the author at 775-826-2607 or may be A brief biography of Caravaggio will be published in the Eminent Lives series in ordered through any bookstore. October, and a book on reading, Reading Like a Writer, will appear in fall, 2006.
Dario Gamboni is Professor of Art History at the University of Geneva. He is John Colle Rogers is a sculptor and professional blacksmith based in Oakland, the author of numerous publications on the art of the nineteenth and twentieth CA. A member of San Francisco’s Survival Research Laboratories, his investiga- centuries, including The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the tions into accelerated culture include photographing freeways and making art French Revolution (Yale University Press, 1997) and Potential Images: Ambiguity with firearms. His conceptual installations lampoon the military-industrial com- and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (Reaktion Books, 2002). plex through humorous documentation and architectural models.
Julian Gantt is a history student at Vassar College and an editorial assistant David Serlin is an assistant professor of communication and science studies at Cabinet magazine. at the University of California at San Diego and the author of Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the University of California at He is an editor-at-large at Cabinet. Berkeley. In addition to over 100 academic articles, she has written for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Times Javid Soriano is a student at New York University and an editorial assistant at Literary Supplement. She is also the author of The Scientist in the Crib: What Cabinet. Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind (HarperCollins, 1999) and the forth- coming How Children Change the World: The New Science of Discovery, Courtney Stephens is an assistant editor at Cabinet. Imagination and Transformation (Houghton Mifflin). Peter Thomashow is a physician, artist, and collector currently living in Ver- Louise Harpman and Scott Specht are partners in the architectural firm, Specht mont. He teaches at the Dartmouth College School of Medicine. The article Harpman, which maintains offices in New York City and Austin, Texas. Harpman on Benjamin Pike, Jr. in this edition of Cabinet is from his forthcoming book on is a professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is philosophical instruments and their makers. He is currently working on a series also the undergraduate dean. Specht Harpman’s coffee lids share wall space of Philosophical Amusements and Dioramas. with their collection of plastic ice cube trays. Christopher Turner is an editor at Cabinet and is currently writing a book, Erik Henriksen is a graduate student in the Physics Department at Columbia Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America University, where he studies one- and two-dimensional electron systems. to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Brooklyn with assorted flora and fauna. Margaret Wertheim is director of the Los Angeles-based Institute For Figuring, Nicholas Herman is currently a lecturer in the Sculpture Department at the an organization devoted to enhancing the public understanding of figures and Yale School of Art. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Denis Johnson is the author of several novels and plays, and has also published articles, short stories, and poems. He lives in North Idaho and Arizona.
Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and editor-in-chief of Raritan. His books include Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America (Basic Books, 1994) and Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Viking Penguin, 2003).
Paul Maliszewski’s writing has been published in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. His last piece for Cabinet appeared in issue no. 15.
Caitlin Masley is a New York-based artist. In 2005-2006, she began exhibiting a new series of reconstruction/combination-based architectural installations, portable paper buildings, and wall drawing projects in New York, Geneva, Amsterdam, London, Zagreb, and Auckland. www.caitlinmasley.com
René Morales is a writer and independent curator. In 2004, he co-curated “Island Nations: New Art from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico” at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. He is currently working as Curatorial Research Assistant at the Miami Art Museum. COLUMNS “Colors” is a column in which a guest writer responds to a spe- colors / Silver cific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet. / “Inventory” is an Priscilla Becker occasional column that features and sometimes examines a list, register, or catalogue. / “Ingestion“ is a column that explores Silver is the metallic version of my favorite color, gray. I don’t cuisine, aesthetics, and philosophy. / “Leftovers” is a column like silver as much as I do gray for the same reasons I don’t that examines the cultural significance of detritus. like loud people as much as quiet ones. Silver was worn to good effect by the Tin Man, but on others, it can seem like second-string arrogance: I’m special, but not as special as gold over here. It’s good for jets, streaks, and bullets—any- thing that zips through the air. Silver is also the color of my radiator, a beloved appa- ratus in my apartment. I love little more than to be awoken in the night by the sound of the heat spitting on. Its strange nocturnal respiration fills me with a deep sense of security. My father always kept the heat low—fifty-eight degrees at night and sixty-two during the day. We weren’t freezing, just uncomfortable—the favored condition of my family. My father also likes music to be turned down low. The sensation of an orchestra needling in the distance is a source of irritation for me. I like music to be heard and heat to be felt. The suggestion of music or the intimation of heat makes me feel desperate, but they are just the conditions, I suppose, that make my father feel alive. In any case, these tendencies of my father’s are good indications of his crepus- cular existence. The heat in my childhood home was noiseless, its emis- sions weak and regular, more a gesture towards comfort than comfort itself. The heat in my apartment announces itself, most noticeably in the middle of the night when it bumps up against the relative quiet. This is the time when I get up to relieve my bladder. I stumble into the middle room where intricate criss-crossed shadows are sketched on my walls by the giant tree outside my windows. It is a beautiful and frightening scene. Often there is a moment when I am torn between continuing to the john and sitting among the shadows of my middle room. I have done both. The times I choose the shadows, my face falls into their line and acts out the play of darkness and light for a while. It is then that the song of the silver radiators plays out. There are three—radiators, that is. I neglected to mention their number because I hate to play favorites—another famil- ial carry-over—but it is my bedroom radiator of which I am most fond. I suspect, though, that their number goes a way toward explaining my new appreciation for this color. I have never before had more than one radiator, at least not more than one that I’d call my own. To be fair, I don’t know which radiator sounds the first note of the symphony, asleep as I am on its downbeat, but I suspect, because of its westernmost position in the apart- ment, that it is the one in the writing room. Because this is opposite to sense (for why would a song rise in the west?), I feel it is probably correct—just as when I think I should turn right, if I turn left instead, I am usually headed in the right direction. I imagine the song begins in timid fashion, in the westernmost room, from the thinnest of the three radia- tors—just three humps wide—with a remote whistle, like silver accordions, delivering only the mostly sustained but a mosquito flying in from the coast. It hovers and worries sometimes gusting high winds of the tropics. for a few moments alerting the bedroom radiator to begin The bedroom goes on; the writing room lags; the its ascent—a gathering-up, a dredging, silver wind shuttled middle room is quiet, exhausted. through a tunnel. This is the sound that wakes me. Then it all begins again, but in a fury, a confusion of It is not unusual for sound to wake me—I have the tones. The writing room fights for precedence, and, once shallow sleep of the congenitally guilty. In summer, while gained, holds its harmonies. A toilet is flushed in an abutting growing up, the sound of tension in the trees would wake eastern apartment—a cascade of cymbals shimmering over me. It was a vibrant sound like high live wires, alert and the top of the sound. crackling. A few years ago, I described this tension to a From the bedroom, a high-pitched valvic squealing, friend, who laughed and said it was locusts, which fly in like pulling up to a stop, applying the brakes. And with this swarms and nest in the tops of trees. Another friend claimed denouement, my mood begins to sympathetically descend. it was cicadas, and I think now, after listening to their down- A satisfied whisper releases from the center of the radiator loaded mating calls, that this is probably what I heard. and rides out on its own breath. Now a mid-range clinking, Sometimes after awakening, I would get up to check the sound of finger tambourines made of silver nickels, sub- that nothing had been moved in the house. On rare occa- merged and internal. sions I would encounter my father. The unexpected sight The writing room delivers its final kettle drum sound— of him hunched over a bowl of cornflakes, his silent spoon like large drops of water dripping into a basin. And, in fact, unaided by artificial light, embarrassed me. That I had been I later discover, water is dripping, though not into a basin, discovered creeping pointlessly through the house embar- but onto my hardwood floor. rassed me too. As I reluctantly get up from my seat, I console myself And now in my own apartment, awoken by the sounds with my fortune—a silver symphony of a half hour’s dura- of the heat, it is perhaps the sense of the actual that tion, and with the knowledge that I have tickets in my impresses me. bathrobe pocket for many future nights of song—at least for On nights that I succumb to the allures of the shadows, a few more weeks, when the heat is officially turned off. I proceed to the middle room and take to my rocking chair. Each backward motion chips white paint from the wall, revealing a green, like mold, beneath it. The shadows web across my face. As though sensing my presence, the middle room radiator chimes in—like someone whistling between silver amalgam fillings. By this time, the bedroom is gaining momentum: it delivers two sustained pitches, from different sections of its orchestra—a high note blown from the top as from a silver flute, and from the lower portion, more like a bassoon, a steady hiss. An internal rattling also pipes in— a machine sound. The writing room begins its rhythm—an under-percus- sion—a gentle low thumping; its song gathers urgency. After all, it is a little further on in the theme. A staggered tune, a round, is by now in full bloom. The middle room, not to be outdone, inserts its rhyth- mic pattern; it beats a higher, sweeter tone than the writing room, like someone tamping an embroidered plaque into the wall. Its tune becomes more insistent, and though I like to think of my bedroom radiator as the big guy, the string section for our purposes, in all honesty this prestige prob- ably falls to the middle room—what with its central location, its position before the conductor (me). This middle room is the carrier of the main theme—per- colation. It is a murmuring, a conversation—among its own silvery disparate parts, and also among the voices from the other rooms. And I haven’t yet mentioned the kitchen and bathroom. The wind instruments come primarily from these rooms, where tall pipes finish in silver gauges—the source of their sound. These have far less range than the opposite: Priscilla Becker’s radiator. Photo Ryo Manabe. Inventory / designs that we now see. “There is no coffee lid that occu- Peel, Pucker, Pinch, Puncture pies the same status as the paper clip,” agrees Patton. There Louise Harpman & Scott Specht is no model that is “the winner.” Forms, and many of them, have followed this function. We are both collectors. We love scavenging and finding Each new patent designation identifies an “improvement” things, especially objects that participate in the designed so as to differentiate it from other models. Mouth comfort, environment but do not necessarily register as design splash reduction, friction fit, mating engagement, and one- objects. Items and artifacts that are highly specific and yet handed activation are some of the current innovations, any do not conform to any particular self-conscious taste culture of which could easily describe other, more intimate, bodily have a special appeal for us. The ability of some objects to pleasures. be highly designed without signaling the fact of their design The wide variety of lid designs inspires the collector is their allure, their interest, and their beauty. to formulate a specialized taxonomy. To better understand Our collection of independently-patented drink-through the range of drink delivery options, we offer the following plastic cup lids is the largest in the United States. We are genomic categories by means of operation: the peel, the ever-vigilant, and make new additions to our collection in the pucker, the pinch, and the puncture. most obvious of places—in convenience stores, gas stations, diners, and delis. Ours is a collection of the ordinary, not the Peel esoteric. It has no monetary value, but rather operates as The peel-type lids follow directly from the DIY strategy so some modest form of intellectual capital. We have collected familiar to cab drivers and early 1980s college students. most of the lids ourselves, but have also, over the years, And yet, “follow” is not quite accurate; some of the earliest benefited from the bemused indulgences of both friends lids were designed with removable wedges. Patrick T. Boyle’s and acquaintances who send us their contributions. We design for a Splash Proof Drink Through Container Lid (1977) have multiples of almost every lid, preparing ourselves for features radial score lines “defining a central tear tab” so that queries from fellow collectors, with whom we might fash- removal of the tab can be accomplished with “predictable ion a trade to secure the elusive 1935 Stubblefield lid, the tears,” leaving the remainder of the lid intact on the contain- earliest patented drink-through lid, or the 1953 Delbert E. er. Later models of the peel-type lid include the peel-and-lock Phinney lid/cup combination. type lid, where the peel-back section is received in the deck Although the earliest examples of drink-through lids of the coffee lid but not removed. In fact, the most recently- were designed for cold beverages, the true efflorescence patented lid (10 May 2005) is of the peel-and-lock type, with in drink-through lid design and production can be traced the added benefit of one-handed activation. to the 1980s, when we, as a culture, decided that it was important, even necessary, to be able to walk, or drive, or Pucker commute while drinking hot liquids. A quick survey of the Certain lids, such as the Solo Traveler (1986) designed by US patent registry reveals nine patents for specialty drink Jack Clements, require the drinker only to place his or her lids in the 1970s, jumping to twenty-six individual patents mouth over the protruded polystyrene proboscis. The puck- in the 1980s. er-type lid requires its user to drink through the lid, not from We began our collection during college in 1984 when the cup, as is the case in the peel-type lids. The Solo Traveler the purpose-built cup lids began to appear with some fre- is the lid that Phil Patton championed in his 1996 article in quency. Up until that time, coffee drinkers who wanted a I.D. magazine and also the lid that art and design curator drink-through lid had to go DIY: beginning from two points Paola Antonelli selected for inclusion in last year’s Museum along the outer edge of any flat plastic cup lid, the drinker of Modern Art exhibition, “Humble Masterpieces.” This would peel back the plastic rim along two radial axes toward type of lid offers a certain degree of “mouth comfort” and the centerpoint of the lid, creating a jagged wedge of an also has added “loft” space within the structure of the lid to opening. This operation yielded a reliable aperture, but also accommodate beverages with frothy tops. a triangular bit of garbage which design writer Phil Patton calls the “guitar pick.” The strategy was serviceable, but Pinch inelegant. Some degree of improvement was surely The pinch-type lids play a game of one-upmanship with the 10 mandated, though not the “dizzying array” of lid peel-type lids. Again, in these examples, a scored section is removed from the deck of the lid to allow liquid to pass. than radial, means of operation. This lid does not rely on Yet the means of removal, “applied squeezing pressure,” any real or implied radius for its use, but instead is purely is claimed to be more direct, therefore distinct. In these perimeter. We first came across this lid at a 7-11 conve- models, such as the model patented by Thomas Winstead nience store in Austin, Texas. This lid is really two lids in one (1985) and manufactured by the Sweetheart corporation, and, from a design point of view, is literally over the top. This the thumb and forefinger clasp or pinch the declivity design seems to have evolved from the Solo Traveler pucker- through its prepared “gripping surfaces,” thereby effecting type lid and offers a top lid that rotates over a lower lid to its extraction. form a positive lock around the drinking hole. This is a truly re-sealable lid. Because there is no deformation during acti-
Puncture vation, unlike the case of the peel or puncture-type lids, this Other lids offer liquid delivery through a push-button mecha- lid can be opened and closed multiple times without affect- nism. David Herbst’s Push and Drink Lid (1990) operates by ing its performance. applying “downward force” to a raised element on the lid, In addition to molding the drink delivery mechanism, thereby puncturing the lid to allow liquid to pass through the thermo-forming process used by all modern lid manu- its surface. The puncture-type lids are perhaps the most facturers allows for a great deal of legible information to be over-designed of the lid types, what we have begun to call printed on the deck of the lid. Coffee lids can be imprinted the “extreme lids.” Not only must these lids be designed with a vendor’s logo and now come in many colors, includ- to allow the delivery of the hot beverage, their activation ing black, green, red, blue, and tan. Most lids contain some requires additional stiffening to resist the downward pres- kind of warning, CAUTION CONTENTS HOT, and also offer sure placed on the lid surface, while maintaining its positive some means of indicating the contents of the cup. The most attachment to the rim of the cup. The Push and Drink Lid, for frequent information offerings on the lid refer to possible example, requires no fewer than five lateral braces to allow additions that might have been made to that particular cup its safe and proper use. of coffee; through marking or dimpling, the mass-produced lids become “personalized” to the user. B for black, C for • • • cream, S for sugar, D for decaf. The new red McDonald’s lids, like the older white McDonald’s lids, offer two triangu- Two lids in our collection seem to defy these tentative lar dimples which can be depressed to indicate “decaf” or typologies. These may be one-offs, or may be the first “other.” We find the “other” designation mildly amusing, members in as-yet-unpopulated new categories. The first since “other” carries no information in an otherwise highly is one we discovered in a small coffee shop across the street specific constellation of design decisions. Language, in this from the Islesboro ferry terminal in Maine. In this example, case, loses. the lid and the cup are both patented and together create The development of the coffee lid can be seen as a a unique liquid container and delivery system. The drinker uniquely American phenomenon, responding to a par- is not required to mar or mutilate this lid, only to place it ticularly American set of expectations. Yet, as American within the walls of the cup. This lid sits within the conical fast-food franchises have established themselves around the body of the styrofoam cup, rather than clipping on top. The world, our coffee and coffee drinking conventions have fol- “lid” (or strainer, really) sits approximately one inch down lowed. And still, there is resistance. An architecture school into the body of the cup and allows liquid to flow through graduate reported to us that, during a recent visit to Paris, its surface when tilted up for drinking, but also provides a she was looking for the “French style” of coffee lid to add to shallow funnel to encourage the overflow coffee to find its our collection, but hadn’t seen any during the two-week trip. way back into the reservoir. The drinker using this lid actu- Finally, on her last day, she went to a café and said in her ally drinks coffee from the cup, unmediated by a polystyrene halting French, that she would like her coffee à emporter, or, lid. In addition to the obvious “mouth comfort” found in this “to go.” The waitress shrugged in response and gave her the model, we speculate that this particular lid/cup combo might coffee in a porcelain cup. “Go with it,” she said, “but bring have found favor in the Maine coffee shop because it allows back the cup.” for considerable “splash protection” during harbor crossings.
The other lid that seems to be a category unto overleaf: Photos Louise Harpman and Scott Specht. Islesboro ferry terminal lid 11 itself is one that has a self-closing rotational, rather at bottom right; atypical 7-11 lid to its left.
Ingestion / Why Architects Look Sick excuse for a party. Whereas a traditional dedication cere- at Building Dedication Ceremonies mony focused on ribbon cutting or the presentation of keys Mark Morris to the front door followed by a simple reception peppered with speeches from dignitaries and the architect, now the Little King Boggin built a fine hall, reception and its centerpiece, the cake, predominate. This Pie crust and pastry crust, that was the wall; pricey dessert is typically bankrolled by benefactors wishing The windows were made of black puddings and white to underscore their support of the building project. And slated with pancakes—you never saw the like. To explain the presence of such a cake and why an —Mother Goose edible architectural model would be so important to open- ing a new library or museum, one has to acknowledge the American rituals surrounding new construction, particularly curious and long-lived relationship between architecture civic structures, have shifted focus over time from solemn and food. Architects, as a profession, have a particular pre- quasi-religious affairs to media-friendly parties. One thing occupation with food. Restaurants serve as their alternate hasn’t changed much: the symbolic role of food on such offices—places to meet clients, do work, and take calls. The occasions. Cornerstone ceremonies mark the start of a build- legend of the “napkin sketch” grows out of this association. ing, and dedication ceremonies its completion. Traditional It is always a cause for comment if an architect designs not cornerstone ceremonies, presided over by a local lodge of just the building, but also the furniture and even the table Masons in little aprons, included placing and pouring food- service, as though bespoke china and cutlery represented stuffs on the stone itself. Corn was featured to symbolically the zenith of the architect’s services; suggesting that defini- preserve the workmen and give thanks for their labor; wine tive proof of the architect’s skill not only extends to, but was poured on the cornerstone to bless the community’s resides in, the table service and not the building itself. It undertaking, and a vessel of oil rounded things off, ensuring follows a fantasy that the design of, say, the Macintosh Tea everyone’s peace and enjoyment of the building to come. Rooms could be found condensed and abstracted in the tea- This was the sort of ritual that Grand Master Mason George cups there, as if the table service itself were a kind of model. Washington enacted at the site of the Capitol building. A Taking this a step further, Henry van de Velde designed his simple ceremony, one could probably pull it off today for $20. own house, its furniture, the tableware, cutlery, napery, and Not so with the dedication media blitz; not anymore even the meals that were served on the bespoke china so anyway. The centerpiece of the modern dedication ceremony that no unappetizing color combinations could thwart the is a cake in the form of the building itself and these can cost moral education of his children. as much as $20,000. Few bother with cornerstone ceremo- Salvador Dalí wrote of the “edible beauty” of Art nies these days, tied as they are to full-pomp Masonic rites. Nouveau architecture. The critic Adrian Stokes described Instead, there’s the watered-down alternative: the foodless
groundbreaking ceremony. Dedication ceremonies, above: A model cake of a Seattle biotech company’s new headquarters. 14 however, only get more and more popular—any Photo courtesy Mike’s Amazing Cakes, Auburn, Washington. the “oral invitation of Veronese marble,” referring to John where the couple will honeymoon. A CEO might mark a Ruskin’s own wish to “eat up this Verona touch by touch” successful IPO with a party centered on a cake resembling after exhausting all other types of architectural analysis. the company HQ. Marie-Antoine Carême, considered the father of French That the cake should strive to be a model is proof of a cooking and chef to the Prince Regent, wrote cookery trea- design’s formal strength if it can be realized in any material, tises like Le Patissier Pittoresque (1815) taking inspiration not concrete or sugar paste. Colliding building and butter cream from other chefs, but from architects like Giacomo Vignola can offer certain payoffs. James Thurber quipped, “Seeing is and Asher B. Durand. He famously asserted: “The main deceiving, it’s eating that’s believing.” With the model cake branch of architecture is confectionery.” Carême’s trade- a sort of visceral proof is offered, associating a new build- mark was to produce highly designed dishes culminating in ing with sugary sweetness (where taste reinforces visual a dessert masterpiece resembling an architectural model: pleasure), and tapping childhood recollections of highly iced classical temples on meringue mountains or rustic mills decorated birthday cakes. One might argue that the building with moving wheels and champagne sluices. Following in itself should suffice as focus for a dedication ceremony. The the tradition of Carême, the edible building (as opposed to problem is that the scale of the actual building precludes the gingerbread house which emphasizes appearance over press and public from grasping the overall design; the model taste) is intended to be eaten and enjoyed. Delectable and cake gives everyone a bird’s-eye view. One might then argue decorative aspects are both meant to fully operate. This is a that a scale model could do the job. With computer model- natural extension of the modern pastry chef’s skills coming ing becoming prevalent in the industry, real tactile models out of increasingly complex wedding cake design. are an indulgence (finished models costing as much as their Wedding cakes are themselves edible buildings. The pastry equivalents). In light of this, the novelty of the edible first tiered wedding cake, so the legend goes, was prepared model increasingly wins out in terms of PR. Here Carême’s by an enterprising London baker in Fleet Street. This reinven- assertion rings true and chefs get a portion of what had tion of the bridal cake was modeled on the steeple of—what been an architect’s trade (and fee). Anytime one loses that else—nearby St. Bride’s church (church of the press, print- kind of money, there is an excuse to feel sick to one’s stom- ing, and journalism). St. Bride’s was one of fifty-one City ach no matter how good the food. churches designed by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great At the dedication of a brand new building, the model Fire of 1666. The church was completed by 1674, but the cake endures destruction, slice after slice. Hitler’s architect steeple was not finished until 1703 owing to delays and Albert Speer wrote of imagining every new building of his redesign. At over 225 feet, it was Wren’s tallest steeple and as an eventual ruin, and that is what this type of cake sup- managed to survive the Blitz. The poet, W. E. Henley, wrote plies. At the eve of its use, a vision of the building’s eventual of its “fanciful, formal finicking charm” and described it as demise is conjured. This, in part, prompts some nausea “that madrigal of stone.” The cake version might never have for the architects handed a chunk of their creation with a caught on so well had it not later received the royal seal of fork stabbed into it. So much of what architects do—from approval of Queen Victoria’s daughters, who chose tiered sketching to drafting to modeling to creating virtual fly- cakes for their wedding receptions. These majestic cakes through presentations—is predicated on communicating were seven feet tall and clearly referenced the object of their an interior vision to the client and the rest of the world. inspiration with pilasters and swags and so on. The trend The whole logic of an architect’s creative path, a striving today is to downplay their architectural ancestry, but the to commit design concepts to legible, reproducible, and tiers remain intact. incorrupt media, is undone by the act of eating/destroying The wedding cake’s symbolic function—to reference any representation. Unlike a cornerstone ceremony, which the churchly site of the ceremony and thereby connect the is all about potential and hope, a dedication cuts the ribbon celebration with the ceremony that precedes it—still persists on a fully manifested and flawed object in the world. There even when the ceremony takes place elsewhere. As with is something of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory working those at dedication ceremonies, the wedding cake has only here; materiality and scale run counter to our expectations. grown in importance (and price) over time. But dedication Everyone but the architect can enjoy eating the normally cakes are still in their infancy compared to the wedding inedible; everyone becomes King Kong gorging on a frag- sort and their quality and specificity vary widely. Depending ment of the metropolis. on the occasion and budget, these objects may just be re- arranged hunks of sheet cake carefully iced and meant only Further reading: to approximate a building. Others, on the other hand, are Simon R. Charsley, Wedding Cakes and Cultural History (London and New York: Rout- “built” layer upon layer according to actual blueprints. Mar- ledge,1992). zipan façades are checked against photographs of the real Karen A. Franck, ed., Food + Architecture (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2002). thing. Increasingly, architectural accuracy is sought after Jamie Horwitz & Paulette Singley, eds., Eating Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT not only for dedication ceremonies (where the design of Press, 2004). the building is the focus), but also for select weddings and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcenden- business celebrations. A bride may want her cake tal Gastronomy [1825], trans. M.F.K. Fisher (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Adrian Stokes, The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, v. 2 (London: Thames and Hudson, 15 to remind everyone where the groom proposed or 1978). leftovers / A Revolutionary Aim? ate] the sufferings which must be endured by all, but more Barbara Penner especially by females on account of the want of them.” The Great Exhibition could be said to have marked the Last year at Glastonbury, one of the United Kingdom’s larg- start of a more civilized era in women’s “elimination facili- est music festivals, a radical improvement was introduced: ties” (to borrow the current term in planning parlance). She-Pee, a pink fenced-off enclosure containing urinals for However, it could also be argued that the success of its toilet the exclusive use of women (guards stood at the entrance to arrangements actually exacerbated the provision problem keep men out). Once inside, intrepid female users were sup- for today’s generation of women. The model of the ladies’ plied with a P-Mate, effectively a disposable prosthetic penis room established at the Exhibition—private stalls each provi- made of cardboard that enabled them to stand up to pee. sioned with water closet, lock, and door—is still so dominant The British media reported widely and positively on that it has not been seriously rethought in the last 150 years. She-Pee. And once they figured out how to use P-Mate, And even though there is a rising recognition of the right to the small army of female bloggers at Glastonbury gave it access to public toilets, thanks to campaigns on behalf of thumbs up too. After explaining how P-Mate worked (place groups like the disabled or the transgendered, these discus- the funnel where your underwear should be, straighten out sions have yet to stimulate mainstream debate as to how your knees, point and shoot), one woman concluded, “Okay, public toilets are currently designed or how they might be it feels a bit weird standing up and it can be a bit tricky when produced in future. drunk, but otherwise it’s a great invention.” While some Why should this lack of design innovation matter? hailed She-Pee and P-Mate as a form of empowerment for For one thing, in the specific case of women, the toilet situ- women, most simply expressed relief at being able to by- ation remains dire. There are simply not enough toilets for pass Glastonbury’s grimy and over-subscribed portaloos. women in public spaces, even now after nearly two decades P-Mate was distributed free at Glastonbury but normally of American “potty parity” bills. Publicly acknowledging that retails for £2.50 ($4.50) for a pack of five. As any woman its 1984 potty parity legislation has not gone far enough, the who does rock-climbing or other adventure sports knows, New York City Council has recently pushed through a much P-Mate is just one of many cheap and uncelebrated devices tougher Women’s Restroom Equity Bill which requires that available today that allow women to urinate in any situation. most new public buildings install two women’s bathrooms (Other popular models include the Whiz and Feminal). These for every one men’s (versus the one-to-one ratio which are hardly as progressive as they might initially seem: along existed previously). The strong support received for this with chamber pots and bourdalous, female urinals made of Bill—it was voted in unanimously—suggests that city coun- glass or pottery (some remarkably beautiful), have actually cilors have largely accepted the arguments of crusaders like been around for centuries, long before water closets were John F. Banzhaf III, the “father of potty parity,” who note ever invented. Yet Glastonbury 2004 should still be recog- that women need more water closets because they take nized as a milestone of sorts, as it is one of the few attempts longer to pee and because they can’t use urinals. in recent times to use such technology to collectively tackle But is building more female water closets, the main the age-old problem of the queue for the ladies’. goal of potty parity legislation, the only way to remedy the With its ambitious and no-nonsense attitude towards long line-ups for ladies’ loos? What really stands in the way female toilet provision, Glastonbury recalls an earlier but of women having their own urinals as at Glastonbury? equally innovative festival, London’s Great Exhibition of Since at least the late nineteenth century, there have 1851, where conveniences were provided for the public been a number of small-scale experiments to provide on a large scale for the first time. Reportedly used 827,820 women with such alternate accommodation. In London, times over the 141 days of the Exhibition, these toilets, circa 1898, “urinettes” were first installed on a trial basis in the brainchild of engineer George Jennings, were hailed as a great success and led to an acknowledgement of the above left: Glass female urinal, ca. 1701-1740. Courtesy Science Museum / “necessity of making similar provisions for the public Science & Society Picture Library, London. 16 whenever large numbers are congregated [to allevi- above right: P-Mate. Courtesy P-Company. Photo Ryo Manabe. one female public lavatory. Smaller than conventional water (stainless steel bowl and spout, supply and return hose, closets, with curtains instead of doors, they were expected mirror, instructional floor mat) that Daniels installed at various to “answer much the same purpose as urinals in the men’s locations between 1996 and 1998. Rejecting the “backing section;” that is, they were to be used for a quick pee. On on and squatting” stance of most existing female urinals, the face of it, “urinettes” seemed perfectly viable. Not only FEMME pissoire opts for a “standing and facing” position: in were they more space-efficient than water closets, but they other words, it requires women to stand directly over the toilet were also cheap, as only a halfpenny was to be charged for bowl and to direct the stream of urine themselves as boys are their use instead of the usual penny. Moreover, given that trained to do. women wore skirts and their underclothing was typically Again, as de Beauvoir observed, whereas boys are taught open at the crotch, these devices were probably easier to to control their urine stream through handling their own penis, use then than they would be now. the girls are taught that their sexual organs are taboo. Dan- However, even though they continued to be installed at iels’s hope is that, in using FEMME pissoire, women become least into the 1920s, urinettes never appeared to gain wide- accustomed to touching themselves to direct the urinary spread acceptance. (I have found only one other reference to stream until, over time, this gesture becomes “an automatic them from this period: Florrie, a female patient of Havelock reflex.” By placing a mirror at eye-level, Daniels also ensures Ellis, refers to a urinette in Portsmouth, the sight of which, that female users confront images of themselves as they uri- she claimed, caused women to flee “in horror.”) Yet the nate standing up, actively challenging fixed ideas about what female urinal got another chance when American Standard is “proper” feminine behavior and fostering an awareness of produced its Sanistand between 1950 and 1973—a fixture the learned (as opposed to “natural”) character of the conven- which can still occasionally be spotted in national park and tions that govern toilet protocol. zoo restrooms. Advertising for Sanistand made no reference Lastly, FEMME pissoire comes with a pair of women’s to space-efficiency or cost: rather, it attempted to sell the fix- trousers, the FEMMEp-system pant, which features two ture to women with the promise that they didn’t need “to sit zippers: one that opens like a conventional fly, and the other or touch [it] in any way,” playing on fears of contagion and that opens at the crotch. These trousers are an integral part implicitly acknowledging that then, as now, the majority of of the redesigned toilet, addressing not only the “pants- women prefer to hover when using public toilets. round-the-ankle” complaint that repeatedly surfaces with Even though there is little historical evidence for why users of female urinals, but also the way in which female these experimental products were discontinued, an explana- genitalia is left unarticulated in clothing design, a “lack,” tion is not so hard to find—and this begins to get us to the in comparison to the male. In the same way that the front real problem with rethinking the female toilet. As the horror zipper on trousers articulates male anatomy, the FEMMEp- displayed by the women in Portsmouth reminds us, this system pant now articulates and makes visible the female. behavior is not simply a functional response to female physi- Even though Daniels designed FEMME pissoire to be ology but a cultural product shaped by discourses around mass-produced, it exists now as a propositional object, the body, privacy, femininity, decency, and hygiene. Women a means of challenging the Freudian maxim “anatomy is are just as invested in maintaining these discourses as men destiny” and prevailing customs. And despite a new genera- to the extent that they often override their own physical tion of female urinals in production since the 1990s, from needs: many women refuse to use a female urinal not on the Lady P to the Lady Loo, most of these are purchased for practical grounds but because to use it feels immodest or their novelty appeal and installed singly in nightclubs unnatural or just simply weird. or theaters. The current crop of female urinals is simply too To balk at such an invention should not be dismissed as expensive and inflexible to supplant the traditional water mere prudery. Such resistance runs deep, just about as deep closet. And, despite some efforts to train women to pee as you can go, as many of our toilet attitudes and habits are standing up (see, for instance, “Teaching our Daughters to learned in childhood and, some argue, are fundamental to our Pee Standing,” http://www.restrooms.org/teaching.html), gendered sense of self. Simone de Beauvoir, who discussed most women still require assistance. toilet training in The Second Sex, believed that teaching little Perhaps, ultimately, the best hope for change lies where girls to squat to urinate constitutes “the most striking sexual we began: with inexpensive prosthetic devices like the P- differentiation” of their childhood. She explained: “To urinate, Mate which are portable (most fit comfortably into a purse) [the little girl] is required to crouch, uncover herself, and and which help women direct their urine stream. While they therefore hide: a shameful and inconvenient procedure.” can be used in conjunction with urinals—and P-Company In society, the erect position is reserved for men alone. has recently designed a mobile urinal, the WC3, for use at Arguably, then, in order for female urinals to succeed, Glastonbury 2005—they can be easily used anywhere, even women must simultaneously be subjected to a complex sort out of doors, as well as with any existing toilet facilities. In of retraining, one that reverses or subverts the socialization fact, I would close with a modest proposal: why not have the process. This possibility intrigued New York-based architect Whiz or P-Mate machines installed in female public toilets Yolande Daniels when she began working on her prototype alongside the sanitary pad and condom dispensers, thus female urinal, FEMME pissoire. saving a generation of women an escape from long lines and 17 FEMME pissoire consists of a basic ensemble dirty seats? Really, in the end, is this aim so revolutionary? MAIN Looking Forward Metropolis never did exist, however, except in the Paul Maliszewski elaborate and detailed pages of The Human Drift, an 1894 utopian tract by King Camp Gillette. Born in 1855 in Fond There was once supposed to have been a city, located du Lac, Wisconsin, Gillette was the youngest of seven not far from Niagara Falls, where 60 million people lived children. His mother wrote a well-known cookbook that is, in 24,000 apartment buildings, each 25 stories tall. In remarkably, still in print, and his father owned a wholesale Metropolis, as the city was named, the apartment buildings hardware business and worked as a patent agent. Gillette were arranged in a regular pattern and served as the central was a restless tinkerer. He sunk nearly $20,000 into an hubs or cogs around which life there revolved. Short, neatly ultimately failed quest to create a carbonating machine landscaped walkways connected the buildings together and and later traveled the country as a salesman for a firm that led to wider and longer avenues that crisscrossed through manufactured corks, bottle caps, and stoppers. Seven years the city. Schools, recreation and amusement centers, flower after formulating his blueprint for a better and certainly more conservatories, parks as ample as they were well-planted, organized city, Gillette, then forty-six years old, invented the and buildings for food production and storage clustered safety razor, a commercial product that became the basis for around every apartment building, each of which accom- a thriving company and made its inventor a multimillionaire modated about 2,500 people in comfort and high style. and one of the few celebrities known the world over. An According to the city’s creator, “the most magnificent early president of the company recalled that when Gillette modern hotel in New York could not compare in beauty of visited Egypt, locals recognized him from his picture, which its rooms and liberality of its service with any one of these was printed on every razor’s wrapper. They surrounded the thousands of buildings of Metropolis.” Indeed, individual inventor and pointed at him eagerly, scraping at their faces apartments promised a lavish, if not obscene 4,500 square with bent forefingers. feet of living space, which was divided into three bedrooms, Disposable razor blades proved a considerably easier three bathrooms, three sitting rooms adjacent to the bed- sell than the new way of life promised in a not-yet-built city rooms, a library and music room, as well as a window-lined of the future. And yet, Gillette had good reason to expect parlor and veranda for entertaining guests. An expansive that people would line up to buy new and improved futures glass-domed room, located at the center of the apartment as well. He had dedicated his book “to all mankind,” and buildings, offered a communal dining area. In all, the city then added, “for to all the hope of escape from an environ- encompassed 15,000 miles of avenues, “every foot of which ment of injustice, poverty, and crime, is equally desirable.” would be a continuous change of beauty.” It extended east The United States had recently fallen into a deep economic into New York State and, pending the cooperation of the depression, the worst in its history, brought on by the cur- Canadian government, west into the province of Ontario. It rency crisis of 1893 and made worse by the predatory drew much of its power from the Falls and the Niagara River. practices of business owners (“robber barons” in the honest The residential portion of the city alone—that tightly woven parlance of the time), who were hell-bent on merging and honeycomb pattern of apartment complexes and ancillary acquiring and combining and growing, all as rapidly as buildings—lay just south of Lake Ontario and subsumed possible. Stock trading was so speculative and unregu- sizable parts of seven upstate New York counties, from lated it earned frequent comparisons to gambling. The age Niagara and Erie in the west to Ontario and Wayne 19 in the east. above: A Gillette razor wrapper, early twentieth century. was called gilded: on the outside it glittered like gold, but want, and poverty. The book sold 5,000 copies a week in underneath it was bad fruit, rotten and soft. Severe unem- 1888 when it was published—only Uncle Tom’s Cabin shifted ployment and hundreds of failed banks further exacerbated more units that century—and was translated into more than the nation’s misfortunes. Railroads were bought, sold, and twenty languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, traded feverishly, eventually gutted of their value and left and Lithuanian. Seven separate translations circulated in as empty husks to operate in unprofitable receivership. Russia, with the first inspired by Tolstoy, who considered The nation’s cities were not appreciably different from what Bellamy’s book an “exceedingly remarkable” achievement. Jacob Riis witnessed in New York City’s tenements and According to Scott McLemee, who in late 2000 took stock described in How the Other Half Lives (1890): dangerous of what Bellamy had wrought, Looking Backward spawned and impoverished, ridden with crime and communicable countless imitators as well as clubs for readers devoted to diseases. Life had become so nasty and brutish that people discussing the original’s teachings and implications. Writing must have felt justified in wishing it at least be mercifully for the New York Times Book Review, McLemee suggests short. President Grover Cleveland, tone deaf to the tune of that Bellamy’s genteel readers were “relieved to think that the times or else unable to imagine any solution save waiting society could be improved without violent revolution.” and seeing what happened next, greeted the not unreason- Gillette was one such mild-mannered reformer. He able demands of some striking workers by dispatching the acknowledged that the world as it worked was a broken U.S. army to crush them. machine, but was possessed of such an even temperament Not surprisingly, the last years of the nineteenth century that he sought reasonable solutions to even the most intrac- proved to be fertile soil for discontent and produced both a table problems. Though many of his criticisms of the social bumper crop of utopian schemes and people to dream them. order were acidic—Gillette wrote that both U.S. political If necessity is the mother of invention, poverty and hardship parties were “wedded to boodle, and managed and con- are the parents of utopian proposals. According to Russell trolled in the interests of capital”—and though many of his Jacoby, author of The End of Utopia, at least one hundred ideas had a distinctly socialist complexion, Gillette refused utopian novels were published during the last twelve bitter years of the nineteenth century. The most popular by far was above: “The Human Drift,” in King Camp Gillette, The Human Drift [1894], Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: From 2000 to 1887, (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976), p. 17. which imagined, with not a little optimism, that the twen- opposite: Plate V from The Human Drift, p. 103. Description reads: “... a perspec- tieth century would lick the nineteenth’s problems and the tive view of a complete building and its imaginary surroundings. Here we see the new millennium would dawn brightly on a world that tiers of apartments arranged in a circle and joined at the back, and the interior 20 had achieved equality, peace, and an end to crime, court thus formed is surmounted by a dome of metal and glass.” to embrace that ideology and never thought of himself as ever, and employed in the earliest stages of the construction an enemy of capital. His solution instead was to propose a of Metropolis. practical and corporate-minded fix designed to appeal to Gillette had it all figured out. In The Human Drift, he working people and business owners alike. Business, Gillette tried to foresee and address every eventuality, from the believed, could repair the world of troubles that business location, size, and shape of the buildings to minute details had itself made. of their design. The city would start from the ground up, In The Human Drift, the creation of Metropolis is but developing in layers like a cake: the second part of Gillette’s ambitious solution. In order to raise the money necessary for the construction of his city, In the building of “Metropolis” there would be no exca- he planned to create a new corporation, a behemoth to vating for sewage, heating, cold air, and electric systems. dwarf and, finally, dominate all existing companies. Follow- Each would be above ground and in plain sight, where every ing the merger-merry spirit of the age, the new company defect could be noted and repairs made without unnecessary would assume control of the competition, eventually labor. To accomplish this, a chamber is formed above ground monopolizing every single smaller and weaker enterprise. by the erection of steel pillars and the building of a platform It would bring all other companies to heel. Unlike those throughout the length and breadth of the city. The pillars used other firms, however, Gillette’s United Company would be are of such different height as to overcome the inequalities of land surface, and make it possible to lay a perfectly level plat- owned jointly by all people, all equally. Individuals could buy form at the top of the pillars, it being calculated to be elevated stocks in the United Company just as they could any publicly at least twenty-five feet from the ground. This platform is traded firm, but regardless of how many shares they owned, composed of frameworks of steel inlaid with glass, similar to every shareholder received but one vote to ensure that the the numerous vault lights of our cities, which admit light to firm always operated in the interests of its collective owners, cellars and basements. We now have a perfectly level floor of the world’s people. To make buying a piece of that future glass and steel throughout the city, and the chamber beneath easier, Gillette included a certificate of subscription in his that platform is as light as day. book for the interested investor to detach, fill out, and mail in. Gillette’s idea of one company to rule them all benevo- Gillette further prescribes two more layers, constructed lently was not new. Looking Backward predicted the creation along similar lines, with the second reserved for the city’s of a massive state-owned and -operated trust that would transportation system and the third made expressly for deploy, as Jacoby writes, “the nation’s wealth to ensure perfect financial equality for all.” The novelty of Gillette’s idea lay in his abiding faith that private enterprise, acting within the existing market economy and without govern- ment’s help or interference, could achieve that goal. Gillette believed that the corporation—taken to its ultimate conclu- sion—could solve all problems. His commitment to social reform was real, but he remained a businessman in both his ideas and outlook. Later, Gillette referred to this firm, even more grandly, as the World Corporation and The People’s Corporation, but while its name changed, his central idea held steady: a corporate monopoly, the cause of so much that he identified as socially noxious—competition, Gillette thought, lay at the root of every one of the problems that beset society—could still be bent to good purposes. He was a businessman with a socialist’s heart. And he believed the country’s future could be secured only by taking a counter- intuitive leap of logic, the same sort that inspired scientists then to create a cure for diphtheria by using diphtheria itself. As the United Company grew, the assets it accumulated from sales of shares and the creative destruction of its dwin- dling rivals would be funneled straight into the creation of Metropolis. The North American continent, Gillette believed, needed no more than one city of its size. One well-designed city was more desirable than thousands of smaller, deeply flawed, and badly operated runts. The United Company’s success came at a steep price though. Thousands, if not millions, of people would lose their jobs and be made redun- dant by the colossal company of the people. All 21 those unlucky workers would be taken care of, how- 22 storage and a spacious walkway, which he considered relegating Twentieth Century and Gillette to the dustbin of “desirable in inclement weather.” Even building materials well-intentioned ideas and fanciful notions, it’s worth asking and colors are specified here. The first layer would be white, if there isn’t something worth saving. Kenneth M. Roemer, with the ground “first covered with a cement or asphalt an English professor at the University of Texas at Arlington composition, and then a layer of white glazed tiling.” The who has written frequently about Gillette, including the second layer “would also be treated in white tiling, relieved introduction to a 1976 facsimile of The Human Drift, its most by colored borders.” For the third layer, which Gillette recent edition, argues that “Gillette’s grand plans, even if envisioned as a “bewildering scene of beauty in its artistic they were grand delusions, deserve better” than casual treatment,” he pulls out every stop: mockery of his outsized ambition and naïveté. For Roemer, Gillette captures distinctly nineteenth-century concepts of The floors, ceiling, and pillars of porcelain tile, with their how corporations increasingly played a role reserved, during ever-changing variety in colors and designs, the artificial earlier eras, for religion. But beyond the historical signifi- parks topped above the upper platform with domes of colored cance of The Human Drift and its oddly angled snapshot of glass in beautiful designs, its urns of flowers, and beautiful turn-of-the-century anxieties, maybe it possesses a more works of art and statuary, would make it an endless gallery timely value—perhaps even a timeless one. of loveliness. Here would be found a panorama of beauty Utopian tracts, and novels too for that matter, needn’t that would throw into shadow the fables of wonderful palaces be read as blueprints. As plans that stipulate specific and cities told of in the “Arabian Nights”; yet the genii of all actions—a specific city built on a specific hill by specifi- this would be naught but the intelligence of man working in cally designated workers—they always and inevitably will unison. What would be seen here is within our knowledge to founder. But does it represent the failure of utopian writers do, and with less expenditure of labor than is now required to when what they predicted has hardly come to pass? Or is maintain our present cities. it our fault—our collective fault—that so much is still so Gillette calculated for every need save one: interested wrong, unequal, and unjust? Journalist Heywood Broun homeowners. Not that he lacked for at least one champion. writes in a 1926 introduction to Looking Backward that his Twentieth Century, a populist weekly magazine, took to radical friends routinely condescended to the novel, for- advertising The Human Drift as part of its five-volume set of ever reminding him that first-rate economics didn’t inform reform-minded literature, which included Looking Backward Bellamy’s thinking. And yet, Broun argues, many of those and essays by George Bernard Shaw. The magazine even same friends granted that the novel first inspired them to formed a corporation, inspired by Gillette’s proposal, and start thinking about inequality and next consider what was called it Twentieth Century Company. Gillette was declared to be done. In Metropolis, no building was ever made. No its president, and the magazine wasted no time in bid- ground was ever broken, and no team surveyed the site. But ding readers to buy shares at five dollars a pop. Later, the as calls to our better selves, utopian literature might still suc- company’s directors abruptly announced it would break ceed. Gillette and Bellamy and other utopian writers remain into the insurance field. Next, they took control of a printing a group of unappeasable instigators, a hard-to-impress tribe company, their first acquisition. Russell B. Adams, Jr., the forever facing the future, still there to inspire a few more author of Gillette’s only full-scale biography, describes that restless dreams of better worlds and hopes that may be transaction as “fittingly cashless.” The directors, who never realized yet. seemed all that deliberate about executing Gillette’s plan, had little money and so could afford to bank only on good- hearted ideas and their bottomless enthusiasm for a better future. Investors meanwhile didn’t flock to the company, and readers never really warmed to Gillette’s theories. Their lack of interest was writ large in the 1896 presi- dential election. The most reform-minded voters that year lent their support to the Democratic Party and William Jen- nings Bryan. Their political decision, however cagey and based on notions of what we might now term electability, was for naught. The country chose William McKinley, a Republican who enjoyed the fealty of bankers. Adams notes that within two years of McKinley’s victory, Twentieth Cen- tury published its last issue. “The radical weekly,” he writes, left: Plate I from The Human Drift, p. 95. The plate depicts “thirty-three apart- “had failed even to survive into the century that had inspired ment buildings. five educational buildings, marked A, five amusement buildings, its name, thereby more than living up to its motto, ‘Always marked B, and five buldings where food is stored and prepared, marked C.” ahead of the times.’” overleaf: Moyra Davey, Untitled (Receiver), 2003 The American left has become so accustomed to such page 25: Moyra Davey, Untitled (Speaker), 2003 grim irony in the face of defeat that it can seem now page 26: Moyra Davey, Untitled (Nyro), 2003 23 like a crucial plank in its political platform. But before page 27: Moyra Davey, Untitled (Shure), 2003 Events moyra davey
Evolving Out of the Virtual Mud: effectively act like springs and you can play around with all An Interview with Ed Burton sorts of configurations and see how these different models Margaret Wertheim behave within the world. The world itself has some very basic physics programmed into it, such as a simple simula- They crawl, they hop, they slink, and they undulate. Some tion of gravity. The thing I never anticipated was the diversity roll, some fly, and others unfold from a simple triangle. of forms you could build with just this simple set of rules. These “creatures” are the products of an imaginative evo- lutionary experiment that now involves more than 100,000 Can you describe how one of these people worldwide. Each of these forms has been created models works? through a program called sodaconstructor that enables users to build models which increasingly resemble living Sodaconstructor is a two-dimensional organisms. Over the past five years, a global community has world populated by points and lines. brought forth from this digital mud a Cambrian explosion The points represent masses, and of species: walkers, stalkers, floaters, and flyers; things that the lines represent springs. In the real tumble and skip; simulations of spiders, crabs, and starfish; world, springs usually have a fixed monopeds, bipeds, tripeds, and centipeds; a Möbius strip rest-length. The novel element I introduced in the software that turns itself inside out, and a hyperactive “butterfly” is to have some of the springs change their rest length enigmatically titled “Love.” This imaginary Galapagos over time. You can think of the springs as a bit like muscles resides on a server in a warehouse in the Shoreditch area of expanding and contracting. The change is driven by a sine London’s East End, the grunge-chic office of Soda Creative, wave that is programmed into the world and acts like a clock a company that specializes in producing software at the within this space. By connecting the point masses in vari- boundary of art, learning, and play. ous configurations and letting the structure flex freely under The architect of this virtual world is Ed Burton, an artist the influence of this wave, it was possible to make simple and computer programmer who serves as Soda’s research walking creatures. I suppose that was the height of my and development director. A graduate of the Center for Elec- ambition—to make simple things that walked. tronic Arts at Middlesex University, Burton was inspired by computer pioneer Seymour Papert’s constructivist notion So you were trying to make a virtual version of a mechanical of “creative play” and by the engineering principles of Con- toy like Mechano or an Erector Set? trol and Dynamic Systems. To his surprise, the software has turned out to enable a far richer range of possibilities Actually, it’s difficult to think of a physical toy that is like than he had ever dreamed, as users have found ways to this. Most mechanical vehicles tend to have wheels because subvert and exploit features of the code Burton had thought wheels are easy to build out of cogs. But typically in were inviolable. As in the natural world, the taxonomy of nature you don’t get wheels. I was thinking of soda-organisms has evolved in ways unimaginable at the something more biological. start, while Burton—an accidental god—has watched on in wonder at the fecund spirit animating this miniature How did other users get involved with cosmos. In July, he gave a talk at the Institute For Figuring in the program? Los Angeles. Before that event, Institute director Margaret Wertheim interviewed him by phone from London. At Soda Creative, we originally put it up online in 1997. But it went into a very discreet corner of How did you come to design soda- the site and was essentially unnoticed for several years. In constructor? the summer of 2000, we gave the site a polish and made it more prominent, then quite spontaneously it started to I had just joined Soda Creative, attract an exponentially growing amount of interest. It was who were doing a lot of software largely a viral process. Suddenly, it washed around the world in a language called Java that I’d and we started to see very quickly all these different kinds of never used before. So I needed to creations coming in. learn this quickly, and the way I like to learn things is to play. Essentially, Many of these models seem organic; it’s almost as if they are I thought up sodaconstructor as a alive. They also seem to come in distinct types or “species.” toy I could build in Java and play Could you describe some of these types? with. One type has come to be called amoebas. Essentially, an What kind of a toy is it? amoeba is a ball that locomotes by squashing itself along a rotating axis. I don’t know if there’s anything in nature it It’s in the tradition of a construction toy. You create would be like. That’s one of the few types that dates back 28 a set of points and join them together by lines that to the first batch of models I made. Since then, our users have come up with many different kinds of amoebas and a to be really called evolution. Most lot of other types I never imagined. There’s a whole style of importantly, it lacks any competi- models based on intermeshed circles and Möbius strips, and tion for resources which evolution there are many, many different types of walking models, far typically has. Perhaps that’s one more sophisticated than anything I envisaged. For instance, reason why the sorts of things bipeds. I suppose I had aspired to create bipeds, but they you see in the “sodazoo” are always struck me as much too difficult. somewhat like what you see in the pre-Cambrian explo- What’s so hard about bipedal motion? sion in the earth’s fossil record. There’s this almost When bipeds walk, they are constantly out of balance, so crazy diversity because to achieve this style of motion requires dynamic balance there’s so little competition with active feedback to keep from falling over. In fact, I in the environment. Soda found a forum where someone said that sodaconstructor users think, “As long as it doesn’t fall down, it’s okay.” would never create bipedal motion because there wasn’t any active feedback from the environment. But our users have One of the things that surprised you, I gather, is that some managed to make very effective people turn out to be star constructors. Creatively speaking, bipeds by exploiting the fact that it hasn’t been a level playing field. as a biped falls forward, it gets a slightly better grip on the ground Yes. I had imagined everyone would be equally good, which enables its feet to acceler- and that’s not the case. The first real breakthrough user ate slightly. In effect, as it falls who absolutely raised the bar of what we could expect to forward, it’s able to right itself achieve was someone who called himself Kevino. A few automatically. It’s interesting that months after the software became publicly known, he users were able to make a sort sent us twenty or so models, and all of them were a quan- of patented method for dynamic tum leap forward in sophistication. The most memorable balance. was one called Unfold. When you first saw it, it was just a triangle sitting on the bottom of the screen, but the Do you think they were consciously thinking of this as an engi- triangle started to expand, and then it would suddenly neering problem or just hit upon the method accidentally? scrunch like a pop-up and unfold into a multi-faceted construction. Then, rather remarkably, it could slowly It would have to be fairly conscious and a prolonged process contract in a very complex geometric way back into the of trial and error. The way things get made in sodacon- simple triangle. It was a completely different genre and structor, it’s not that you just think, “Ah, I can make this” not anything to do with my preconceived idea of the and draw it on the screen, and there it is. Things have to program, which was basically just to enable things to be built slowly, through discovering the dynamics of indi- move back and forth across the screen. Kevino had found vidual experiments and then building up slowly to create a completely different style of movement, and it was more sophisticated things. Something like balanced bipeds executed with a great requires lots of experimentation. deal more skill than Another thing the users have been able to do that took I’d imagined was a lot of conscious effort is to develop models that fly. I really possible. didn’t expect that. They’ve made models that effectively One of my all- defy the gravity built into the system. This is an example of time favorites is another the community going through a process of experimenta- Kevino model called tion and creating something Shape-shifter. Again, when you first see it, and analyzing it and improving it appears to be just two triangles joined together on it. They weren’t just reveal- floating in space. Then those triangles unfold into an array ing something I’d hidden in the of triangles, and then that unfolds again, and each time software; they were genuinely it unfolds it forms a different shape. That was extremely discovering new potential I hadn’t surprising to me because all the movements of soda- even suspected. constructor are driven by one sine wave, and so I always imagined the scope of the movement was going to It sounds quite Darwinian. be repetitive on the same timeframe as the wave, but Kevino was able to create something that had a It is like evolution in many ways, larger scale of change and appeared almost random, but it’s missing some of the despite the fact that the software is completely 29 mechanisms that would allow it deterministic. It turns out that users have very different and often quite how it’s possible to create or invent through a process of idiosyncratic construction styles, which is also interesting trial and error. In terms of pedagogy, we’re building on the given the mechanistic nature of the system. idea of learning through a constructivist style, Yes, the building blocks are so primitive that it’s surprising seeing knowledge as that people could put so much personal voice into it. Every something that people so often someone comes along with a new break-through have to actively build in style that is picked up by others. A memorable character in their own heads, and that respect was a user named Mono. All we really know that building artifacts about him is that he lived in Japan. He is particularly known can be a good way of for introducing a style of construction that has since been building knowledge. called flex-chains or flex-loops, characterized by models In sodaconstructor, if the first thing you construct is a made up of long chains of closely spaced masses. He square and you press “simulate,” it’s probably going to fall designed all these remarkable models and then disap- flat on the ground. But as long as you don’t find that too dis- peared. Other users have since picked up on this style, but heartening, hopefully the next thing you’ll think of is drawing it remains recognizably his. Kevino has done some beautiful a cross within that square to cross-brace it. Then if you press models using these chains, including one called Buggerfly “simulate” perhaps you’ll get a square that will bounce and and another one called spring back upright and remain square. That’s perhaps what Love—both of which have a we’re most interested in facilitating—getting the user to really organic quality to their have a genuine moment of discovery. That’s only possible if motion. the software has a sufficient degree of openness, which also has to be enough to allow for failure. Looking at the evolution of the soda universe and see- You have created this world, but you’re not really the master ing how the models have of it. progressed from very simple to ever more complex, do These days I’m almost embarrassed to reveal the models I you think there is a lesson made myself because they look distinctly juvenile compared here for understanding the development of life on earth? to some of the later models by others. I haven’t really tried to keep up with the great model builders like Mono and Kevino. It’s a difficult issue, because everything in the sodazoo has It was evident I wasn’t going to be able to, and it was actu- been designed by humans. In that respect it’s more like cre- ally more fulfilling just to let them develop their own art and ationism in that there are always conscious agents behind take it much further than I was able to. it. That makes it difficult to take away lessons applicable to nature, other than the idea that there is some driving force Do you see this as a process that will keep on going, with the towards diversity rather than pure homogenity—it’s like an models getting ever more complex? Or will it plateau out? ecosystem that doesn’t work unless it has diversity. Novelty or originality is one of the main drivers, and that’s maybe a If you’d asked me that three years ago, I’d have said yes, but lesson both in sodaconstructor and nature: diversity is good. it hasn’t. The users keep developing new things. They are very good at exploiting any bugs in the system and making I gather there have been discussions in your user forums technologies I hadn’t thought were possible. Our aspiration about the issue of creationism versus evolution. now is to try to see if we can produce a system where the users can modify the software Yes, there are a number of people playing with the software itself. This is now a major proj- who are strongly advocating a creationist account of life. ect for sodaplay; to make the Maybe rather naively, I imagined that doing a project like this software mutable and let the would somehow close down the debate. But people point to users start to tinker around it as evidence of the need for there to be a conscious agent with the instructions and see behind creation, and it was a surprise to me that the project where that takes them. was able to support such a diverging debate. It’s like you’re allowing them to In part this is supposed to be an educational tool. What spe- genetically engineer the code cifically do people learn here? itself.
Sodaconstructor has a good deal of Newtonian mechanics Yes, it allows our users the built into it. But perhaps the more interesting thing agency to realize their best 30 that can be learned is the more transferable skill of ideas. We have quite an active forum in which they talk to each other, and often they’ll have ideas they can’t realize, like, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if the masses had magnetic polarity so we could make mod- els that attract and repel each other.” At the moment when someone has a great idea like that, people can talk about it, but there isn’t any mechanism by which they can realize it and start experimenting with it. That’s precisely what we’re trying to do in the future.
In some sense you are the god of this universe. You have created a cosmos and the users are angels bringing vari- ous orders and suborders of creatures into being. It must be fascinating to watch what they do with it.
One of the things I’m working hard to do is to dethrone myself. I am a little uncomfortable with some of the almost reverence that’s apparent in the forums. In a way, I become almost like a mythical character—people whisper as to whether Ed exists. I’m much more eager to open it up to be a more creative ecol- ogy where anyone that has a good idea can realize it rather than me being in a privileged position of the sole creator.
overleaf: Kevin Okada, a.k.a. Kevino, is one of the most innovative soda- constructors and the architect of a startling range of models including the enigmatic forms Inspyre, Love, and Buggerfly. Offline, Okada is a resident of the San Fernando Valley who works as the purchasing manager for the Aussie Racing Apparel company. As a child, he was obsessed with Tinker Toy constructions and once built a Tinker Toy digging machine driven by the motor from a discarded cassette player. At 43, Okada is twice, or triple, the age of most soda-players, who tend to be high school and college students. A gallery of Kevino’s models can be seen online at the website of the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts: www.nesta.org. uk/inspireme/soda/sodaplay.htm. INSPYRE Calling to mind an octopus, Inspyre’s graceful movements are driven by a counter-rotating “motor” located at the center of the model. Made up from simple cogs, motors are now a widely used design element in the sodaplay world. This one is constructed from two square cogs rotating in opposite directions. Kevino has timed the major “muscle” springs so that each one contracts for a quarter of the cycle of the sine wave that acts as the clock within the soda-universe. To this central mechanism, four tentacle-like fronds have been appended, their undulations invoking an undeniably organic quality. LOVE Kevino has also been one of the innovators of a sodaplay mechanism known as “pre-tensioned flex linkages” or “flex chains,” a technology he has exploited to make models that resemble psychedelic jellyfish and hypnotic mechanical butter- flies. Like Inspyre, Love is also driven by a central motor. This time, however, the basic mechanism is enhanced by two arm-like structures that impart a kind of swimming motion. “It’s almost like doing the breaststroke,” says Okada. “The arms reach out in front and then snap back, pulling the mechanism in again.” The flex chains themselves act like streamers. Because each point mass has a virtual weight, the chain has an inherent inertia, which causes the elegant trailing motion. Extraordinary Voyages churning roulette wheel and beaten the house. “I felt like a Christopher Turner man who has passed into the painless portion of death by drowning,” Graham recounted as he revived himself with whisky, “There was a terrible roar in my ears. I tried to speak aloud in the barrel to break it, but I couldn’t… I felt a con- tented resignation.” A few days later, investigative reporters from the Buffalo Evening News exposed Graham’s story of cheating death as an elaborate hoax; his braggadocio, they wrote, was merely “corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to a bold and unconvincing narrative.” Though he had set the dare, Graham could only fantasize about risking it. He knew it was a suicidal journey—a month earlier he had sac- rificed a Newfoundland dog to the Falls; the dog drowned when the barrel it was strapped into splintered in the mad rush of water. But his challenge, which became the paragon of dare- devilry, proved irresistible to the Victorian imagination (that same month Stephen Brodie, a newsboy from New York who claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, pre- tended to have gone over the Falls in an inflatable rubber suit), a world in which showmanship and mad stunts were continually being upstaged. The French funambulist, Emile Blondin, for example, began his series of apparently effort- less “ascensions” over Niagara Falls in 1859, each trip more spectacular than the last: he carried his manager over the river on his back; he wore an ape costume to push a wheelbarrow across the high wire; and, as if to mock the overpowering Falls with domesticity, he erected a small stove half-way over and cooked two omelets which he low- ered down to openmouthed onlookers on the sightseeing boat, Maid of the Mist. Carlisle Graham, a cooper from Philadelphia, was the first By 1900, Niagara Falls was known as “Suicide’s Para- person to dream up the crazy idea of going over Niagara dise,” because no one survived the drop—to do so would Falls in a barrel. Above is a photo of the Victorian daredevil, be almost to reverse the natural flow of the river itself. The wearing tights and sporting a huge black moustache, pos- ceaseless roar of water over the Falls seemed to symbolize ing by the seven foot-tall cask in which he hoped to perform the inevitability of death: “Down this predestined course,” the impossible feat. He’d built the barrel himself, and it was wrote a nineteenth-century visitor, “ton follows ton as painted bright red like a little makeshift rocket. Resembling remorselessly as human generations speed to the great the hero of one of Jules Verne’s “Extraordinary Voyages,” Unknown.” Kant had described the feelings conjured up Graham looks ready to be fired by a cannon to the moon, or by the sublime as a giddy “vibration…a rapidly alternating to be sucked through an abyss into the center of the earth. repulsion and attraction,” and many of Niagara’s visitors In 1886, Graham catapulted to fame when he rode the succumbed to this vertiginous draw. Harriet Beecher Stowe treacherous Whirlpool Rapids in the gorge below the Falls became so “maddened” by the Falls’ dynamic beauty that in his oak barrel. His stunt made the front page of the New she imagined that hurling oneself into the cascade, as so York Times, which described his craft as looking like “an many had done, would be a “beautiful” death. enormous carrot.” He strapped himself into it with canvas suspenders, the lid was screwed on, and he clung to iron • • • handles as it spun like a top through more than two miles of ferocious boilers and eddies. Graham entertained crowds four times by making this run, which many died copying, above: Carlisle Graham, the first person to go through the Whirlpool Rapids before upping the ante and promising to go over the Falls. in a barrel, 1886. One morning on September 1889, the “Hero of Whirl- opposite: Annie Edson Taylor, the first person to successfully make it over pool Rapids” stumbled into one of Niagara’s saloons, wet Niagara Falls, 1901. and exhausted, with tales of having done just that. Despite overleaf: Jean Lussier emerging from the rubber ball in which he had just seemingly hopeless odds, he claimed to have thrown rolled over the Falls, 4 July 1928. 34 himself into the waterfall like a ball-bearing into a All photos courtesy Niagara Falls (Ontario) Public Library. On October 24th, 1901, Annie Edson Taylor became the its prey.” The waterfall, which gushes 150,000 gallons of first human being to truly attempt the treacherous trip over water per second, spat her into the 150-foot plunge pool at Niagara Falls in a barrel. Taylor, a plump former dance teach- its base, and she disappeared from sight. The barrel spun er from Auburn, New York, was an unlikely daredevil—she around, she said, “like butter in a churn,” momentarily caught turned sixty-three that day (though she claimed to be forty- in the Falls’ lethal cross-currents, before bobbing back to the four) and was unemployed and destitute, too proud to face surface and fifteen feet into the air. Carlisle Graham helped life in the poorhouse. “I might as well be dead, as to remain to fish her out; when he prized off the lid of the barrel, he in my present position,” she said. Her stunt would be a life- exclaimed with genuine surprise, “Good god! She’s alive!” or-death test and had a desperate, but rational, economic Taylor had a three-inch gash in her head and was obvi- logic: If she died, as everyone expected she would, her ously concussed. She kept asking, “Have I been over the unhappiness would be over; if she lived, she would emerge Falls yet?” When she recovered she told reporters, “If it was from the cascade showered with riches. my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat. I will never go over the Falls again. I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces, than make another trip over the Falls.” She earned fame, but not fortune. Her manager ran off with her precious barrel and sold it to a theatre in Chicago that was staging a play based on her exploits. Taylor hired a lawyer to reclaim it, and the lawsuit consumed what little money she had earned lecturing about her adventure. It was ten years before anyone else would be brave enough to attempt the barrel ride, but in the decade of her monopoly Taylor proved too dour and serious for the hyperbolic world of sideshows. The “Heroine of Horseshoe Falls,” as Taylor styled herself, died in poverty, having eked out a meager living by allowing tourists to have themselves photographed alongside her with a replica barrel; her grave doesn’t record the date of her death or birth—only of her stunt. In 1911, Bobby Leach, a circus stuntman from Eng- land—who had already parachuted off Niagara’s Upper Suspension Bridge and been down the Whirlpool Rapids in a barrel—successfully went over the Falls and assumed Taylor’s crown. Leach’s vessel was an eight-foot-long cigar-shaped contraption made of steel. Like Graham’s barrel, it was painted bright red and looked like the rocket that hits the moon squarely in the eye in Georges Melies’s film, Voyage dans la Lune. (The film came out the year after Taylor’s stunt.) Leach hung inside it—blind drunk—in Taylor engaged a manager who represented high-divers a waterproof canvas hammock, but he was badly injured in carnival acts to choreograph this anticipated change in when his craft struck a rock just before it dropped down fortune and she had a four-and-a-half foot barrel especially the chasm. You can see the dent it made in Leach’s contriv- built for the stunt. It was equipped with a harness, packed ance—there is a photograph of him sitting on it; as a result with pillows and had a 200-pound anvil for ballast. “I will he spent twenty-three weeks in hospital with shattered knee not say goodbye,” she said before she was sealed into the caps and a broken jaw. Obituary writers delighted in the coffin-like darkness, “but au revoir, because I’m coming daredevil’s prosaic end: he died many years later at the age back.” No one believed her—Maude Willard had suffocated of seventy, after slipping on a piece of orange peel. to death in the Whirlpool Rapids the previous month in one Leach felt that it was the tough shell of riveted steel of Graham’s barrels—and numerous photographs show that had saved him, and nine years later, when Charles onlookers crowding around the cask as though it were a Stephens planned to go over the Falls in a wooden barrel, gallows. “The easiest way to attract a crowd,” Houdini later Leach tried to dissuade him. Stephens, a fifty-eight-year-old wrote of his own brand of sub-aquatic escapology, “is to let English barber (the challenge was attracting daredevils the them know that at a given time and a given place someone world over), built himself a six-foot long barrel of Russian is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will oak which was the most high-tech and fantastical device to mean sudden death.” date; a cross-section shows him harnessed inside it, sucking Taylor’s barrel was released in smooth water upstream, on the tube of an emergency air supply. His barrel even had before bobbing through the rapids, which were, electric light to alleviate the claustrophobic darkness. How- 35 in her description, “like a thing of life, fighting for ever, when it cleared the foaming sheet of water and hit the base of the falls, the anvil that he tied to his legs as ballast is Hill’s death provoked a public outcry—many thought that presumed to have kept going, breaking through the bottom daredevils merely legitimized and romanticized suicide—and and taking Stephens with it—he became the first of the there is now a law against going over the Falls, referred to barrel stunters to die going over the cataract. Only his arm, as “stunting without a license.” Needless to say, no licenses which had been severed by the harness, ever resurfaced. have been issued since. However, the ban did not put an end Along with the broken staves, the limb floated downstream to stunts. In fact it seemed to improve them—the daredev- carrying a tattooed message: “Forget me not, Annie.” ils’ vehicles became increasingly sophisticated, more like Despite this eerie warning, adrenalin junkies, addicts submarines or space pods than pickle barrels. With sturdy of the sublime, continued to dare the devil, or to succumb and buoyant frames, interior padding, jump seats, harnesses to the devil’s dare. In 1928, Jean Lussier from Canada rolled and oxygen tanks, they sealed the passenger into a self-suf- down the rapids and over the brink of the Falls in a rein- ficient womb-like space. Since the ban was imposed, no one forced 760-pound rubber ball, which he’d spent his life’s has died going over the Falls in a barrel, and of the thirteen savings building, and became the third person to make it people who have deliberately taken the plunge in reinforced over alive. Two years later George Stathakis, a chef from drums, two have made the trip twice.* Buffalo, made the attempt in a bulky 2,000-pound barrel, In 2003, Kirk Jones, a forty-year-old unemployed man but was trapped in the vortex of water beneath the Falls for from Michigan, became the first person to survive going more than fourteen hours and suffocated to death (though over the Falls without any safety device at all, effectively the tortoise he took with him for good luck survived). In ending the era of barrel riding. One of Niagara’s surviving 1951, William “Red” Hill Jr. went over the waterfall in a daredevils complained that Jones’s failed suicide attempt flimsy craft made of thirteen heavy-duty inner tubes which “cheapened the legend.” Jones steeled himself with two he christened “The Thing,” after the movie of that year, and liters of vodka and orange and floated towards the crest became the third victim of barrel-riding daredevilry. of the Falls on his back. He had, according to one witness, So, on the fiftieth anniversary of Annie Taylor’s inaugural a smile on his face, and went over the roaring cascade feat, three people had died and three had survived. Your odds headfirst. His brother was with him and was supposed to of making it over the Falls in a barrel, in this Russian roulette videotape it, but the battery died. of a sport, were fifty-fifty, heads or tails, life or death.
* However, Karel Soucek, who went over the Falls in 1984, died recreating the stunt in • • • the Houston Aerodrome when he was dropped 180-feet into a tank of water in front of 45,000 people. His barrel cracked like an egg on the lip of the ten-foot wide tub. Harnessing Niagara Falls Sasha Archibald
Thus is the force of Niagara transformed into electricity, which is carried to Buffalo by a cable no larger than a woman’s wrist should be. —Hartley Davis, “The City of Living Light,” Munsey’s Magazine, 1901
General Electric’s corporate history, Men and Volts, includes a long chapter devoted to the moment in the late nineteenth century when “electrical men awaken[ed] to the possibili- ties of the giant working in their whirling dynamos” —the “giant” being Niagara Falls and the “whirling dynamos”
the hydroelectric power generators installed there in 1896.1 Even before Niagara was supplying energy for the nearby city of Buffalo, New York, GE was keen to announce its control over the resource; they were, of course, equally eager to acclimate the American public to electric light. An opportunity presented itself on both accounts in the form of a world’s fair. With financial backing from GE, it was decided that the 1901 Pan-American World’s Exposition would be held in Buffalo, and its explicit raison d’être to “show 37 the force of Niagara Falls conquered by the commanding thought of man.” As covered by the national press, the story floodlights, illuminated shop windows, and street lighting of the Pan-American Exposition was also “The Wonderful would revolutionize nighttime urban landscapes, and a few Story of the Chaining of Niagara,” “The Slavery of Electrical rural landscapes as well—including that of Niagara Falls. In Energy for Man,” or, as Men and Volts put it, “Niagara’s First the summer of 1907, a young GE engineer named William Harness.” D’Arcy Ryan installed thirty-one thirty-inch colored search- The exposition’s eight million visitors proceeded lights under and above the Falls’ swirling currents. Perhaps through a monumental arch, the Triumphal Causeway, to inspired by the landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, who in find themselves on a 15,000-foot esplanade that stretched 1884 had lit heaps of gunpowder beneath the Falls, Ryan the length of the fair. The esplanade was designed as an softened the spotlights’ 1,110,000,000 aggregate candle- allegorized Path of Progress, meaning that the location of power (nearly twice the brilliance of the midday sun) with various pavilions depended on their contents. The horticul- exploding smoke bombs. Despite the smoke and voltage, ture building, for instance, representing the Fruits of Nature, viewers found the final effect soft, ethereal, and romantic. was closer to the fair’s entrance than the theater building, Although electricity was everywhere associated with the representing the Fruits of Man, while the mineralogy pavil- technological promise of the future, and although improving ion was closer still. The color of each pavilion underscored upon natural wonders with artificial light was a profoundly this narrative. C.Y. Turner, Director of Color, determined new idea, Ryan’s treatment managed to evoke nostalgia. that the percentage of white in a given color indicated that Nostalgia for what? For the moment before Niagara’s elec- color’s level of cultural refinement and painted buildings trification: “For the first time since a factory was erected to accordingly, such that the Path of Progress grew progres- draw its power from the rushing water [of Niagara],” The sively more pastel in hue.2 If visitors were perhaps not New York Tribune wrote, “the garish outlines of the bleak attentive to the symbolism of the fading colors, the espla- brick buildings were gone and in their place ... were the falls nade was lined with 500 plaster sculptures tirelessly telling in their old glory.”6 the story of Progress in figurative allegory. The endpoint of the Path of Progress and the apotheosis 1 John Winthrop Hammond, Men and Volts, (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, of the entire exposition was the Electric Tower, a 390-foot 1941), p. 234. edifice painted in ivory, gold, and pale green—darker shades 2 With one reviewer at least, Turner’s color scheme backfired. Hartley Davis, whose rave at the base and lighter at the tip—and topped with a spar- review of the illumination is cited in this article’s epigraph, wrote, “Mr. Turner tries to tell kling white Goddess of Light statue. The base of the tower the story of man’s progress in the colors, as I understand it. It is a sad, faded story, if the housed a mini-Falls, a seventy by thirty-foot aperture that colors are to be credited. The washed out blues and yellows would indicate that poor, gushed 11,000 gallons of water per minute, while the cupola feeble man was discouraged the greater part of the time.” See Hartley Davis, “The City of offered a glimpse of Niagara itself. From the top of the Tower Living Light: The Wonderful Illumination that is the Most Striking and Beautiful Feature of a spotlight shone straight into the air. Identical to those that the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo—The Predominance of the Spectacular Element adorned the 1889 Eiffel Tower and the 1876 Philadelphia in the Display,” Munsey’s Magazine, October 1901, pp. 122, 128. Centennial Tower, the spotlight was the most retrograde ele- 3 Ibid, p. 116. 4 David Gray, “The City of Light,” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, September ment of the exposition’s illumination scheme. In fact, as its 1901, p. 673. planners hoped, the distinguishing characteristic of the Pan- 5 Ibid. American was its illumination: not only larger in scale and a 6 The New York Tribune, 5 September 1907. Cited in the 1925 General Electric com- hundred times brighter than any previous light display, the pany report “Beginning and development of illuminating engineering,” General Electric exposition pioneered the use of light as an aesthetic rather Co. Archives, J. W. Hammond File L:1038; Schenectady Museum, Schenectady, NY. than purely utilitarian medium. GE Engineers Luther Stieringer and Henry Rustin’s method was deceptively simple. Every possible edge of each building, walkway, cornice, and window was lined with relatively dim incandescent lamps, meticulously spaced at three-foot intervals. While the darkness obliterated form, the small white lights reiterated line, transforming the exposi- tion into a series of perfect geometric shapes. The direct descendant of this kind of illumination is suburban homes previous: Horseshoe Falls From Goat Island By Illumination. “This new decorated with Christmas lights, but it would be a mistake to enhancement of America’s beauty resources is nothing more than the Falls, make the comparison. Even the best Christmas light displays under flood lighting for four hours each night,” reads the postcard’s reverse. cannot be described as “a paralyzing, deadening drug,”3 or ”Their own power has been taken from them, brought under the control of man, a “modern miracle that conveys something of the ecstasy of and then turned back upon the power creator itself, and we get a new beauty, the sun-worshiper.”4 ten-fold greater than any beauty known at the Falls before man took hold to One especially omniscient critic noted the way the conquer them for service.” lights simplified and sanitized the exposition landscape and opposite: Caitlin Masley, two towers, 2004 hailed the birth of “nocturnal architecture.”5 Indeed, overleaf: Caitlin Masley, airport2fortress, 2004 38 in the next twenty years, electric signs, skyscraper page 42: Caitlin Masley, city4ver1, 2004 Reconstructions (Middle east) caitlin masley
The Difference Engine favorite depraved bard, Lord Byron. Soon after Ada’s birth, Samantha Hunt following Byron’s alleged affair with his sister, Annabella had taken her five-month-old daughter from her father and
Two Theories, One Train begun a lifelong project of rooting out the Byronic, not Imagine that on a train crossing England in the mid 1800s, only from Ada but from all British society. Ada was fed on Charles Babbage watched a common house fly travel into Reason, strict morality, and math, resulting in an appropri- the future. Bumbling from the rear of the carriage to the ate response: she conducted her scandalous first love affair front, the fly stopped atop a lady’s floral hat and regurgitat- at age thirteeen, with her math tutor. When she met Bab- ed. It’s what flies do when they aren’t flying. At that instant, bage, he was intensely interested in both stomach pumps as the creature ceased moving forward, Babbage thought and the railway, as they could reverse natural processes; that the time the fly had flown through—moments arrayed i.e. digestion could now move from both mouth to stomach behind it like consecutive bread slices—was catching up and stomach to mouth, while locomotion could move from with the fly now that it had stopped moving forward. Times London to Manchester and Manchester to London. These already experienced were slamming into the fly again as it about-faces contained the kernel of Babbage’s favorite idled, as the train gained on London. “Wonderful,” Babbage theory, one he perhaps explained to Ada this way: “I believe thought, even if his theory wasn’t entirely correct. that if you know a number of facts about an object, you Louis Pasteur, another passenger on this mythic train, should be able, via computation, to travel these conditions twisted his paper into a sword and swatted at the fly. forward and thus to know how the object will exist in time The behatted woman screamed as Pasteur hit his mark. to come.” He imagined riding a train into the by-and-by and “Madame,” he begged, “forgive me,” and began to explain returning later that night with a forecast. how house flies’ secret regurgitations are repositories for “You mean,” Ada might have said, “through math you germs. The woman quickly changed seats thinking she’d can predict the future?” encountered a madman. As Pasteur was on his way to “Not predict. Know.” share his theory with the Royal Society, his confidence was “Anything?” shaken. He had been considering how best to phrase it: “Anything that can be translated into numbers.” And “The reason that so many people are dying is because the air Babbage had yet to meet an object, he thought, that could and water are filled with tiny, lethal beings that we cannot not be rendered numerically. see.” Pasteur’s heart sank. It did sound crazy, despite being “For example,” Ada perhaps proposed, “which horse entirely correct. He did not need to travel into Babbage’s will place first in Saturday’s race?” future to know how his ideas would be received in Town. Charles needed money badly. For years he had been developing a machine called the Difference Engine, never
Imaginary Numbers wholly constructed in his lifetime, but which even in skel- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)—whose full title is ESQ., M.A., eton form could tabulate terrifically. More important, even, F.R.S., F.R.S.E., F.R.A.S., F. STAT. S., HON. M.R.I.A., M.C.P.S., than tabulation, Charles saw a way in which the apparatus COMMANDER OF THE ITALIAN ORDER OF ST. MAURICE AND could store what it had learned and act on it again. The Dif- ST. LAZARUS, INST. IMP. (ACAD. MORAL.) PARIS CORR., ference Engine and a second version, the Analytical Engine, ACAD. AMER. ART. ET SC. BOSTON, REG. OECON. BORUSS., became, by the 1850s, proto-computers—or they would PHYS. HIST. NAT. GENEV., ACAD. REG. MONAC., HAFN., have been, had Charles had the money to complete con- MASSIL., ET DIVION., SOCIUS. ACAD. IMP. ET REG. PETROP., struction. The Difference Engine could think for itself. By NEAP., BRUX., PATAV., GEORG. FLOREN., LYNCEI. ROM., MUT., using a method of finite differences, the engine was able PHILOMATH. PARIS, SOC. CORR., ETC.—was an expert lock- to compute a programmed formula on an infinite string of picker, inventor of the heliograph, the cowcatcher, the first integers without human prompting—a wonder to a budding speedometer, occulting lights for lighthouses, standard Victorian, for whom automation still existed almost exclu- railway gauges, standard screw threads, and a device for sively in dreams. walking on water that almost worked. He was also the The Difference Engine was terrifically bulky and ornate. father of the modern computer, working at a time when the Nearly as large as a wardrobe, it was made up of two thou- Romantics’ Nature twisted a vine around the Victorians’ sand shiny brass and steel parts, some of which were etched wrought-iron Science and Computation, encouraging fertile, with tiny numbers where results could be read. Babbage ini- if erroneous, experiments that often disregarded the bound- tially tried to pitch the Difference Engine as a mechanism for aries between the physical and metaphysical. These bold, if tabulating exact logarithms and nautical chart numbers that mistaken, Frankensteins blossomed into half-bred philoso- would aid in latitude and longitude navigation—a sensible phies such as floral numbers, loose morality, Mesmerism, use, but one that employed only a fraction of the engine’s the musical calculus of the nervous system, independent powers. One theory says that Ada saw a different application female intellectuals, algebraic fairies, and robotic life, at a for the Difference Engine: gambling on horses. time when poetry drenched scientific thought. To these mathematicians, a horse was the number of In 1833, Babbage, 42, met Ada Byron, 17, teeth in its mouth, the length of its mane, the variety of its 43 daughter of Annabella Milbanke and everyone’s dapples, how fast it could run, even the sum total of putre- faction that its carcass would produce once the maggots to run on and scheming over ways that the Analytical Engine were sold for medicinal purposes. Babbage wrote: could marry music to numbers. Though much of the written evidence for Ada’s “gaming fever” was ultimately veiled or Small pieces of horse flesh are piled up. In a few days the destroyed by Annabella, one irresistible theory is that, draw- putrid flesh is converted into a living mass of maggots. These ing upon her earlier experience writing a Difference Engine are sold by measure: One horse yields maggots which sell for program to tabulate Bernoulli numbers (the sums of powers 1s. 5d. The rats which frequent the fresh carcass of a horse of consecutive integers; extremely important to number are innumerable. 16,000 rats were killed in one room in four theory), she developed a formula to render racehorses as weeks, without any perceptible diminution of their number. numerics: weight, speed in past races, places won, jockey’s The furriers purchase the rat skins at about 3s the hundred. height, horse’s leg length, horse’s age, etc. These values could be plugged into the Difference Engine to produce Ada was mesmerized. Not with love, but by a view of the what would today be called odds. world that allowed for both the mechanical morality of
Annabella and Byron’s wild curves. She, too, needed money. Dr. Frankenstein So it was an easy next step to take, applying the years of In 1837, in the converted ballroom of a grand house known math tutoring to her newest gaming interest. as Fyne Court in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, a man To proceed with the computational adventure and named Andrew Crosse distilled solutions into beakers, place bets in public, booking agents required Ada to secure skipped meals, tore at his hair, grew mineral crystals in a letter of permission from her husband, William Lovelace, bone-china teacups, assembled lightning-fueled batteries in that would permit her to gamble. As a woman, without Leyden jars, and spoke to himself in verse: her husband’s allowance, Ada was worth nothing, and so could not be responsible for any debt she incurred. Though Crosse, yes, Crosse will be selected the fortune they lived on was hers, women were not legally When he in turn makes life electric! entitled to own things—a restriction that easily explains her monstrously “unfeminine” attraction to wagering in the first A true mad scientist, Crosse was responsible for tempo- place. Permission granted, Ada began to act as bookie for rarily revivifying the notion of spontaneous generation. He a syndicate of acquaintances. Simultaneously, she set to harkened back to the good old days, pre-Enlightenment and work publishing articles on the wonders of the Dif- pre–ex-ovo omnia, when folks believed that life could arise 44 ference Engine, drafting programs for the machine from nothing more than a bolt of electricity. Crosse dripped a chemical mixture over pumice stone, then battered it with Ada was diagnosed. It was not her father’s amorality or her an electric charge. The pumice began to precipitate sta- numerological obsession, but an illegitimate parthenogen- lactites, and a few days later wiry insects, Acari electricus, esis of the most monstrous sort, a uterine cancer gone too crawled forth. He had done it! Faraday was fascinated. Mary far. Unlike the proto-computers she loved, the growth of this Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein, modeling her artificial life inside Ada’s womb seems like the final revenge doctor on Crosse himself. But sadly, spontaneous the bugs of the feminine upon Ada’s bolder behaviors. Ada’s husband were not. Unlike Pasteur, Crosse was wrong—however won- and doctors decided to keep the cancer a secret from her. derfully so. It seemed that Charles and Ada were done for. Lack- Here again Ada was nevertheless entranced, not only ing either legitimate or illegitimate funding, the Difference by Babbage’s calculation fever, but by the legacy of auto- Engine would not be built until 1991, when the Science matic, self-perpetuating creation promulgated by Crosse’s Museum of London marked the bicentennial of Babbage’s experiments. Perhaps she was also influenced by the birth by crafting their own Difference Engine from Babbage’s famous proximity of Byron to the Shelleys, and the cel- sketches and thus proving, far too late, that Charles Babbage ebrated invitation to ghost-story writing, issued by her father had invented the computer for which Ada Lovelace wrote one stormy night, that supposedly stimulated the virgin birth one of the first computer programs. of Mary’s novelistic brain-child. In any case, Ada paid a visit to Fyne Court, where it soon became evident that her fasci- In the Department of Defenses nation with illicit creation might hinge on the fact that she Great failures in homegrown science—Charles’s water- was painfully in love with Crosse’s son, John. Troublesome, walking device, Ada’s wagering debacles, Andrew Crosse’s this, as both she and John were married to other people. inability to spontaneously generate life, or even Ada’s Nevertheless, in good Byronic fashion, John became Ada’s doctor’s incapacity to cure her cancer with prescriptions of lover and an active member of her gambling syndicate, an copious red wine and opium—seem to have disappeared assemblage that drew on her connections both seedy and into the static, silent past. Failed experiments are rarely aristocratic: John Crosse, Richard Ford (the travel writer remembered. Today, many, many people are nobly work- and son of a government magistrate who, it is rumored, ing on novels or plays or poems in their off-hours. But who recruited Wordsworth as informant and spy during the is developing a device for teleportation, or grafting human French Revolution),William Nightingale (Florence’s father), DNA with the great blue heron’s in her basement after work? and two mystery men known as Fleming and Malcolm. The days of building computers in garages are gone, and With the most important race in England approaching, it is becoming nearly impossible to operate a laboratory in the York Derby of 1851, Ada concentrated her forces, both this country without receiving money and meddling from psychic and monetary, on her favorite horse, Voltigeur. The either a large corporation or the US Department of Defense. steed, named for his sire, Voltaire, was no doubt attractive Pasteur’s heirs—the scientific pioneers who have been taken to Ada for the power of his name’s double association, to as heroes into the bosom of history—seem to have little or both the Italian electrical physicist Alessandro Volta, and to no relation, now, to the madmen and renegade girls left by Andrew Crosse’s electrical experiments. She felt sure that the wayside of quixotic experiment. But maybe the bread- Voltigeur would win, and her bets reflected her certainty: slice moments are still hurtling forward, and about to crash She doubled the risk, wagering the same funds twice, once into us when we least expect it. with herself and again with a professional bookie. Sadly, A year after Voltigeur’s defeat, Ada died at the age of math and science had other forces to contend with. Volti- 36. Babbage, in turn, began to work on his most astound- geur, not made from pure numbers but from flesh and bone, ing and beautiful project yet. It was a formula that would lost the race. haunt him for the rest of his life, because he never could Ada’s debts opened before her as a chasm: 3,200 get it quite right: a theorem for predicting the chances that pounds, large even by today’s standards, particularly for a someone dead would come back to life. In a twisted sense, woman with no income. Within days, Malcolm was black- against all odds, it worked. Babbage had a moon crater mailing her for his losses. He was fully aware of what might named after him, and in 1971 the US Department of Defense happen to Ada if Annabella were to find out about her created a computer language for discharging weapons on daughter’s unseemly activities. William paid Malcolm off. the enemy. The language is named ADA. Ada in turn pawned her family jewels so that she and John
Crosse could continue gambling. The hocked items were opposite: Babbage’s Analytical Engine, 1834-1871, the first fully automatic discovered and recovered by Annabella, but Ada calculating machine. Courtesy Science Museum / Science & Society Picture 45 pawned them again. And then the real dark streak in Library, London. cabinets de physiques, you notice a display of electromag- netic medical devices with broadsides describing the various ailments that can be cured or relieved by their application. There is a list of local physicians on Broadway (and a few on Canal Street) who have purchased many of these award-win- ning devices and utilize them in their practices. Some are portable and meant for house-calls. You read that “nervous diseases, rheumatism, bronchitis, loss of voice, sprains, deafness and many other diseases” have been successfully treated using Pike’s Rotary Magnetic Machine. There is a large sign advertising this “new magnetic machine for medi- cal purposes” hanging prominently on the front of his shop. Pike, or one of his assistants, is available to demon- strate many of the apparatuses. Particularly fascinating is the array of new electromagnetic machines; it is most remark- The Old Curiosity Shop able to experience how the invisible force of magnetism Peter Thomashow can make wheels rotate mysteriously or even transmit intel- ligence through a copper wire! Pike sells at least five of the All material bodies may be distributed into two classes, machines recently invented by Dr. Page of Massachusetts. unorganized and organized. The descriptions of organized At the shop, you can purchase a copy of Pike’s Cata- bodies constitutes the science of Natural History...to Natural logue of Mathematical and Philosophical Instruments. It is Philosophy belongs the inquiry into those general principals his greatest achievement: a compendium of over 700 pages of unorganized bodies...by the use of proper apparatus we that includes “upwards of 750 engravings, mostly original can repeat natural phenomena under varied conditions, and, designs” spanning the world of Natural Philosophy. It is a among all attendant circumstances, we can determine what two-dimensional version of the shop and describes almost are accidental, and what are essential to any given effort. everything he sells. One local newspaper writes, “The work —Benjamin Silliman, First Principles of Natural is not a mere catalogue; it is a museum to which lovers of Philosophy science may resort and where they may examine the vari- ous apparatus which have been contrived to illustrate and It is 1848 and it is New York City. You are strolling down explain the phenomena of nature.” Broadway and come to a shop displaying devices of wonder There is an advertisement on page 284 of the second meant to dazzle the observer with knowledge of the latest volume for a wonderful set of electrical apparatuses. It scientific discoveries—apparatuses designed to stimulate costs thirty-one dollars and fifty cents. One large electri- the imagination and create a sense of discovery and curi- cal machine creates “fluid” that can be utilized to charge osity for phenomena pertaining to the world of Natural all kinds of interesting devices—sportsmen, egg stands, Philosophy. The establishment is that of Benjamin Pike, orreries, chimes, thunderhouses, swans, dancing figures, Jr.—a manufacturer and importer of mathematical and philo- and luminous spiral tubes. These are but a few of the most sophical instruments. beautiful, sparkling, and sublime electro-static contrivances, This elegant shop is a place where science, magic, all powered by the invisible fluid of electricity. invention, and entertainment intersect. Pike is a merchant The next scheduled demonstration is Saturday at ten. who sells a vast assortment of philosophical instruments to educators, lecturers and physicians; but also to gentlemen All of the instruments illustrated in this article were collected by the author. They have who may wish to amuse parlor guests. Important scientists been acquired by and are on display at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity in are known to gather here to discuss their latest ideas and Bellingham, Washington. experiments; the proprietor can aid inventors in having their prototypes built. REFERENCE You enter the shop at 294 Broadway after gazing at an Benjamin Pike, Jr., Pike’s Illustrated Descriptive Catalogue of Optical, Mathematical, impressive array of objects in the window. Beautiful carved and Philosophical Instruments, Manufactured, Imported, And Sold By The Author; cabinets line the walls with displays of astronomical, mag- With The Prices Affixed At Which They Are Offered In 1848; With Upwards of 750 netic, galvanic, pneumatic, optical, chemical, hydrostatic, Engravings, Mostly Original Designs from the Experiments of His Establishment in the mechanical, and electrical demonstration apparatus. Models Various Departments of Electricity, Galvanism, Magnetism, Electro-magnetism, Pneu- of the solar system hang from the ceiling; planetaria and tel- matics, Hydrostatics, Mechanics, Optics, Astronomy, Surveying, Navigation, Meteorol- luria also sit on tables at the center of the shop. Maps hang ogy, Chemistry, &c, &c. Designed to Aid Professors of Colleges, Teachers, and others, on the walls; globes are perched on shelves; and telescopes in the Selection and Use of Illustrative Apparatus, in every Department of Science stand on the floor. There is a section in the back with lac- (New York: Published and Sold by the Author, 1848). quered brass microscopes under glass bell-jars. 46 As you walk down the corridors created by these pages 47-49: Photos Geoff Hansen. ELECTRICAL SPORTSMAN A polychromed, hand-painted model of a hunter resting on a walnut base measuring 13” x 4” with a Leyden jar and pith birds (missing.) This electro- static demonstration apparatus was sold by many different manufacturers of philosophical instruments, including Benjamin Pike, in the 1840s. He writes, “When the bottle is charged to a certain extent, the distance between the muzzle of the gun and ball near it will not be sufficient to restrain the passage of the [electric] fluid, which will therefore pass between them, occasioning at the same time a flash of light, a loud report and the falling of birds.” ELECTRICAL EGG STAND Consists of wooden frame and three wooden stands to hold as many eggs. This electrostatic accessory is made of mahagaony and stands 7 5/8” tall. The Pike catalogue reports that as “a shock is passed through the eggs by touching the upper ball with a discharging rod... the eggs will become beautifully luminous, the shock in passing will make the sound as if the eggshells were broken, as indeed they will be if the shock is large... the eggs, if eaten immediately, will have a strong taste of phosphorous; and will very soon afterwards become putrid... when broken, the white and yolk will be found completely intermingled with each other, if several shocks have passed through the eggs.” ELECTRICAL THUNDERHOUSE This device illustrates the concept of a lightning rod. Pike writes, “The identity of the electric fluid with lightning was one of the first established relative to atmospheric electricity, and as it was the first in time, so it is also in importance to us, teaching not merely the origin and properties of that mighty power of nature, but also how to escape from its direful effects. [This] little arrangement amusingly illustrates the use of a continuous conductor. To Franklin, whose active mind was constantly directed to practical application of the facts disclosed by science, we are indebted for the suggestion of a method of partially defending buildings from the dreaded effects of lightning.” chance Rolling the Dice: An Interview with How did you become interested in the study of chance or, Jackson Lears as you call it in your book, the “culture of chance”? David Serlin There were a lot of different streams that came together In late spring 2005, the on-line gaming empire known in this book. Since my first book, No Place of Grace, I as PartyGaming—home of the wildly lucrative website have thought seriously about the cultural longing for tran- PartyPoker.com—announced that it would take its company scendence that survived the economic rationality of the public on the London stock market. Speculators predicted nineteenth century. I perceived that there was some kind that, on the open market, PartyGaming would be valued at of longing for grace that animated the impulse to gamble, over $10 billion, just a few poker chips less than the value and once I had hit on that hunch I began to find evidence attributed to the venerable British department store chain of it everywhere. I began to see that there were connections Marks & Spencer. Despite historic attempts to control or mar- between the gambler’s dice and the soothsayer’s bones. ginalize games of chance as a socially disreputable practice, The gambler and the diviner were brothers under the skin. the multibillion-dollar gambling industry in both its virtual and This led me to situate gambling in the midst of what I call physical incarnations—from online poker websites to lottery a culture of chance, which includes all sorts of rituals and tickets and off-track betting parlors to suburban casinos and practices that use chance as a way of knowing or a way of the emergence of Las Vegas as a cultural capital—seems to trying to discern the will of the cosmos, the meaning of the have never been stronger or more resilient. universe, or even—in the case of Calvinist casting of lots— In his recent book Something for Nothing: Luck in the will of God. The notion of luck is always communicated America (2003), Jackson Lears, the Board of Governors as an unearned gift, a free gift. Luck, like grace, is something Professor of History at Rutgers University and the editor-in- that happens to you. You don’t earn it. To me, this represent- chief of Raritan, asserts that gambling is a central component ed a very deep realization at some fundamental level of the of contemporary culture. Lears argues that this is not futility of striving and trying to control all outcomes, which because Americans are a nation of gamblers per se, but seems to me at the heart of our dominant culture, whether because gambling is a modern distillation of what can best in religious or secular forms. I began to see gambling and be described as a “culture of chance.” For Lears, the concept the culture of chance as a kind of counterpoint to this. of chance and its various metaphysical siblings Luck, For- The other stream that fed my interest in chance came tune, and Grace have profoundly influenced American life in about while I was on a subway platform in Manhattan. I was everything from personal expression to social policy. With the waiting in a short line to buy a subway token and noticed rise of the market economy in the early nineteenth century, that there was a much longer line next to mine, snaking all Lears argues, the culture of chance has fought tooth and the way around the platform, for the lottery machine. This nail for survival against the rational appeals of a “culture of was 1994. Newt Gingrich and his buddies had just won a control.” The divinatory dimensions of chance through which huge victory in Congress, the “Contract with America” was Americans experienced the world, as embodied in games of in the air, and there were all sorts of messages directed at luck and skill and as practiced by the confidence man and Americans to take responsibility for their own economic fate, gambler, were transmuted into rational systems of forecast- pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and refuse welfare ing and speculation practiced by the stockbroker and day and other “handouts” that they didn’t deserve. The rhetoric trader. Trying to predict the future while trying to maintain of the self-made man was making a comeback. I looked control, Lears suggests, remains a ritualized component of around at these people waiting in line for the lottery ticket both religious and secular cultures. The gambler’s dice, the and I thought, these people work hard, but the fact that soothsayer’s bones, the fortune-teller’s tea leaves, and the they’re in this lottery line suggests that they realize, at their financier’s econometric charts are more closely aligned than core, that hard work is not the whole story. Sometimes you we’ve been led to believe. David Serlin spoke with just have to catch a break. And catching a break is basically 51 Lears by phone in June 2005. the secular American version of grace. reminded of the celebrity cowboy Roy Rogers’s farewell to Was this epiphany—seeing working people spending their his faithful TV viewers in the 1950s, and it seems to me to hard-earned money on lottery tickets—the origin of the dis- be the signature advice of that era: “Be brave, but don’t take tinction that you draw throughout your book between the chances.” This is a perfectly self-canceling sentence. It says, “culture of chance” and the “culture of control”? in effect, “Experience the frisson of bravery, the excitement, the pleasure of feeling like you are doing something heroic. What I wanted to show in this book is that there was, and But never bet on anything less than a sure thing.” continues to be, a huge overlap between the culture of Human beings want the excitement of risk, but they control, which relies on some predictability and systematic also want the safety that comes with containing its worst direction of fate, and the culture of chance, which is much possibilities. I think that, in some ways, these paired desires less certain that diligence is the only path to success and capture the dialectic I was trying to get at in my book. The is willing sometimes to roll the dice. These two cultures culture of control is not just rooted in a desire to dominate not only overlap, but they interpenetrate each other. One other people and the environment. It is rooted in a desire finds some combination of chance and control working that is just as natural, I think, and as universal and timeless together, whether you’re talking about sports or investment as the desire for risk and uncertainty and luck, and that’s the or religious faith. Some imagine life as a series of calculated desire for stability and predictability. risks, more like a poker game than a lottery, in which people realize that they can’t control all outcomes; but some also I was taken by your account of Robert Bailey, the incorrigible want to be able to use their skills to their best advantage, as early nineteenth-century gambler who is sent to prison and, one does in poker. Yet, at the same time, people recognize while there, vomits up something the size of an egg, has a that they cannot control all outcomes and that, in the end, spiritual awakening, and disavows his lifelong gambling hab- luck will play a role as well, and we have to acknowledge its its. He seems to exist, both historically and psychologically, power. at the crossroads between the culture of chance and the We find this invariable coexistence of chance and con- culture of control. trol on Wall Street and in the history of speculation. People debate whether or not speculation is mere gambling or Robert Bailey is a good example of a gambler who lived whether it’s an investment. Huge sums of money are spent between different worlds. He came of age in late-eigh- by investment banking firms and brokerage houses to per- teenth-century Virginia, a slave-holding, socially hierarchical suade people that, in fact, they aren’t taking a risk when they world where gambling was a mark of masculine honor. The invest and that they can put their portfolios together in vari- gambler was the big man, the big spender as described in ous ways that can minimize if not eliminate risk altogether. the gift economies studied by anthropologists. The way that Of course, anyone who claims they can eliminate risk ought you became a big shot in southern society under slavery, to be brought up immediately on charges before the U.S. and the way that you demonstrated that you had become a Securities and Exchange Commission. big shot, was by spending money to the point of wasting it with a kind of careless insouciance. Your book describes how the culture of control secularized some of the religious or spiritual elements of chance. So is Do you mean like lighting a cigar with a hundred-dollar bill? the oxymoronic concept of the “safe risk” or “safe bet” part of that process of secularization? There’s an unspoken sense In effect, yes. A disdain for “mere” money. The code of the that a “safe bet” is not a bet at all; it’s almost a guarantee, gentleman is all about indifference to money and indulging such as when aspiring students identify a college as their in reckless generosity. One of the things that Bailey did in “safety school.” trying to justify his own career as a professional gambler was to say there’s a big difference between the true gambler, That’s one of the paradoxes that we look at every day in the who is a sportsman, and the cheating gambler, who wants culture of capitalism. On the one hand, there has to be this to control outcomes. Bailey upheld the traditional idea of the promise of a magical reward of wealth without work; at gambler as a liberal cultured gentleman; liberal in the largest the same time, this magic has to be stabilized and rational- sense with respect to money and material goods. Yet, at the ized and made to seem predictable in order to cancel out, same time, even though he was participating in this world or threaten to cancel out, the elements of luck and risk. and coming out of it, by the early nineteenth century he was Since the turn of the last century, folks like J.P. Morgan living in a very different realm that was openly hostile to have attempted to make speculative capitalism seem safe gambling. Evangelical morality was sweeping across Virginia and predictable. Of course, this falls apart completely in the at this time, as it was across a lot of other southern states. Great Depression and only begins to emerge again in the By the time he wrote his autobiography in 1822, Bailey had long bull market of the 1980s and 1990s. But there is some- thing quite misleading about the attempt to be reassuring opposite: Sheet music for “The Gambling Man,” 1902. Courtesy Sam on the subject of risk, to say that what is genuinely DeVincent Collection of Illustrated American Sheet Music, Archives Center, 52 a risk is not a risk but is, in fact, a safe option. I’m National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. to justify what he’d done in evangelical rhetoric and not workmen’s compensation for injuries or disabilities sus- just in the language of the sportsman and the high-minded tained on the job, and, by the 1930s with the collapse of gentleman. The gambler was no longer the big man; he was the economy in the Great Depression, Aid to Families with a slave to his appetite, little better than the drunkard or the Dependent Children. masturbator. He was a man who had no control, and self- control had become the new key to manhood. So are you arguing that the welfare state is basically rooted Another example of how the culture of chance and the in the culture of chance, or an acknowledgement of the culture of control coexisted and intermingled is in a late- limits of the culture of control that can only be understood nineteenth-century figure like Washington Gladden, a social through the culture of chance? gospel minister, who was very much concerned with man- aging chance generally. He was against gambling not for The welfare state wants to manage chance for humane pur- exclusively religious reasons but because, to him, it was the poses, and that’s how twentieth-century liberalism became most distilled expression of what’s wrong with the capitalist wedded to the welfare state. It’s an attempt not to eliminate economy; and what’s wrong with the capitalist economy is chance, because nobody pretends they can do that, but that people don’t get what they deserve. Their merits and instead to manage chance and keep its worst effects at rewards don’t match and, in fact, there are many morally- bay. It seems to me there are certain historical moments deserving people who lose their arms in industrial accidents in which policymakers believe in their own power to con- or lose the bread-giver in their family due to illness or injury. trol outcomes, such as the immediate aftermath of World They end up suffering through no fault of their own. People War II. We had just won an enormous worldwide struggle, like Gladden influenced figures like Theodore Roosevelt and largely through our technological superiority, and almost Woodrow Wilson, who said, “Look, the world of industrial as soon as we had won it there was, at the same time, the capitalism is governed by accident, and that’s a terrible increasing influence of Keynesian economics to create full thing. We have to respect the power of chance. We can’t say employment and to manage chance so that workers would that everyone is getting what he or she deserves through not be chronically troubled by the accidents and insecurities hard work or the lack of it.” Roosevelt and others helped of unregulated capitalism. It is a triumph of management to create mechanisms to soothe the abrasions of that the culture of control could be in the ascendant and 54 chance, such as unemployment compensation, that gambling could still persist in various forms, such as in Saturday night poker games around the kitchen table as well helps explain why it remains fascinating in so many forms to as more ambitious and exotic forms in places like Havana artists in so many different disciplines. and Las Vegas. In the 1950s, gambling was at a low-ebb as a legally sanctioned and widely practiced activity, even though In a postmodern worldview that either thrives on or sur- it was a golden age for horse racing in certain regions. But renders to contingency and irony, chance can either be it also was an era when Americans learned to accept certain something full of possibility or something horrifying. It’s types of collective constraints on their behavior, and even either, let a thousand flowers bloom, or be careful where you corporate business accepted higher tax rates, unions, and step because any chance that you take might lead to certain other sorts of regulations on their activity. doom.
Your description of the interplay between the cultures of People on the Left often have been suspicious of postmod- chance and control in the period after World War II makes ernism because they’re suspicious of anything that allows me think of the emergence of chance-oriented aesthetic or too much to chance. I think there’s a desire to believe that philosophical moves among postwar artists like John Cage, you can control outcomes through systematic effort and Merce Cunningham, and Jackson Pollock. Do you think planning in order to create an alternative politics. I would not there’s a connection there? deny that. My book is not an uncritical brief for the culture of chance; rather, it’s an attempt to renovate chance, to resur- As gambling became less visible and reputable an activity, rect it, to acknowledge its power. Of course, you don’t want it acquired greater power as a governing metaphor for the to celebrate dumb luck; you want to celebrate smart luck, arts. The aesthetics of accident is central to modernism and the coexistence of an interpenetration of skill and grace. I postmodernism, and twentieth-century art defines itself think that’s a puzzle to try and figure out. explicitly in contrast to an over-organized society. That’s There’s another reason for the Left to acknowledge the partly because during World War I the dream of reason power of chance, and it’s because the officially sanctioned bred monsters, technological rationality was harnessed to forces in our society devalue chance and even dismiss it horrific ends, and the process was repeated even more dra- all together. Certainly the kind of secular understanding of matically in the familiar but inescapable litany of Auschwitz Providence that has come to dominate—George W. Bush’s and Hiroshima. Whether you are talking about surrealism assertion, for example, that not only history but God is “on in Paris in the 1920s, or the experiments at Black Mountain our side,” and that remaking the world, or hurrying along College in the 1940s and 1950s, or the work of Cage and the inevitable process of turning the world into a version of Cunningham in the 1960s, all of them look back at this fas- America, is part of God’s plan—is another instance of the cination with spontaneity and unpredictability among the victory of the culture of control over the culture of chance. Surrealists. And they break new ground as well. I would To claim that God’s purposes are working themselves out argue, though, that Abstract Expressionist painting is very in individual lives and in the world of nations is to commit much based on a notion of inner spontaneity rather than the ultimate sin of secular arrogance. Yet this seems to me opening one’s self up to the chance occurrences in the a very seductive formulation for many Americans, and espe- outside world. I’m thinking of someone like Cage, or Robert cially for American policymakers: “We, the United States, Rauschenberg’s junk sculpture assemblages or, for Joseph have been divinely ordained to carry on this struggle against Cornell, the tradition of the lucky find. All of these artistic the forces of evil.” movements are in reaction to a kind of Weberian modernity The tradition of Providentialist thinking that is ulti- or technocratic regime that expressed itself most horrifi- mately more humane and powerful is the one embodied by cally in the Nazi state, but was certainly present in other people like Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. They totalitarian societies, namely the Soviet Union, and in the acknowledged that we don’t always know how Providence softer form, from these artists’ point of view, in American works itself out in every day life, but what it should instruct consumer culture. us in, if it instructs us in anything at all, is humility. We see So I think there is a direct relationship between the the denial of chance operating everywhere in contempo- sense that life has become over-organized and the fascina- rary life: people and nations are regarded as successful tion with an aesthetic of accident, the desire to open up the because they deserve to be, whereas people and nations are prospect of creativity and release the artist from the burden regarded as failures because they had it coming to them. So of controlling outcomes. Of course, this is connected with part of my agenda is to revalue chance as a counterpoint to the reshuffling and reorganization of space and time that these officially sanctioned values. occurred in the early twentieth century. Figures like William James and Henri Bergson challenged the idea of an easily organized and predictable universe just as time was stan- opposite: Illegal slot machines being destroyed by Chicago law enforcement, dardized in time zones and mechanically measured through ca. 1930. clocks and railroad schedules. I think this tension between overleaf: John Colle Rogers’s ongoing Accidental Graffiti series documents what can be measured and what is possible is a constant paint smears left on the concrete dividers along California highways as a result shadow behind the aesthetics of accident, and I think it of automobile accidents. accidental graffiti john colle rogers
Stumbling Over/Upon Art early twentieth century, Marcel Duchamp extended this Dario Gamboni experience beyond the iconic image and turned it into an experiment. The demonstration of this move was made with “Chance in art” can mean many different things, so numer- Trois stoppages étalon [Three Standard Stoppages], which ous and so varied that one may be tempted to dismiss the used a mock-scientific procedure to subvert the quantita- term as a misnomer or a lexical straw man, like so many tive and iterative basis of the mechanistic and deterministic adherents to the notion of divine or natural causality have worldview: the unit of length is destroyed if the shapes done in the past: “Chance seems to be only a term, by which adopted by a one-meter-long thread falling three times we express our ignorance of the cause of any thing.”1 But from a height of one meter are regarded as relevant, as the there may be a plane on which at least some of these mean- artist made clear by deriving from them three templates ings and forms meet and which can illuminate them—this used in the production of other works including the Large essay will attempt to locate it. Glass. Duchamp defined this operation as “canned chance” One classical interpretation of “chance in art” is that of and explained later: “This experiment was made in 1913 the “image made by chance.”2 The phenomenon is docu- to imprison and preserve forms obtained through chance, mented across times and cultures and can be understood through my chance.”7 as a particularly explicit manifestation of the active, cogni- Alfred Gell’s relational notion of artistic agency, based tive (or “projective”) nature of visual perception. In fact, the on the agent/patient dynamics and extended beyond the earliest known “image” associated with humans—or rather artist’s figure, can help us understand the rationale of this pre-humans—, the pebble found at Makapansgat in South “experiment.” Duchamp’s work involved letting the thread Africa, is supposed to have been selected, transported, and “distort itself as it pleases and create a new figure of the unit preserved some three million years ago because it hap- of length.”8 Letting the thread act “as it pleased” obviously pened to look like a face.3 Rather than the first work of art, meant abandoning it to another “will,” that of universal grav- it can claim to be the first Readymade, as one commenta- ity. The following note, also preserved in the “Green Box,” tor facetiously remarked.4 Depending on the current views thus mocks the exaggerated claims to control made by of the origin and working of the universe, such “images” politics—following those of science—by imagining a “Min- have been attributed to the gods, God, or some other super- istry of coincidences. / Department / (or better): / Regime of natural beings; to Nature acting as an artist or to her blind coincidence / Ministry of gravity.”9 A similar pattern of oscil- mechanical laws; or to man’s own eye and mind, the human lation between agent and patient position is manifest in the imagination, or the “unconscious.” description given by Duchamp of the genesis of his Ready- The last group of interpretations, which could be made Trébuchet [Trap]: “... a real coat hanger that I wanted labeled “endogenic,” first gained prominence in Late Antiq- sometime to put on the wall and hang my things on but I uity and the Renaissance, and has dominated the Western never did come to that—so it was on the floor and I would understanding of this question from the late eighteenth kick it every minute, every time I went out—I got crazy about century to the present.5 Despite its apparently monistic it and I said the Hell with it, if it wants to stay there and character, it does retain a crucial element of the earlier bore me, I’ll nail it down... and then the association with the
“exogenic” interpretations: for the accidental image to be Readymade came and it was that.”10 The artist’s agency perceived as an image, a “sender” must be at least implic- is defeated by the object’s stubborn resistance and active itly postulated by the receiver.6 If this sender is situated obstruction, until he reverses the situation and reclaims for in the receiver, it becomes an Other within the subject. himself this very opposition, makes it definitive, and lifts it This explains the connection between chance images and from a physical to an ontological plane by recognizing the Freud’s notion of “the uncanny” (das Unheimliche) and the nailed coat hanger as a Readymade. fascination they have exerted upon the Surrealists.
Because of this sense of something or someone com- above: Ferrous pebble of reddish color found in 1925 at Makapansgat, South municating, the agent, when perceiving an image made Africa. Bernard Price Institute of Paleontology, University of Witwaterrsrand, by chance, experiences himself or herself to be Johannesburg. Photo Robert G. Bednarik. 58 a “patient,” to be a “passive recipient.” In the opposite: Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14. One cannot miss the analogy between this scene and kind of chance often inspired by probability theory that uses slapstick comedies, in which humans are regularly con- protocols and is more frequent in geometric abstraction and fronted with objects that escape control and exert their own some forms of performances.12 These are poles rather than agency with a vengeance. In Buster Keaton’s The Electric categories, however, and they share the crucial feature of House (1922), for example, the ultra-modern, all-mechanized distributing artistic agency. The theory of economic agency house turns into a nightmarish trap that persecutes its users provides a useful model here by describing small systems and especially its designer. Slapstick films were at the height or organizations in which the agent, acting by proxy in the of their popularity at the time when Duchamp was playing name of a “principal,” “is to choose among a number of and fighting with bicycle wheels, one-meter-long threads, alternative possibilities.” Agency is therefore delegated, and bottle dryers, snow shovels, combs, typewriter covers, this delegation implies an essential element of uncertainty: urinals, coat racks, and hat racks. These films were largely “The outcome is affected but not completely determined based on improvisation and accident—in the first 1921 by the agent’s action.”13 The artist as principal can, in turn, shooting of The Electric House, Keaton had fallen victim to involve other artists, assistants, the public, and all sorts of his reversible escalator—and they exploited the analogy and objects, instruments, and materials—and of course natural interchangeability between the human and the mechanical laws such as gravity—as agents in this sense. that fascinated Duchamp and in which Henri Bergson had In fact, all twentieth- and twenty-first-century art can recognized a crucial trigger for laughter.11 be described in these terms, which could also help analyze Among twentieth-century artistic recourses to chance, the still little-publicized procedures devised by those who, it has been suggested that a distinction be made between like Lawrence Weiner with his statements or Sol Lewitt “hand-made” chance—close to traditions of spontaneity with his wall drawings, produce quasi-allographic forms and automatism that one encounters, for example, in Sur- of art by delegating to others a part or the entirety of the realism and Abstract Expressionism—and a mathematical material realization of their works.14 And the same model could also serve to describe the organization implied in the making of works before the idea of undivided labor became a defining criterion of art and to put this idea into historical perspective. Seen in this broader context, “chance in art” or rather the recourse to chance may only apply to cases and situations in which the delegation of artistic agency takes particularly explicit and sometimes conscious forms. Their relation to science need not only be one of opposition but also of emulation and even of similarity, especially if one considers science in the making rather than science as it is reconstructed ex post facto in the name of method or laid
out programmatically to raise funds.15 André Corboz has thus provocatively but correctly suggested finding a model of realistic and efficient art historical methodology in the legend of the three Princes of Serendip and their reliance
on the “happy accident.”16 Serendipity also defines artistic activity in the famous quote attributed to Picasso, “I do not seek, I find,” which dismisses in a radical way the tendency to suppose a telos to each action and to make it a key to interpretation. Having taught a few seminars on “the use of chance in art,” I have realized that the heuristic potential of this ques- tion tends to be limited by the habits of binary or dualistic thinking, i.e., the implicit expectation to find only chance or, instead, no chance. In fact, as the idea of delegated and distributed agency suggests, what happens in the making of a work of art is always a mixture of control and lack of it, a pattern of abandoning and reclaiming agency. But it is true that, like “handmade” and “mathematical” chance, total control and total absence of control can represent poles, even though they must be qualified in relation to the relevance, for the final aesthetic judgment, of what is left by the artist to other forces to determine. Despite its integration in a broader—and maybe uni- versal—typology of the management of artistic agency, the “recourse to chance” may thus be distinguished by the that Jeff Wall, who stages photographs like long-feature search for, or the welcoming of, a foreign intervention that films and pushes control until it meets some irreducible ele- promises or imposes an unknown and unexpected result. ment of chance, should have found in the most implausible This is the case whether a metaphysically transcendent Stumbling Block an image that exacerbates the tension quality is attributed to this foreign character or not, and between the instant of shooting and the permanence of the it accounts for the centrality of the use of chance in the work. One could speak of a “stumbling picture,” a concept movements dedicated to the pursuit of innovation and in used by Joseph Beuys to describe (as Stolperbilder) the twentieth- and twenty-first-century art at large. We have works of Sigmar Polke, an artist more obviously indebted to encountered or supposed this element of surprise and chance.19 accident in the Makapansgat pebble and in Duchamp’s The stumbling block also acts as a challenge to rise— experiments with objects. Duchamp compared the making after falling—to the accidental circumstances. According of a Readymade to a rendezvous, and the programmatic use to le facteur (Joseph-Ferdinand) Cheval, the primus motus made by the Surrealists of the definition of beauty borrowed behind his “Ideal Palace” was a “bizarrely shaped stone” from Lautréamont—“the chance encounter of a sewing on which he stumbled and which, corroborated by other machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”—aligns it findings, led him to think: “Since Nature wants to do the with Antoine Cournot’s definition of chance as the result of sculpting, I will do the masonry and the architecture.” the meeting of two or more independent series of causes.17 Nature was clearly not the only challenger of the country A particularly apt image of this accidental encounter is postman who devoted thirty-three years of his life to a the stumbling block, which Duchamp literally appropriated “monument” summarizing the cultural history of mankind with Trébuchet, the title of which means “a trap for little and proclaiming “what a peasant can do,” but its continued birds” or “a little pair of scales,” but also evokes the verb provocation is visible everywhere in the form of accidental trébucher, to stumble. In the 1960s, the generation of artists (or aided) sculptures. The initial stumbling block is said to who discovered in Duchamp a benevolent and provocative sit on top of a pedestal on the terrace of the West side: it is grandfather also elaborated upon this invention, and Daniel indeed a remarkable object, one that evokes not so much Spoerri started turning tabletops with glued objects into iconic associations as the stones that Chinese scholars used “trap pictures” (tableaux-pièges). Its graphic—and arguably to treat like sculptures and in which Octavio Paz has seen an superior—version, the small book Topographie anecdotée antecedent to the Readymade.20 du hasard [Anecdoted Topography of Chance] preserves the horizontal outline of all the objects that happened to stand or lie on the artist’s table on 17 October 1961 at 3:47 p.m. above: Daniel Spoerri, Relevé topographique du hasard, 17 octobre 1961 à 15 and describes their identity and how they had come to be h. 47 (Topographical Layout of Chance, October 17, 1961, 3:47 p.m.), drawing there. Spoerri “traps” the objects but, to the extent that they published in Daniel Spoerri, Topographie anecdotée du hasard [1962] (Paris: determine his picture, he is trapped by them, in advance of Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1990). his reader—and one could add that he runs the risk of being opposite: Joseph-Ferdinand Cheval (Facteur Cheval), Le Palais idéal, 1879- trapped by their recognition of an ever less acciden- 1912, Hauterives (Drôme), view of the north side, and detail of the “stumbling 60 tal “signature style.”18 Closer to our time, it is telling stone.” Photos Dario Gamboni. 1 William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the 13 Kenneth J. Arrow, “Agency and the Market,” in Kenneth J. Arrow and Michael Intri- Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (s.l., 1802), quoted from J. A. Simpson ligator, eds., Handbook of Mathematical Economics (Amsterdam : Elsevier, 1986), III, and E. S. C. Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (Oxford, 1989), III, p. 1183, quoted in Etienne Balibar and Sandra Laugier, “Agency,”in Barbara Cassin, ed., 10. See Dario Gamboni, “‘Fabrication of Accidents’: Factura and Chance in Nineteenth- Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris: Robert/ Century Art,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 36 (Fall 1999), pp. Seuil, 2004), pp. 26-32. 205-225. 14 For a recent collection of such “delegations of agency,” see Hans Ulrich Obrist, ed., Do 2 See Horst W. Janson, “The ‘Image Made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought,” De It (New York/Frankfurt: e-flux/Revolver, 2005); on the notion of allographic art and what Artibus Opuscula XL. Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky (New York: New York University distinguishes Weiner’s or Lewitt’s works from it, see Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: Press, 1961), I, pp. 254-266; H. W. Janson, “Chance Images,” in Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dic- An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1976), pp. 113- tionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (New York: Scribner’s, 123 (especially p. 119). 1973), I, pp. 340-53; Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, L’art de la tache. Introduction à la Nou- 15 See Bruno Latour, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts [1979], velle méthode d’Alexander Cozens (Paris: Limon, 1990). (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, “Historische 3 Robert Bednarik, “The ‘Australopicethine’ Cobble from Makapansgat, South Africa,” Beispiele experimenteller Kreativität in den Wissenschaften,” in Walter Berka et al., eds., South African Archaeological Bulletin, no. 53 (1998), pp. 4-8. Woher kommt das Neue? Kreativität in Wissenschaft und Kunst (Wien/Köln/Weimar: 4 Wolfgang Krischke, “Anfang der Kunst. Kieselig,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 80 Böhlau, 2003), pp. 29-49. (7 April 1999), N5. 16 André Corboz, “La recherche: trois apologues” [1997], in André Corboz, Le territoire 5 See Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art comme palimpseste et autres essais (Besançon: L’Imprimeur, 2001), pp. 21-30, p. 259. (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). 17 See Antoine Cournot, Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités (Paris: 6 See Erhard Schüttpelz, “Höhere Wesen befahlen,” in Gerhardt von Graevenitz, Stefan Hachette, 1843); André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme [1924], in André Breton, Rieger and Felix Thürlemann, eds., Die Unvermeidlichkeit der Bilder (Tübingen: Narr, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 51; André Breton, L’amour fou 2001), pp. 187-203. (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), p. 31. 7 Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe. Ecrits, Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, 18 For an English translation, see Daniel Spoerri, An anecdoted topography of chance eds., (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), p. 50 [1912-1915]; Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of (re-anecdoted version), done with the help of his very dear friend, Robert Filliou, and Myself” [1964], quoted in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel translated from the French, and further anecdoted at random by their very dear friend, Duchamp (Munich: Prestel, 1989), p. 273. Emmett Williams, with one hundred reflective illustrations by Topor (New York: Some- 8 Emphasis mine ; Duchamp, Duchamp du signe, op. cit., p. 50. thing Else Press, 1966; London: Atlas Press, 1995). The preceding thoughts on Daniel 9 Ibid., p. 51. Spoerri are gratefully indebted to Fabienne Lavennex. 10 Interview with Sidney Janis, 1953, quoted in d’Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Mar- 19 Der Tagesspiegel (15 May 1966), quoted in Sigmar Polke. Die drei Lügen der cel Duchamp, op. cit., p. 283. Malerei, exhib. cat.: Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (Berlin: SMPK,1997), 11 Petr Kral, Le burlesque, ou la morale de la tarte à la crème (Paris: Stock, 1984), p. 56; unpaginated [43]. Henri Bergson, Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris: Alcan, 1900). 20 Octavio Paz, Apariencia desnuda. La obra de Marcel Duchamp (Mexico D.F., Era, 12 Claude Faure, “Hasard et arts plastiques,” in Emile Noël, ed., Le hasard aujourd’hui 1978), pp. 35-36. (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 67-79. A machine for constructing stories: actually created by the Egyptian god Thoth to share ancient An Introduction wisdom; a decade later Alliette, using the inverted name “Etteila,” gained fame as the day’s leading fortune-teller.) The exact origins of tarot cards are uncertain, but refer- Employing their special interpretive sensitivities, tarot “read- ences to them first emerge in Western Europe during the ers” could use the images on the various cards of the Major mid-fifteenth century, a renaissance moment in general for and Minor Arcana—kings and beggars, hierophants and card games. Believed to descend from the playing cards for fools, angels and devils—to build a narrative suggesting the an Italian game known first as trionfi and in the next century outcome of particular events or situations in the lives of their more familiarly as tarocchi (from a word meaning “foolish”), subjects. these early cards featured the four suits the tarot still uses As we were researching this current issue devoted to today—cups, swords, coins (or “pentacles”) and batons Chance, a colleague suggested we seek out Italo Calvino’s (or “wands.”) The Castle of Crossed Destinies, a novel based on this idea of Despite its contemporary reputation as a tool for the tarot as a generator of narrative possibility—what Calvino soothsaying, the tarot deck did not begin to acquire its calls a “machine for constructing stories.” For the following occult connotations until the late 18th century. It was then two pieces, authors Denis Johnson and Francine Prose were that figures like the French-born pastor Antoine Court de asked to participate in an experiment designed to gauge this Gébelin and the Parisian wigmaker-turned-esoteric Jean- latent potential. Provided with identical tarot decks, each was Baptiste Alliette, drawing on the current fascination with asked to lay out three cards from each the Major and Minor things Egyptian, popularized the power of “les Taraux” to Arcana in sequence and then to write, as extemporaneously establish contact with the mysteries of the past and predict as possible, texts that responded in some way to the cards future fortune. (In a chapter on tarot in his 1773 Le they were dealt. What follows are these texts, accompanied 62 Monde Primitif, Gébelin asserted that the cards were by the sequence of cards that inspired them. Breakfast of chance began ticking earlier, not when I dealt the six Francine Prose cards, but when I first took the deck out of the box. The first card I saw was the Tower, the lightning-struck Tower, which The images of the tarot deck are supposed to buzz through describes my psyche at the moment better than the pre- your brain, forging new neural pathways, making speedy Raphaelite Disneyland of the cards I have actually dealt. end-runs around language, culture, experience, and whether I dealt the three from the major arcana first, but was or not you have any idea what the cards mean. The beauty my major-before-minor decision a matter of chance, or of of the Waite deck is you do know what they mean. A guy some status-conscious preconditioning? And then there is lying on his face with ten swords sticking out of his back like this: The deck arrived already separated into the major and toothpicks on an hors d’oeuvres tray probably means what minor arcana, but still I had to look for the place where the you think. Which is why they are frightening even for the break was divided. As I flipped through the deck, it seemed unsuperstitious. Everyone knows the Death card is lurking to me that chance was flinging certain cards out at me. The in there, waiting. You don’t have to believe in the predictive Moon with its the howling dogs and the lobsterlike creature powers of a deck of cards. Everyone believes in the armored crawling up out of the sea. The lightning struck Tower and skeleton on horseback. The Moon. That could have led into a story. But that isn’t my Laying out the cards, I find myself dealing oddly, from story, the one inspired by chance. I was playing by the rules, left to right, as if some part of me truly believes that I am but what are the rules of chance? And what exactly does the involved in a voodoo event. To tell the truth, it’s a bit of a chaos of chance have to do with the logical order of science? horror-movie moment, like the scene in The Hands of Orlac in As the six cards turn up in front of me, there’s no spark which the injured pianist with the transplanted killer’s hands to set off that chain reaction that sets a story in motion. I suddenly realizes he’s got murderers at the end of his wrists. leave the room and return. Still nothing. I leave them out on The tarot, and the operations of chance, should inspire my desk. I’ll let them sit there as long as it takes, until they intuition, quick readings burbling up from the fountain of the reveal what they mean. unconscious, or from one of those newly discovered kinds The next morning, my husband makes breakfast: the of subcerebral intelligence. And this experiment, as I under- first blossoms from the zucchini plant in the garden, deep stand it, is meant to involve the fictive imagination, the power fried in batter, and fried eggs from the chickens that we only of the images to inspire narrative. Each card should have recently got, so that the eggs are still an occasion. been a bead to string on that cord that runs through a story. I look at the glowing food, radiant in the sunlight. But the the six cards I have dealt mean nothing to me. I realize that the tarot cards have predicted breakfast: Nothing. No narrative, no mirror. the zucchini blossom and the sunny-side-up egg. I’ve never It doesn’t take a serious student of the tarot to figure thought of the tarot that way, as a sort of menu. out that these cards are the tarot equivalent of the three I had thought the word breakfast. Or actually, breakfast cherries coming up on the slot machine. You don’t need cereal. But I’d gotten it wrong, imagining that Waite deck to know that the ace of pentacles means money, that the must mean some sort of granola or possibly some pink and hanged man is the most problematic image, but that may hideous British breakfast sausage. just signify indecision or transition. As tarot readings go, I also realize, only now, how rural and springlike is the this one is heaven. Pure vanilla. image that the six cards combine to form. The iris on the I have dealt a TV ad for a breakfast cereal. Temperance card is blooming outside at this very moment, Perhaps I should explain that recently there has been a and is that one of our chickens in the tree below The Star? death in our family, so that if the Death card had turned up, Was it sheer chance that the tarot deck intuited that I am in it would have simply seemed like reportage. All these trees the country, and that it is mid-June? and flowers and fruit, blues skies and happy dancing chil- This is what the experiment has left me wonder- dren could not have less to do with my current state of mind, ing about chance: Was it chance, or something else, that nor can I imagine generating a story from a series of images allowed the six cards to predict the next day’s breakfast? that have no conflict, no variation, no nuance. No event. And was it chance, or something else, that this breezy, Maybe the problem is that I didn’t leave enough to lightweight, limited prognostication is the heaviest message chance, or left the wrong things to chance. Perhaps from destiny that I could have borne, or can bear, at the 63 I started at the wrong point. Perhaps the taxi-meter moment? BEELZEBUB RADIO— him?” “TELL HIM NOW!” I said, and she stood absolutely still THE WORLD HAS BEEN SAVED and began sending the message. denis johnson Back outside the gates I waited for the bus. I was terri- fied of who would be on it when it stopped for me, terrified (This isn’t fiction.) I first met the Devil Satan in February, of what would happen to me if I boarded it, but when it 1978. He manifested himself, or rather lost interest in dis- came, when it stopped, when the doors opened, I kept my guising his presence, as a result of a very aggressive series head down and stepped aboard and took a seat not looking of incursions the God Jehovah had made in my universe, at anyone. I was holding the tarot card in my hand. I reached and these visits of His, in turn, came about because the up and pulled the string to stop the bus. As it slowed I Devil had gripped me more strongly as I made small experi- looked at the message in my hand: It had changed to the ments with prayer, meditation, reading spiritual books, card of Strength. “All right!” I said to everyone on the bus, things like that. because God required a public acknowledgment, “I know I worked as a temp for state agencies. By an insane God will give me the strength if I want it!” As the bus coincidence, only a few days after the onset of these came to a halt I laid the card on the seat and got off as fast adventures, I was assigned a clerking job in an outpatient as I could. facility of the state mental hospital. All day long madmen The Devil broadcast two slogans over the atmospheres and madwomen appeared before me with their stories, continually: “YOU HOPE, BUT YOU KNOW.” “IT’S KILL OR their complaints, their theories. A man called on the phone: BE KILLED.” I broadcast in return that I wasn’t going to hurt “I think I’m the devil.” “You do?” was all I could say. “I anyone, that I wasn’t going to do anything wrong. Every few drink and I hurt people when I drink and I can’t stop drink- minutes I encountered someone who, despite their innocent ing and hurting people.” “Have you contacted Alcoholics behavior, I knew had been assigned to kill me. I insisted I Anonymous?” “I am the Devil,” he said, “I am Alcoholics wouldn’t make the first move. I wasn’t just going to assault Anonymous, I am the cosmos, I am the beginning and someone suddenly. If that meant I’d be murdered, so be it. the end,” and I could hear him laughing as I hung up the Tarot cards played a major role in the strategies being pur- phone. When my boss came back from lunch I took a walk sued all around us. Whenever I came near a place that might with him over the grounds where crazy people stood still or deal in such things, I tried not to go inside. But eventually I strolled cautiously over the earth or sat on concrete benches would give in and go see. I would stand at the counter of a or swings meant for small children, and I told him, “I think psychedelic shop or occult book store and ask for a deck. I’m losing touch with reality and I shouldn’t be working I would open it and look at one card. Today the Nine of here.” None of the crazy people all around us talked to any Wands. Not a message for me. But I shouldn’t have touched of the others, none of them looked at anybody else. We all it. The clerk saw. It was his signal to kill me by hitting me knew what was going on. The gigantic clash of good and nine times with some kind of wand. I left quickly without evil tearing apart our souls left us no strength to focus on giving away the fact that I knew all about his assignment. anything else. “Whatever you think is best for you,” said my Very often I passed St. Theresa’s Church, which was temporary boss. When I went to clean out my desk I found on Thomas St., in my neighborhood. A day after I exposed a tarot card. I threw it in the trash. I went to the bus stop The Empress card in a bookstore a few blocks from there, I just outside the stone and iron walls of the facility. The bus understood the meaning of it. St. Theresea. I headed over to came, but I didn’t get on. I went back through the gates, Thomas Street right away and walked along as if I were only went to the outpatient clinic, told the people there, “I forgot pursuing a simple errand of some kind. People were going something.” I stood beside my desk. They were all looking at into the church. I could see they were all innocent, com- me. A couple of patients said nothing, staring at me, breath- pletely removed from the battle raging all around. I joined ing hard. They knew. I said, “I think it’s in the trash, maybe.” them and went inside. It was some kind of social occasion. I took the tarot card from the wastebasket. The Ten of Cups. A man was selling raffle tickets at the door. He had a roll Cups, drinking, hurting people. I threw it back in the trash. of tickets and a box of coins. I stopped. Two days before I On my way out I said to a thin, ropy crazy woman, “Tell him had seen him on a tarot card—the Two of Coins. I nearly ran I get the message. But I’m still with God.” “Who?” she said away, but then I understood that the moment had arrived. I innocently, and I said, “You know who,” and she went over to a drinking fountain, and bending over it as if I 64 said, “All right, I’ll tell him, but when should I tell were getting some water, I said a prayer. Prayers always had to be disguised in some such way—tying of the shoe, drop- ping something and stooping to pick it up, and so on. I let the water hit my lips and prayed: “God, if you exist, I will win the raffle. If I don’t win the raffle, I’ll join the war and begin the killing.” I started to go in, but I turned back to the fountain and said, “But first, I’m going to flip a coin: heads I go in, tails I leave.” I went into a hallway and found the men’s room. I went into a toilet stall and began flipping a quarter, and it came up heads over and over while the Devil screamed “You Hope But You Know!” and “It’s Kill Or Be Killed!” All right, all right, I said. I entered the church. The man said, “Twenty-five cents for a ticket, do you want one?” and I said, “No.” In the front of the church a monk of some kind was delivering a lively talk. He wore a robe and sandals and dark glasses and a beard. His name was Brother William. He apol- ogized for the dark glasses. He was going swiftly blind. He asked for everyone’s prayers. That irritated me. It seemed he almost enjoyed going blind just so he could ask for prayers and show his faith. He talked about his monastery. He said it was in the high red mountains of the desert. Everyone was invited to go there. When he stopped talking they read off the winning raffle ticket and told the winner he could have a free book. I went forward and picked up a flyer about the monastery from the table at the front of the room. I saw another, smaller room full of books. I knew there was one more tarot card in there somewhere. I could hardly move for fear and trembling, but I entered the room. No one else was there. Shelves full of books. I stood looking at them, seeing nothing, blind with dread. A man came to stand beside me. He was going to kill me. In order to disguise myself I reached out and took a book from the shelf and pretended to read its title. “Do you like that one?” the man said. “I don’t know,” I said, “I haven’t read it.” I couldn’t look at him. “Well,” he said, “I got the winning raffle ticket today, but you seem to like that book, so here—“and he handed me the ticket and said, “You win.” As the war subsided I began to feel more and more down-to-earth every day. It took a little over two years before I lost my fear of tarot cards. I still flip coins and ask God to direct my thinking. Not long ago, I read a religious tract that said, “In many places in the Bible, people cast lots in order to reach decisions.” Last week the editor of a magazine sent me a note: If I agreed, he would send me a deck of tarot cards. I would choose six cards at random and write some- thing based on those six. I agreed, and I have no idea why. I don’t believe I should have. When the cards came I didn’t touch them. But my daughter found them. She asked me to explain what I was doing with a deck of tarot cards, and I told her. This morning when I got up I went into the kitchen to make some tea, and I found six cards laid out on the counter. The first was the Devil.
65 Nevada’s Most Unwanted exclusion list. As soon as the restriction came into effect, CHRISTOPHER TURNER Caifano and Dragna checked into the most luxurious of Las Vegas’s casino hotels, armed with a gang of civil rights In 1960, Nevada’s Gaming Control Board released a make- lawyers, and embarked on a conspicuous tour of the Tropi- shift publication bound together with scotch tape, which cana, Flamingo, and Stardust’s blackjack and craps tables. they named the “Black Book” after the color of its binding. They were closely trailed by gaming control agents and the The book listed eleven “persons of notorious or unsavory casinos were forced to evict them. The two mobsters sub- reputation” who were to receive a life-long ban from own- sequently took the regulators to the federal courts, arguing ing, managing, or entering Nevada’s casinos. Las Vegas that the Black Book ban constituted a violation of their civil was becoming a gangsters’ paradise and, fearing Federal rights. Two years later, they lost their case when the courts intervention, the State sought to protect their sovereignty ruled that access to a casino wasn’t a basic human right, as over the lucrative gambling industry by scapegoating those the mobsters lawyers maintained, but a privilege. (Caifano whom the book described as “known hoodlums.” The Black appealed to the US Supreme Court, which denied him a Book was distributed to all state-licensed gaming estab- hearing in 1967.) lishments and included mug shots of the original eleven “The opportunities for rich pickings in this sanctuary chancers, along with a short physical description of each, for gamblers would assuredly be tempting to hoodlums and their FBI file numbers, and a list of all their nicknames and gangsters,” the court concluded when it upheld the ban. aliases (they had 53 between them). “Let the gangsters move in from the underworld and the The year the Black Book came out was also the year resultant crooked games, cheats, frauds, swindles will lead that the original Ocean’s 11 was released, the film in which inevitably to gangland-style kidnappings and killings and Frank Sinatra masterminds the simultaneous robbery of five would mean the end of Nevada’s rich gambling take.” Vegas casinos. The Black Book Rat Pack were all Italian, No changes were made to the Black Book until 1975, caricatures of the mafia stereotype, well-known and feared when it was officially named The List of Excluded Persons, gangsters: Murray “the Camel” Humphreys was a lieuten- after a state resident complained that the original title was ant of Al Capone; Joseph “Wild Cowboy” Sica was one of racist. It now has a silver cover and includes 37 names, Mickey Cohen’s henchmen; Sam “Mooney” Giancana—who the majority of which are still Italian. It features only one was described by one police official as “a snarling, sarcastic, woman, Sandra Vaccaro, who in 1986 received the dubi- ill-mannered, ill-tempered, sadistic psychopath”—was one of ous honor of being the only female to have ever made it the twelve overlords of the American Mafia and Frank Sina- onto the list. In September 2004, Eugene “GiGi” Bulgarino, tra’s most infamous friend. In 1963, Giancana spent eleven an associate of the Philadelphia mob, and his accomplice days at the casino that Ol’ Blue Eyes owned in Lake Tahoe, Dennis McAndrew became the most recent additions to in violation of the Black Book’s new ruling. As a result, the Nevada’s most unwanted. The pair were jailed in 1999 when gaming commission threatened to revoke Sinatra’s gaming they were caught using a handheld computer to trigger slot license and, fearing the bad publicity that this would cause, machine jackpots, a scam which reportedly netted them Sinatra sold his interest in Nevada’s gambling industry. over $6 million. Of the founding members of this reluctant club, only
Marshal Caifano (a.k.a. John Marshall) and Louis Dragna are For more information, see Ronald A. Farrell and Carole Case’s The Black Book and still on the list. In 1960, Caifano was high up in the Chicago the Mob: The Untold Story of the Control of Nevada’s Casinos (Madison: University of Mafia and was suspected of having committed several gang- Wisconsin Press, 1995). For mug shots and descriptions of those on Nevada’s current land executions—“I’ve never seen colder eyes in my life,” List of Excluded Persons, see:
These surviving stalwarts were originally the above and opposite: Excluded persons from the Nevada State Gaming Control 66 ones who put up the most fight to the idea of an Board’s Black Book, 1960. Courtesy Nevada State Library and Archives. cherry, cherry, cherry Marshall Fey
The history of the slot machine—the familiar three-reel version of which was invented by San Francisco auto mechanic Charles Fey in the late 1880s—is marked by the device’s constant struggle for survival, during which many ploys were used to circumvent the gambling laws of the day. Perhaps the most successful of these tactics was a simple transformation of the slot machine’s image, from gaming device to vending machine. This was accomplished in 1910, when Mills Novelty added a mechanism that gave the player the option of getting a piece of gum with every nickel played. The gum was of low quality and generally not taken, as the principle concern of the operator was the money paid out by the slot. To emphasize the idea that this was a vending machine rather than a gambling device, fruit symbols were substituted for Fey’s original poker symbols to suggest the fruit gum they dispensed—the derivation of the popular cherry, orange, plum, and lemon symbols used for many years. The “bar” was the gum wrapper label (there was no jackpot on a slot until 1928), and the bell symbol originated from Fey’s earlier three-reel “Liberty Bell” slots.
below: 1910 Mill Liberty Bell, Special Gum Vendor. From the Liberty Bell Collection. Photo Marshall Fey. Why Ask Why?: far-off places, and children—that was one end of the spec- An interview with Alison Gopnik trum of thought, and at the other end were scientists who Courtney Stephens were, of course, the peak of rationality and sophistication and reasoning, with statistics being one of the most recent In 1975, five years before his death, the psychologist accomplishments in the sciences. What’s happened over Jean Piaget published The Origin of the Idea of Chance in the last thirty years is that we’ve increasingly realized that
Children,1 the first major work in developmental psychol- even the very youngest children are already, at least uncon- ogy to discuss prediction, probability, and randomness as sciously, doing some of the same kinds of computations tenets of intelligence. In it, Piaget posited a multi-stage and calculations and kinds of reasoning that even the most developmental process that turned four- and five-year-old sophisticated scientists are doing. So the old great chain determinists into twelve-year-old probabilists. During the of thinking from the primitive to the sophisticated doesn’t first stage, before the age of seven or eight, a child cannot seem to be right any more. There probably is a difference distinguish the possible from the necessary, so that there is in how explicit, how conscious, we are in our reasoning essentially no conceptual room between what could be and process. So we think that much of what children are doing what is. In the second stage, from eight to eleven, children they’re doing unconsciously, while what scientists are doing begin to detect the presence of fortuitous combinations they’re doing more self-reflectively and thoughtfully. But the and arrangements in the outcomes of events. This intuition actual ways of thinking, the ways of reasoning, seem to be starts to complicate their former conviction that the world quite similar. runs along a set order in chained reaction. By age twelve and onward, the idea of a fixed design has been essen- Could you talk about chance and what these broad stages of tially replaced by a footing in probability, as children come causal development are? to understand that chance phenomena cannot always be modeled, whereas mechanical causality is an intrinsically We know that even the very youngest children, as young traceable process. At this final stage, the young person as two months old, already pay attention to differences in understands that most things that occur in their world are the probability of events. Certainly by eight months they’re a synthesis of fortuitous distribution, random mixture, and sensitive to the difference between whether a result follows construction. For Piaget this understanding was the climax something all the time, or only follows it some of the time. of an instinctive maturation process that both conveyed They seem to be able to discriminate between something a crisp, coherent vision of human development and also leading to something else with varying likelihood. By the echoed the linearity of civilizing progress. time they’re two-and-a-half, we know that they can translate Since its time of publication, Piaget’s schema has been that kind of information into conjectures about causation. So found to greatly underestimate and simplify children’s com- if they see one thing following another all the time but some- prehension of chance. Alison Gopnik is a professor at the thing else that only follows in a particular context, say when University of California, Berkeley, who studies related ques- a third article is present, then they can translate that into a tions of early causal understanding. Borrowing from artificial set of causal information. And we know by the time they’re intelligence models such as Causal Bayes Nets,2 Gopnik and four years old, they really grasp probability—for example, if her contemporaries have found intricate and more generous you show them a machine where placing different colored ways of modeling child intelligence as it relates to chance.3 blocks on it makes it light up two-thirds of the time for one Her research on early theory formation is based on the idea color block and one-third of the time with the other, they’ll that children are not merely undergoing a blind and innate say that the block that made it light up two-thirds of the time growth process, but are actively and scientifically inquiring is stronger, has more special stuff in it, makes it go better into chance and similar ideas starting from a much younger than the one that only does it one-third of the time.5 age than Piaget imagined.4 Courtney Stephens spoke with Gopnik by phone in June 2005. Do the youngest children seem to start with a fixed philoso- phy on chance? In Piaget’s work from the 1970s, he likens the way children develop causal understanding to a larger narrative of prog- It’s a complicated story. We don’t know for sure whether ress in which the child’s mind stands for the uncivilized, children are objectivists or subjectivists about probability. pre-modern mind and a more complex grasp of chance and In philosophy, there are two classical approaches to think- probability signals the departure to the modern, scientific ing about probability. One is to think that there’s actually mind. Has that idea continued to inform the direction of this something intrinsically chancy or random going on in the kind of research? world, which is the idea of objective probability. This holds that some things just are intrinsically probabilistic, intrinsi- I think that idea is exactly the perspective that has changed cally random. The other idea is that things in the world really over the last thirty years. The conventional wisdom indeed are not random, they really are not chancy, but that they’ll was exactly that there existed these primitive modes always look chancy to us observers because there are so 69 of thought that were shared by women, people in many other factors involved. That’s the notion of subjec- tive probability, the idea that it’s just the way our minds been done on children’s understanding of things like magic. are, that even if things are indeed deterministic in the world It’s a little hard to tell what they think. By the time they’re we can never see them that way, there will always be too three or four, they have a concept of magic, but they treat many intruding factors that are going to make things look it as a way of bracketing off things that don’t fit their causal random. So, if we want to find out about the world, we’ll understandings of the world. The traditional wisdom was, have to think in terms of probabilities, not because that’s “Oh, the primitives, the children, women, they don’t under- necessarily the way the world works, but because that’s the stand the causal connections between things; so they just way minds work when they go out into the world. We don’t think that something is similar to something else and simply know whether children are objective probabilists, or whether link the two through magic.” Another way of thinking about they are more subjective probabilists; whether chance is, to it, which seems to be closer to the way children think, is that them, a fact of how things work, or whether they think that they have a great deal of causal knowledge as far as phys- the world is simply far too complicated and noisy and so you ics, biology, and psychology go; they know all about how have to use probability. growth and inheritance work, how everyday physical events and psychology work. And when they come across some- Piaget seemed to think that children would always assume thing that doesn’t fit what they know, not unlike adults, they hidden factors, even when things appeared random. say, “Well okay, there’s evidence for this, I don’t understand it, it doesn’t fit into my causal framework, and I have this There’s some evidence for that. Laura Schultz and I have category that I’m going to call magic, which are things that done work where three-year-olds were presented with a seem to be true, seem to be happening, but don’t fit what I mechanical device, and it only worked part of the time, not think about the causal nature of the world.”6 all the time. Then she showed them something that was hidden in the device. The children assumed a relationship And what about false belief, when children have to undergo between failure and the hidden object. In fact, they seemed the process of being wrong, of having their causal inferences to be looking for hidden causes as though they were deter- completely rejected. In one of your papers, you give children minists. But the important thing was that they weren’t a candy box, but it’s filled with pencils and they seem to ret- confused about probabilities; they were subjective proba- roactively revise their expectations. bilists. But, of course, that example was an example of a physical machine, which you usually expect to be determin- Yes, well, the interesting thing is from the time children istic. When we told them that some of the machines simply are very little they are revising and changing their beliefs worked better, that they had more special stuff, they did in the light of new evidence, but they don’t seem to know understand that more or less special stuff would translate that’s what they’re doing. In that experiment, we showed to correlative functionality. They seemed to be more willing the children the candy box full of pencils; the children then to treat probabilities objectively in that case. A very crucial changed their minds about what could possibly be inside, area that we don’t really know the answer about is the psy- but they didn’t realize they’d changed their minds. This is chological case. When you have a machine, everyone will what psychologists call meta-knowledge, knowledge about expect them to function deterministically, including philoso- knowledge, which seems to be something that is slightly phers. But what about watching two people interact? Some delayed relative to functioning. people have suggested that children might think about peo- ple genuinely interacting probabilistically, that it might be a Does surprise, which most children love so much, factor into sign of what makes people different from other things, that this learning process? you can’t just manipulate people all the time. The psycholo- gist John Watson has suggested that that might be how We know that surprise and interest are emotions that seem we actually identify people. But an interesting alternative to motivate children from the time they’re little babies. There suggestion is that maybe that’s part of why we think that is a revolutionary technique called habituation in which you people have minds inside of them, that we actually see them show the baby something it doesn’t expect, and even tiny behaving probabilistically, when as children we are more babies, two-month-olds, will look very long at things that are deterministic. We think, “This person is behaving unpredict- unexpected and novel, seemingly very motivated to find out ably, there must be something going on in their head.” what’s going on. They seem to have these kinds of emotions of surprise and curiosity and intense interest. By the time This really torments our solipsism. they’re two or three years old, those emotions are probably the most overwhelming, driving motivation they have—so Yes, exactly. much so that they put themselves at mortal peril for the sake of figuring out the causal structure of the world. Parents Is there any precedent for the miraculous in early childhood have given this the technical term “getting into everything.” or is that more or less an acquired concept? So in fact surprise and curiosity seem to not only be there from the time they’re born, but they seem in some ways to 70 Well, there’s some very interesting research that’s be the overwhelming motivation and emotion for babies and certainly for preschoolers through school-age period. 1 Jean Piaget, The Origin of the Idea of Chance in Children, trans. Lowell Leake Jr., Paul They’re looking out in the world, trying to find causal and Burrell and Harold D. Fishbein (New York: Norton, 1975). other kinds of patterns, looking for violations of those pat- 2 Bayes Nets are probabilistic graphical models that are used specifically to represent terns, trying to makes sense out of these violations. uncertainty and complexity. For more information about Bayes Nets, see
And does emotion react to or compliment these cognitive developments?
Well, these cognitive emotions, as it were, seem to be very powerful and strong, even in very young children. It’s funny—it’s again part of this great chain of thinking where there’s reason, which is this hard, cold thing that adults do, and then there’s emotion and magic which is what children and women do. But after all, curiosity and joy in figuring things out are just as powerful emotions as love or desire or any other kind of emotion, and in fact those emotions seem to be in children from very early on. They seem to be driv- ing forces for figuring out what’s going on in the world in the way that lust is a driving force for reproducing. I wrote a paper once called “The Explanation Is Orgasm,” where I argued that the wonderful emotion of “a-ha!” and figuring out how the world works was to cognition as orgasm is to reproduction, a way nature has of telling you “Okay! Keep going! You’re on the right track! You’re headed for the truth! You got it!” Now, in both cases, if you had to wait to find out whether you were right or not, it would be too late. You don’t want to wait to see if these things will turn out well in the long run—whether I’m going to reproduce or get to the moon; nature instead thinks to say, “This is great! Just keep at it. This feels wonderful! You got it!” and then, of course, it turns out that this helps you get to the moon or cure cancer or make fire or hunt mastodons or all those other things. Children are the blue-sky R & D branch of the human spe- cies. They’re the ones who don’t have to do any marketing or management or put anything to any kind of applied use— they just get to sit there, blissfully calculating, figuring out what reality looks like and why it does what it does. And this impulse for knowledge, whatever form it takes, seems to be the real triumph over chaos and randomness. So it’s sort overleaf: “Dice Man” from Schoenbartbuch, an illustrated manuscript from of comforting that our search for order is not necessarily a Nuremburg, ca. 1600. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, mechanism of adult culture, but a very fundamental Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles. 71 nature of the mind. Photo Paula Goldman.
The Language of Birds: The serpent as the bearer of telluric power. Both Cas- Some Notes on Chance and Divination sandra and Helenos received their prophetic gifts from a Dale Pendell serpent that licked their ears, enabling them to understand the language of birds. Siegfried ate the heart of a dragon. During the last ten years of his life I took many walks with Hebrew prophecy came from snakes: Nehush- Norman O. Brown. Sometimes they were weekly, some- tan, the bronze serpent that Moses affixed to a cross. times monthly, or, in the winter, we’d just skip them. Themes for the walks varied widely, but it seemed that in every walk, at least once, we’d talk about chance. Nâchâsh nechôsheth, serpent of bronze. Nobby had become obsessed with chance. For Brown, chance offered a way out. He was recanting. He was trying Both words from nâchash, “to hiss, whisper, to to construct a palinode. He said that Love’s Body was “too divine.” Christian.” He had unfinished arguments with John Cage. Chance seemed to offer a solution—a final refutation of = = 358 teleology and determinism. “Not love, chance! Maybe even Nâchâsh = Mâshîyach: the Serpent is the Messiah. Dionysus is too much.” I was fighting him all along. I saw chance as the Guard the Mysteries! embodiment of godless materialism, reductionist and smug, Constantly reveal Them! nihilistic and monopolizing the privileged chair and ever —Lew Welch so superior to ignorant superstition...what Gurdjieff called “nothing-butism.” As a poet, I rather liked the conclusion of Love’s Body: “there is only poetry.” The art of reading signs is one of our most ancient traditions, I had already finished a draft of “The Language of and a specialty of our Guild. It is not the path to happiness, Birds” before Nobby showed me his essay “Inauguration.” It they say, but what are the choices? was all there, even to an identical line about the bird as the The basic question is whether there is meaning to coin- authority, except that playing off of etymological nit-picking, cidence. I’d stated it in the negative (which gave Nobby a laugh). The The basic question is whether chance is blind. The basic good student should surpass his teacher. In this case (all too question, the question, is that of divining, glimpsing, seeing clearly), such is not the case. Still, there were a couple of forms in chaos. things that Nobby missed. . . The matter of augury. By the time I read “The Language of Birds” to Nobby The whole outward world with all its being is a he was unable to respond verbally—his Alzheimer’s had pro- signature of the inward spiritual world. gressed too far. He’d try to put a sentence together, get lost —Boehme in the complexity of syntax and possibilities, and finally give up. But at the parts he liked he’d jump around and dance. That was enough. This one’s for you:
Norman O. Brown, 1913-2002 Aeromancy divination by weather or by throwing sand into the wind philosopher, teacher, friend Alectryomancy divination by roosters pecking grain Aleuromancy divination by flour or messages baked in cakes Alphitomancy divination by barley Ambulomancy divination by walking The serpent in the tree, offering knowledge. Amniomancy divination by the caul of a newborn infant Mercury’s snakes, the Hermetic power: hermeneu- Anthracomancy divination by watching a burning coal tics, the interpretation of signs, poisoning Single Vision. Anthropomancy divination from human entrails Anthroposomancy divination from facial or bodily characteristics The Dragon kild by Cadmus is ye subject of our Arithmomancy divination by means of numbers work, & his teeth are the matter purified. Democri- Armomancy divination from the shoulders tus (a Graecian Adeptist) said there were certain Astragalomancy divination by knuckle-bones or dice birds (volatile substances) from whose blood mixt Astromancy divination using the stars, astrology together a certain kind of Serpent ( ) was gener- Austromancy divination or soothsaying from words in the winds ated wch being eaten (by digestion) would make Axinomancy divination by heating or throwing an axe a man understand ye voyce of birds (ye nature of volatiles how they may bee fixed) St John ye Apostle & Homer were Adeptists. Divination forms a continuum, but we could say that at one Sacra Bacchi (vel Dionysiaca) instituted by pole there is “possession,” and at the other “reading.” By Orpheus were of a Chymicall meaning. possession we mean that a god or some other spirit enters 7373 —Isaac Newton one’s body and takes control—voice, gestures, words—all belong to the god. Reading is interpretive—that all the flow- it is molten pour it into a can of water. Your fortune ing occurrences of this world are a stream of messages. can be read from the shape of the solidified lead. Do Somewhere in between, half possessed by fire, half swim- this on New Year’s Day. ming in a sea of total significance, there is inspiration. Thus the seduction. Thus we eat. Thus we drink our mantic syrups. Nanabozho in the forest. Charlie Parker. Eric Belomancy divination by marked arrows Dolphy. Tung Shan’s Bird Path: extended hands that leave no Bibliomancy divination by random Bible passages trace. (pagans preferred Homer or Virgil) Bletonomancy divination by ripples or patterns in moving water Botanomancy divination by plants A fork in the path: one way leads to an image of the world Capnomancy divination by smoke, or bursting poppy heads as a book, as a riddle, written in code, each occurrence a Cartomancy divination by cards presage and glyph of the whole. The other way leads to ran- Catoptromancy divination by a polished shield or mirror domness, mere chance, forever beyond our grasp, casting Causimonancy divination from the ashes of burned leaves or paper a shadow of nihilism on an accidental universe. Either way, Cephalomancy divination by a boiled donkey or human skull theology is unavoidable. But in the latter case the language Ceraunoscopy divination by lightning and thunder is geometry and statistics, while in the former it is luck and Ceromancy divination by molten wax poured into water power.
Or is that backwards? Augury, divination: Socrates distinguishes between the two, A fork in the path: one leads to, well, not clear, but along the claiming that divination is the higher art because it comes way we dismiss accidents without ado. from divine madness, and is thus a gift of the gods, whereas augury is the pursuit of rational men. . . . were I superstitious, I should see an omen in this incident, a hint of fate . . . Of course, I explain Tall Hector, eyes averted under his flashing helmet, the incident as an accident, without further mean- shook the two lots hard. . . ing. —Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of But the difference is not so clearly cut. Visions are also Everyday Life signs, as are voices. How much of what we ever see is not projection, or hallucination? Is vision a mental or a physical Thus spake the great seer. phenomenon? If you see it in darkness, or with your eyes The other way is through the grove of Fortuna, first-born closed, is it still seeing? of Jupiter, the goddess of chance who keeps her own coun- sel. The other way. The other way leads to the Pythoness, the Oracle. One of the Principal Ones spoke to me and said: “María Sabina, this is the Book of Wisdom. It is the Book of Language. Everything that is written in it is Augury, divination from the flight of birds. Latin augere, “to for you. The Book is yours. Take it so that you can enlarge, increase.” work.” Auis, “bird,” is a different word, but Plato puns them. —Alvaro Estrada, María Sabina, Her Life Socrates explains to Phaedrus that it is augury that, through and Chants oio-nos (a bird of omen), supplies oiesis (human thought) with information and “mind” (nous). Divination is one of the most common practices associated The oionoistic art: the reading of signs, that salient with the use of visionary plants. Peyote and datura, mush- peculiarity of our species. rooms and morning glory seeds, all were used for divination in Mesoamerica. The entheogens could as correctly be Bird-reckoning. Bird-brain. called the diviners. The bird as the authority: finding august signs, images, white flecks in liver. [Peyote] causes those devouring it to be able to Or coincidence of words: foresee and to predict things; such, for instance, as nicknames, or the waxing moon. whether on the following day the enemy will make an attack upon them; or whether the weather will Auspicious increase. The bird-spectre speaks. continue favorable; or to discern who has stolen It furthers one to cross the great water, from them some utensil or anything else; and other things of like nature which the Chichimeca really to eke out meaning. believe they have found out. —Francisco Hernandez, De Historia Plantarum Put two ounces of lead into a steel ladle or a cast- iron frying pan and melt it on the stove. When 74 Mushrooms. Tobacco. Coca. Ololiuhqui. Salvia divinorum. And the empathogens. were—the association of prophecy and madness belongs to the Indo-European stock of ideas. —E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational The Pythoness burned laurel leaves— *Men, “mind,” is also the root for “meaning.” Thus there is sweet smelling vapour from the Adyton. meaning in madness. Henbane (apollinaris), black and white hellebore, and datura According to Homer, the mantis was always welcome were used at the oracle of Trophonios at Lebadea, the con- at a prince’s table, along with carpenters, doctors, heralds, sultants also partaking. and poets. At the oldest oracle, at Dodona, an ancient oak gave voice to Zeus when the wind blew through the branches: Rationality. Ratio. Analysis. Pascal’s adding machine: stacks unwashen feet, sleeping on the ground. of Boolean gates. Computers can beat grandmasters: it’s The first auguries may have come from the behavior of ani- clear that logical deduction is not our particular forte. mals, or from dreams. Madness may be.
Serpent, lizard, bat. Stuttering. Sneezes. The Greeks had two words for chance, tyche, and automatia. The oino, bird, to the ornis: portent. Zeus: eagle, vulture. Aristotle used tyche to refer to coincidental occurrences in Apollo: raven. Hera: crow. Cicero thought fish too dumb to the human world, and automatia to refer to chance events speak for the gods. in the natural world, the difference being that human beings possess free will while natural objects do not. For True dreams, false dreams, Democritus, automatia refered to events that had no external Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn. cause, while tyche meant that it was an event for which we Our most ancient possession. were simply ignorant of the cause.
“Hidden variables.”
Chaomancy divination from the appearance of the air Democritus didn’t believe in randomness. Chartomancy divination from written pieces of paper Chiromancy divination by the nails, lines, and fingers of the hand Chresmomancy divination from magic sounds or foreign words Randomness is entropy, Claude Shannon’s measure of Claiguscience divination from the taste or smell of a food that isn’t present information. Patternless chaos is maximal meaning, incom- Clednomancy divination from hearing a chance word pressible and incomprehensible. Cleidomancy divination by a suspended key Cleromancy divination by the casting of lots – (entropy) = k log (1/D) Coscinomancy divination by a sieve suspended on shears Crithomancy divination by grains sprinkled on burnt sacrifices All we need is the encryption key. Cromniomancy divination by onions Crystallomancy divination by crystal ball or the casting of gemstones Cubomancy divination by throwing dice Fortuna as the robot genius. Self-moving. Self-willed, and Cyclomancy divination by the wheel of fortune (perhaps an error here) self-contained, uninfluenced by the environment. Insulated from stray sparks. Who but a robot can be spontaneous? Auspice. Auxin: the growth hormone in plants. Sanskrit Automatons are glamorous: enchanting embodiments uks. ati,“he grows.” Plants as authors, the way of growth of grammar. Incarnation of the Logos. and spontaneity, across Central Asia, strengthening, maybe The primordial robot was the Big Bang—Democritus’s getting fat, a big waistline, until we grow old among the first cause and Timolean’s goddess of chance: Αυτοµατια, Tocharians: oks. u. Automatia Or maybe the Creator is a marionette. Or perhaps there is no such thing as chance. Latin: divinatio, related to divinare, “to predict”, and to divi- There is always nus, “divine,” “pertaining to the gods.” that chance. . . . Greek: manteia, “divination.” A prophet or prophetess is mantis, related to mainomai, “to be mad,” and mania, “mad- A polysemous world: the path suffused with numinosity, a ness,” all from the Proto-Indo-European root *men. quavering feeling that everything is portentous, happening as if by prediction. A hazy presage, like a mirage. Pin it down If the Greeks were right in connecting mantic and it disappears. A crow. A wild duck. with mainomai—and most philologists think they Where did it go? Arms are used when there is no other choice; this is like using medicine to cure illness. Therefore it is called “poisoning the country.” -mancy. From µαντις, diviner. Sanskrit múnis, a seer, or —Chih-hsu Ou-i: I Ching Commentary sage. Perhaps related to mátis, “mind.” Thus Sha-kyamuni, the Buddha, is the “seer of the Sha-kyas.” That the Von Neumann wave function collapses implies Tibetan diviners were called mopas. In addition to order: observables emerge, an implicate order, as in Bohm, oracular prophecy through trance and possession, Tibetans or the Avatamsaka—a non-syntactical order, holographic, practiced augury with birds, dice, arrows, mirrors, and the each part containing the whole. rosary (mala). Non-sequential organization: John Cage (Gaussian), Norman O. Brown (corporeal), Gary Snyder (dendritic). All these [divinatory] operations, in the world of psy- Or James Joyce. Open the book at random. Ordered by chical phenomena as in the world of physical phe- nomena, may be carried out either in awareness of mandala, rather than Cartesian axes: no origin, like Anaxi- their relative and ultimately illusory nature and with mander’s cylinder. Apeiron. regard to their moral consequences, and therefore Alan Turing’s oracles were deterministic, and therefore in compatibility with the teachings of Buddhism, or not mad, and, as Roger Penrose shows, following Gödel’s without that awareness and regard. proof, incapable of understanding. They can’t solve the halt- —Lama Chime Radha, Rinpoche (in Oracles ing problem. Penrose suggests that a non-computational and Divination) brain might need a quantum time loop, so that the results of future computations are available in the present. Divination is used to find which of the five spiritual families Thus all beings have thought by the will of chance. of practice best suits an initiate. —Empedocles
The monkeys are still at the typewriters, working on Hamlet.
Dactyliomancy divination by suspended finger ring or pendulum Daphnomancy divination by the crackle of roasting laurel leaves Demonomancy divination with the help of demons and spirits Halomancy divination with salt Dendromancy divination by oak and mistletoe Hepatoscopy divination by the liver of a sacrificed animal Elaeomancy divination by the surface of water Hieromancy divination by interpreting sacrifices Enoptomancy divination with a mirror Hippomancy divination by the behavior of horses Felidomancy divination from the behavior of wild cats Hydromancy divination by water or tides Gastromancy divination by food, or sounds from the stomach Ichthyomancy divination from the movements or entrails of fish Gelomancy divination from laughter Idolomancy divination from movie or rock stars Geomancy divination by cracks or lines in the earth, or dots on paper Lampadomancy divination by the flickering of torches Graptomancy divination from handwriting Lecanomancy divination by looking at oil or jewels in water Gyromancy divination by spinning in a circle until dizzy Libanomancy divination by staring at the smoke of burning incense Lithomancy scrying with gemstones and natural crystals Logarithmancy divination by logarithms Order is syntax, συνταξις: the formations of soldiers, order Lychnomancy divination by flame of an oil lamp or candle of battle.
When there is conflict, the masses are sure to rise up. Chance is creative, a subtle propensity for change. Swerve, Hence there follows the hexagram of THE ARMY. the clinamen of Epicurus and Lucretius. An inclination. Grain The grammatical army: Chomsky’s context-free grammar. in wood. Desert varnish on sandstone. The affinity of things. The Turing machine as the neurolinguistic engine of war, The fact that life disturbs the order of the world more like Lamarck than Locke, etched into codons, . DNA means literally that at first, life is turbulence. What Or BNF: Backus-Naur Form. you see from the top of the cliff, in its sweetness, is the first-born being arising out of the waters, Aph-
Chomsky thinks that we’re born with it. Voluptas or voluntas? The critical letter is obscured in the 76 only extant copy of De Rerum Natura. Serres states it beautifully: Amphilochos slain.
Starting from Venus, the natural, projected to Prometheus chained to a lonely rock. society, gives materialism; starting from society, that, projected to The Athenians locked their state prophecies away in a science, gives hierarchy and determinism. temple, lest their enemies see them.
It’s the V of Venus, the angle, that creates turbulence in a laminar flow: chaos overwhelms causality. Macharomancy divination by knives or swords The Epicureans called augury superstition, but the Maculomancy divination from the shape and placement of blindness/vision of the clinamen is still being debated in birthmarks physics. How far does quantum entanglement go, and does Margaritomancy divination by heating and roasting pearls it mean anything at all? Meteoromancy divination by storms and comets Suam habet fortuna rationem. Metopomancy divination by examining the face and forehead Chance has its reasons. Molybdomancy divination by dropping molten lead into water —Petronius Myomancy divination by squeaks of mice Necromancy divination by ghosts or spirits of the dead She loves me, she loves me not. Nephelomancy divination by appearance of clouds Nigromancy divination by walking around the graves of the dead
Dice seem unnecessary, and slightly vulgar: reason is chancy enough. Closer to Planck’s h. The brain must be Lady Luck, the gambler’s god. If she exists at all, there must indeterminate, if the wave function is, so intellect is Ψ, an be gamblers who win. aleatory endeavor. The signs are favorable. Is it a sign, or had you best trust to reason? Fortuna liked dice, before she moved to roulette. Everything we do is chance. Only automatons can cre- In early tarots, such as the fifteenth century Visconti ate order. Unless, as Ouspensky pointed out, we are really deck, Fortuna is blindfolded, as is Cupid on card VI. Love machines. and fortune, partners in divine madness. From ancient times, Fortuna was associated with Anagkê, Necessity. The casinos are betting on Laplace. Chance may or may not be deterministic. Chaotic dynamics are deterministic but unpredictable. Computers gener- ate pseudo-random numbers indistinguishable from truly Fortuitous, fors, fort. random numbers. What truly random numbers? Perhaps Fortitude. Power. we need a Turing test: if a series of digits cannot be distin- But power is always chancy. The helping spirits may not guished from random digits, they are random digits. come, they may be busy—they may be playing their own Philosophy is so deadly. How can you read it? How can bone game, and they may not want to interrupt it just to help you listen to it? out some mortal shaman. Randomness becomes a tautology, circular: “true” The work is finding lost objects, or a lost shadow, dis- random digits come from radioactive decay, random by the cerning the cause of an illness, or a streak of bad luck. definition of 2. Ψ Without power you cannot do anything out of the But physics is divination, arithmomancy. There is no ordinary. With power you can do anything. This frictionless surface, and there is always a third body. power is the same thing as luck. The primitive con- ception of luck is not at all the same as ours. For Chance vs. order. us luck is fortuitousness. For them, it is the highest (Chance as chaos, anarchy loosed on the library.) expression of the energy back of life. Chance vs. teleology. —Jaime de Angulo (The atheistic Liberator: the Enlightenment.) Chance vs. determinism. And luck is connected with wildness. Mana. Coyote has (The problem of Free Will in a pinball machine.) mana, but screws up anyway, thus insuring that nothing goes according to plan. Coyote is kind of like chance.
“Surely, Professor Bohr,” asked a visitor to the Reading signs is not the path of happiness. We kill the mes- physicist’s country cottage, “you do not really senger. It was a capital offense to prophesy the death of the believe that that horseshoe over your door brings Emperor. good luck.” Teiresias was blinded, Phineus also; “No,” answered Bohr, “I certainly do not believe in superstition. But I have heard that horse- Not God. shoes bring good luck even to those who do not Not Chance. believe in them.” Not both God and Chance. Not neither God nor Chance. (C’mon, take that last step with me, darling.) Chance as the deus ex machina. The Final Metaphor. It (You’re mad!) explains everything, and nothing, thus called “mere.” The Goddess reduced to insignificance at the very moment of her supreme authority. Pareidolia: a vague and random stimulus being mistakenly Chance vs. meaning. (It’s just chance, darling.) perceived as recognizable, such as seeing animals or faces Chance vs. wholeness. (Bohr vs. Bohm.) in clouds, or a man in the moon. Chance vs. luck. (Rationality vs. Superstition.) Or constellations. Or a face in a face. Or a pipe.
This is a random sequence of letters and spaces.
And certainly, most certainly, most rationally, no hallucina- Chance perturbations. Normal distributions. tion. There is no such thing as the “zone,” or the “streak,” accord- ing to Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky. (“The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences.”) As the Epicureans scoffed at divination, even when it proved Looking at a year’s worth of statistics on the Philadel- true, the Stoics defended divination, even when it proved phia 76ers, everything fits into a normal distribution. (In false. The Stoics were determinists, and believed in Fate. baseball, Joe DiMaggio is still a problem.) Fortune was relegated to subjective moments of incomplete The “clustering illusion,” the human tendency to see understanding. patterns where none exist. Soldiers tend to embrace Fate, or Destiny: “if it’s not Related to pareidolia, the illusion of control, the gam- your time, you won’t be killed.” bler’s fallacy, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, and perhaps to Fate is static, beyond even the power of the gods. Divi- eighty other named and described cognitive biases, all irra- nation implies indeterminacy. If the future were fixed, what tional. If we add Freud to that does reason have a chance? is the point of the consultation? But maybe they’ve just proved that luck is modest, that Chance vs. Choice. she disguises herself with bell curves, that she loves static “If you don’t choose, you’ll go on ending up with and noise. The shuffling and the shaking, the randomizing, just whatever comes by,” (she challenged). was to eliminate human bias, that the Word of God be known. (Yep. Sigh. But maybe the World has more intel- Or maybe luck is power, as in “being in tune with.” ligence than I do.) Democritus’s “eidola,” or maybe Lao Tzu’s “tao.”
No victor believes in chance. We defy augury. —Nietzsche Alexander went to Delphi before beginning his conquests of the East. The Oracle was closed, there The “clustering illusion.” Seeing patterns where there are being only a few days each month when the Pytho- none, or, since Frank Ramsey has proved that complete ness did consultations. Alexander pressed his case disorder is an impossibility, giving meaning to patterns that several times, but the priestess was firm. Alexan- have none. As rational men of the Middle Ages sought to der grabbed her by the hair and began dragging debunk the superstition of fortune with the Truth that all her down the stairs to the Adytum. The Pythoness things are governed by God, rational men of today wish to agreed to perform a consultation and added, “Alex- debunk the irrational belief in luck with the Truth that all ander, you are invincible.” Alexander immediately things are governed by chance. We’re back to Empedocles. let go of her, thanked her for the consultation, and departed. And the scientists are as smug as the churchmen.
At least the churchmen knew they were dealing with During the first Punic War, Publius Clodius was leading an theology. expedition against Carthage. As was customary, before com- Gould and Dennett take such glee in attacking any form mencing the attack, they sought an alectryomantic oracle of belief that privileges man. It’s the glee that is really poor from the chickens they kept on the ship in cages for that pur- taste. Still, it’s not that they are wrong—as far as “man” in pose. In this case, the chickens would not eat the grain that the abstract goes. The error lies in that smug air of certainty, was offered—a bad omen. Clodius ordered them thrown into in a skepticism far too tame. the sea, saying “if they won’t eat, let them drink.” His expe- 78 dition met with disaster. He was convicted of treason and executed—not for failing militarily but for blasphemy. matters of business or health, but the cities consulted her In Tenochtitlan, the wealthy could pay to have an unfa- also on every important state decision. vorable birth date changed. All Attica will be taken, but Zeus grants Athena a wooden wall
Oculomancy divination by observing the eye Which alone will be untaken. Oinomancy divination by gazing into a glass of wine Croesus also consulted the Oracle, sending a caravan Ololygmancy divination by the howlings of dogs or wolves of gold overland from Sardis. Philosophers transcribed the Omphalomancy divination by counting knots on the umbilical cord Pythoness’s utterances, the thespiod put them into verse. Oneiromancy divination by the interpretation of dreams Onimancy divination using olive oil to let objects slip through the fingers Pegomancy divination by bubbles in springs or fountains Onomatomancy divination by the letters in names Pessomancy divination by pebbles Onychomancy divination by polished fingernails Philematomancy divination by kissing Oomancy divination from drops of fresh egg whites in water Phyllomancy divination by the patterns and colors of leaves Ophiomancy divination by the coiling and movement of serpents Phyllorhodomancy divination by clapping rose petals between the Ornithomancy divination by the flight or songs of birds hands Osteomancy divination from bones Physiognomy divination by shape, marks, and proportions of the body Plastromancy divination by tortoise shells Podomancy divination by the soles of the feet Chinese teh, or tê, “virtue,” also means “power,” in the Psephomancy divination by rolling small stones, or selecting them sense of accumulated luck. Thunder and wind: the image of at random DURATION. Pseudomancy fraudulent fortune-telling If for example I consult the tortoise and get a Psychomancy divination from the state of the soul, alive or dead favourable response, that is my tê. It is my potential Pyromancy divination by fire or flames good luck. But it remains like an uncashed cheque Retromancy divination by looking over one’s shoulder unless I take the right steps to convert it into a fu, Rhabdomancy divination by branches or rods, dowsing a material blessing. Like an uncashed cheque, a tê Rhapsodomancy divination by a book of poetry is a dangerous thing to leave about. It may fall into other hands, be put into someone else’s account. —Arthur Waley, “The Book of Changes” Without augury there is the general, a ghost story of abstractions: logical order instead of inspired madness. Written or scratched onto a tortoise shell, or nailed to a tree. General Cadmus impaled the serpent on a tree and killed it. When an interpretation is accepted, it becomes a power The teeth grew into soldiers. The Vatican armed. loose in the world. But likewise an omen may be deflected, As a general rule among the ancients power was in may be reinterpreted. Quick wit and a ready response. the hands of augurs. Alexander in Persia before the sweating statue of Orpheus. —Cicero: De Div. I, 40 The power of Thoth. Or thought. The original identity of power and wisdom sapientia, sapience, savor According to Aeschylus, men learned the arts of divination sapience and divination they considered royal from the one who stole fire from the gods, Prometheus. but if the salt has lost its savour Earth and fire. Apollo. Sun and earth. Sun and moon. pellitur e medio sapientia, vi geritur res Lunacy. —Ennius Augury is the realm between. in the place of sapience, violence. —Norman O. Brown, “Inauguration” Apollo stole the secrets of prophecy from Pan. At Delphi, Apollo and Heracles fought for the tripod. The tripod Cicero concluded that divination and augury were supersti- belonged to Gê, who gave her oracles in darkness, from tions that perturb the tranquility of mind. But as an augur dreams, onieromancy, or from lots, cleromancy. himself, and a good aristocrat, he allowed that augury was a good way to control what Hamilton called the “excesses of Serpents were much in evidence at the oracle of democracy.” Delphi. —M. P. Hall A clenched fist raised to the sky.
Most of the questions asked at Delphi were personal, Augury degenerates into priestcraft, priestcraft into force. Auspice ➞ Authority. Agrippa filled in the cavern of the Oracle at Baia. Unlimited Reason (except it’s not) vs. letting the god, or the environment, or the moment, have a say in what hap- pens. Luck is the context, the environment: set and setting. (Except it’s not. Except it’s not.) Events follow definite trends, each according to its nature. Things are distinguished from one another in definite classes. In this way good fortune and Scapulimancy divination from cracks in a charred shoulder blade misfortune come about. In the heavens phenomena Scatomancy divination by studying feces take form; on earth shapes take form. In this way Sciomancy divination from shadows or the shades of the dead change and transformation become manifest. Scyphomancy divination by cups or vases —I Ching Selenomancy divination from the phases or appearance of the moon Sideromancy divination by the burning of straws Spasmatomancy divination by twitchings of a body Tasseography divination by tea leaves Spatilomancy divination by animal droppings Tephramancy divination by the ashes on an altar Sphondylomancy divination from beetles or other insects Theomancy divination from the responses of oracles Spodomancy divination by ashes Theriomancy divination by watching wild animals Stichomancy divination from random passages in books Tiromancy divination by milk curds, or the holes on cheese Stigonomancy divination by writing on tree bark Topomancy divination by the contours of the land Stolisomancy divination by the act of dressing Trochomancy divination by wheel tracks Suggraphamancy divination by studying history Thumomancy divination by intense introspection of one’s own soul Sternomancy divination by the breast-bones Transatuaumancy divination from chance remarks overheard in a crowd Sycomancy divination by drying fig leaves Urimancy divination by casting the Urim and Thummin Urinomancy divination using urine for scrying Xenomancy divination by studying the first stranger to appear Divination is chance and chance is playfulness, lila, enthu- Xylomancy divination by wood or fallen branches. siasm, feeling God within, entheogen. Clear portents from a Zygomancy divination with weights dropped word, from timing. Myriad faces in every tree and Zoomancy divination by the behavior of animals bush.
Seeing faces in clouds, trees, and such probably David Abram connects the loss of animism with the adop- has to do with overstimulation of a particular area of the visual cortex. Seeing faces is an especially tion of the Phoenecian/Hebrew alphabet by the Greeks. important skill of vertebrates. If the cortex is dam- The letters were no longer associated with animals and aged, a condition known as prosopagnosia can objects. When vowels were given signs, writing was sepa- occur, in which the person can no longer recognize rated from its former reliance on oral transmission, and faces as being faces. The reverse condition might soul (psyche) became associated with the literate intellect. be called hyperprosopgnosia. The idea of a pure and detachable soul, transmitted from the Pythagoreans through Orphism and, ultimately, to the Excess of meaning, the “too-muchness.” A sentence with Puritans, was rejected by Blake. five levels of meaning, and everybody talking at once. A The Goddess Fortune is the devil’s servant, ready to kiss polymorphous bead game in overdrive: all the meanings anyone’s arse. anticipated before the sentence is finished, questions and answers, call and response, uttered simultaneously. A diapa- It was Cadmos brought the alphabet to the Hellenes. son of lucid babble: Pentecost. Legends are concocted not without reason. The early Christians practiced glossolalia. A few still do. —Theophrastus Though the Apostles had cast lots, the Church forbade all divination in the third century because of its association with Reification is idolatry. paganism.
They drew lots, and the lot fell on Matthias. Abstracted words are idols. Where the letter stands the spirit Fortuna was the last survivor. She must have been a bird has departed. The spirit is the wind: that which surrounds, goddess. She was Etruscan, or earlier, and wore a belt of which nurtures and sustains. The word alone is defleshed, skulls. The Christians renamed her Providence. Insurance a disembodied intellect. Meaning is not in words. Meaning companies cover accidents, but not “acts of God.” lies between the lines, between the sheets, embedded in Emperors closed oracles the way dictators shut down sentence. Or sentience. newspapers. Without a body, the alphabet hovers like a hungry ghost 80 Apollonius was declared the Antichrist. above a stagnant well, wailing in an eternal twilight. Ego is like the centralized state. In the committees, not Mediamancy divination by scanning police radio or random one member is sober. TV shows Mammalian language. Rooted words. Plants with hair. Ouleimancy divination by the appearance of scars. Without sap no sapience. Selenosciamancy divination by the shadows of moonlight through trees As the universe becomes alive, the ruler dissolves and Tympanimancy divination from the rhythms of drums vines grow over the throne. Each member speaks, or sings, a choir, the diapason building. To understand the language of birds, one needs not ears, not Arise, ye more than dead! cochlea and tympanum, but a cellular hearing, where the Undulations move across a field of grasses, rustling, whis- organs of perception have expanded to include skin, hair fol- pering secrets. Somewhere Spinoza is scratching at the licles, heart beat, and whatever it is that is all of it together. window, and the neighborhood enters freely. The prophetic gift is like a writing tablet without writing, both irrational and indeterminate in itself, but capable of images, impressions, and presenti- The Hebrews distinguished between true and false prophets: ments, and it paradoxically grasps the future when the false prophets not remembering anything when they the future seems as remote as possible from the emerged from the trance, while the true prophets remained present. This remoteness is brought about by a conscious. Robert Graves likens the latter to the poetic condition, a disposition, of the body that is affected trance: the words are gifts, from the Other, but the poet by a change known as “inspiration.” maintains full consciousness. The divination is immediate —Plutarch, On the Cessation of Oracles and intuitive, like the Tibetan tra, or the second sight of the Scottish highlanders. There is only poetry. But there is another level of the poetry oracle—the inter- nal logic and structure of the poem—its rhythm, assonance, and rhyme—that can demand a word or phrase otherwise quite out of place, semantically. The poem itself discovers, or uncovers, new information, that the poet herself does not know. A poem in resonance is like a formula in physics, an equation of power.
The great god Pan is dead.
And it can’t be blamed on the Christians. There were charg- es of corruption and political conniving at Delphi. Perhaps the nephitic vapours had ceased wafting through the cavern, and the Adyton was less sweet. Times were changing. It was harder to believe in gods that walked around and drank wine—easier to believe in things like ideas, and numbers. “It’s only . . .” “It’s just . . .” “But that’s irrational.” “But that’s cognitive pathology.” “But that’s fuzzy thinking.” “It’s nothing but . . .” God, Chance . . . presage for a year of drouth.
Tell the emperor that my finely wrought house has fallen to the ground. No longer has Phoebus his shelter; nor his prophetic laurel, nor his babbling spring: the speaking waters have dried up. —Last utterance of the Delphic Oracle
Ailuromancy divination by the actions of a familiar cat Arachnomancy divination using spiders Epombriamancy divination from the sound of rain. Glauximancy divination using owl castings Haemocapnomancy divination by the smoke of burning blood-soaked paper tissues BET THE HOUSE Javid Soriano
“We have known Indians to lose everything—horse, dogs, cooking utensils, lodge, wife, even his wearing apparel...” This description, from a 1850s report by fur trader-turned- amateur ethnologist Edwin T. Denig to governor Isaac I. Stevens of the Washington territory, refers to a game called Cossoo, played by the Assinoboine tribe of Montana. The contest, which Denig calls the “principal game played by men,” involved two opponents (usually soldiers) wagering increasing amounts of their possessions, beginning with minor personal objects and culminating with their homes and wives. The opponents alternately shake a bowl con- taining six types of “dice”—ranging from small stones and buttons to bits of china and crow’s claws—of various values until one has reached 100 points. The winner then takes all the wagered objects and the loser must bet an object or objects equal in value to the total of the opponent’s previ- ous winnings. Obligated to match the other’s amassment of goods again and again—with the exception being when one player’s gun is next to be bet, at which point he is allowed to withdraw without losing his honor—the players, notes Denig, square off “for up to two or three days... without any intermission, except to eat, until one of the parties is com- pletely ruined.”
opposite: Native American game drawing by Edwin T. Denig, in the papers of Frank Hamilton Cushing. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum Archives. Culin Archival Collection. Games [7.1.001]: North American Indian games corresp. A-G, 1896- 1906.
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WHAT’S LUCK GOT TO DO WITH IT? Sasha Archibald & Courtney Stephens
There are essentially two ways of beating a game of chance. The first involves fixing the course of play to alter the natural outcome of the game—weighted dice, consortiums between dealers and players, cards up the sleeve, and so on. The second refuses the premise of chance altogether, using laws of probability, statistics, and physics to accurately predict the game’s outcome, the most common example being card-counting. Practitioners of the latter are called “system players,” and the former, “sharpers,” “hand-muckers,” “subway dealers,” and a host of other colorful sobriquets, “cheater” among them. Both methods require ingenuity, invention, and nerve, but there is an ethical distinction to be made; it is for good reason that marked decks are illegal and card-counting is not. Yet, given the billions of dollars spent on casino surveillance and the overwhelming house advantage—casinos make as high as thirty percent profit on slot machines and keno—perhaps anyone who wins against the casino commands a modicum of regard, no matter their method. The industry’s bread and butter are players who think they can win but won’t; a few of the exceptions are assembled below.
Printer-Marked Decks Marked decks have been around since the inception of face playing cards in the fourteenth century. Though a marked deck was once the advantage of its owner, the method recently entered the age of mechanical reproduction in 1999 when South Africa’s sole card supplier, Protea Playing Cards, delivered 4,000 marked decks to Johannesburg’s Caesars Casino. Information about the delivery was apparently sold to known gamblers by company insiders and within days the house’s blackjack take dropped three percentage points. Noticing patterns in where winning players sat (to best view the dealer’s deck), their fluctuating bets, and continuous eye darting, police eventually seized both the decks and the altered printing plates from the printers, though the ring- leaders were never identified and the players could not be prosecuted.
Eudemonic Pie Spurred by Einstein’s dismissive “No one can possibly win at roulette unless he steals money from the table,” a group of UC Berkeley and Reed College physics students in the late 1970s dubbed themselves the Eudemons and began constructing a computer that would accurately predict the final resting place of a roulette ball. Designed to fit in an Oxford shoe and hold the weight of a person—no small feat in the late 1970s—the computer was only slightly more sophisticated than the Eudemons’ feedback device: a series of solenoid buzzers (also located in players’ shoes) that pulsed winning numbers in code. One player used his left toe to enter data on the wheel (to set the parameters of the equation) and his right toe to click each rotation of the ball. A second player standing nearby received the computer’s prediction via solenoid buzzes against the arch classic, Beat the Dealer, which was itself based on an article of his left foot and bet accordingly. The elaborate scheme published by four army engineers in Journal of the American was unfortunately plagued by electrical short-circuits, Statistical Association in 1956. Thorp’s system—still revered computer malfunctions, and a variance in roulette wheels’ by blackjack players—involves keeping a running tally of degree of “tilt” that skewed the basic algorithm. The play- every card played; the count at any given moment suggests ers’ nervous sweating also caused problems. After years of whether there are more high or low cards remaining to be difficulty and innumerable delays, the betters made their dealt. The method yields a solid two percent advantage, last fully equipped trip to Nevada in 1980 and gave up after but is fairly easy to detect and requires a large monetary a few hours. The only group that ultimately planned to use investment for a relatively small yield. The MIT ring made a their earnings for the social good—all proceeds were to number of improvements to the system, the most significant have been pooled into the Eudemonic Pie, a fund slated for being the division of labor between Spotters (who counted protecting forested land in Oregon, building dirigibles, and and bet small), Gorillas (who played dumb but bet big, based setting up a commune—failed to turn a profit. on the spotter’s signal) and Big Players (who counted care- fully and bet big, becoming familiar to casino houses as
American Roulette high-rollers with money to burn). Team members studied American Roulette: How I Turned the Odds Upside Down— and adopted personas for each role that exploited the casi- My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping off the World’s no’s expectations: blond women with overdone makeup did Casinos is the self-explanatory title of Richard Marcus’s well as Spotters, while Big Players were most convincing as account of his career as a professional casino cheater. expensively-dressed young Asian men. Flying from Boston Finding himself homeless in Las Vegas after a gambling to Vegas every two weeks for two years, the team made bout, Marcus applied for a position as blackjack dealer, and over three million dollars. They were eventually betrayed by was eventually recruited by a well-organized scam team. another MIT student who for $25,000 sold information on Their method used sleight of hand, psychological manipula- the team, including photos and personal info, to a private tion, and sheer audacity to essentially convince pit bosses security firm. Following their expulsion from Vegas, three of that the bets revealed at the close of a hand were other than the former team members founded the Blackjack Institute, what was apparent at the start of play. In their most success- a highly successful consulting business for card counters. ful scam, Marcus and his comrades would hide high-value Their website, www.blackjackinstitute.com—formerly mit- chips under low bets and claim their full value only if their blackjack.com, until a successful lawsuit by MIT—offers live hand won. If they lost, they would retract the high-value seminars, home training courses on DVD, and a weekend of chip so furtively that on the infrequent occasions they were private instruction for $3,000. exposed it was almost always by fellow players rather than casino personnel. Slot Machines In 2003, the Las Vegas Nevada Gaming Commission added
Laser Roulette “career slot cheat” Tommy Glen Carmichael to its Black In March of 2004, three Serbian roulette players visiting Book of excluded players. Carmichael began cheating slot London equipped their mobile phone with a velocity-sen- machines in 1980 with a “top bottom joint,” a crude metal sitive laser scanner linked wirelessly to a nearby laptop. device that was inserted up through the machine’s coin The scanner read the location of the roulette ball as it was release slot to generate a massive payout. A five-year stint released and then marked the moment it passed two des- in jail (a useful opportunity to collude with other slot cheat- ignated points on the wheel. The data then streamed to a ers) increased the sophistication of his methods, as did laptop in an upstairs hotel room, which by calculating the the advent of electronic slot machines in the mid-1980s. velocity of the spin (tempered by its decaying orbit) indi- In 1992, Carmichael perfected a gadget—a mini-light bulb cated the ball’s probable final resting place. Before the third rigged to a camera battery that when shined into the elec- rotation of the wheel, after which bets cannot be altered, tronic slot machine would “blind” its sensor and trigger the prediction was relayed back to the gambler via her cell a payout—with which he claims to have made $10,000 a phone display, for a total turnaround time of just over two day from the slots, and even more in sales to other cheats. seconds. The threesome made 1.3 million pounds in two Eventually caught in the act by a surveillance camera, nights at London’s Ritz before police arrested them in their Carmichael was banned from ever again entering a casino, hotel. They’d apparently broken no existing law and were and is currently promoting what he claims is the first ever allowed to keep their loot. slot machine anti-theft device, dubbed the Protector.
MIT Blackjack An extracurricular student club at MIT in the mid-1990s became one of the most celebrated card-counting rings, made famous by Ben Mezrich’s bestseller, Bringing Down
the House. Students initially learned the method opposite: Two bands of elastic inside this vest allowed the wearer to discreetly 85 from UCLA professor Edward Thorp’s 1962 gambling tuck away additional cards and a miniature pencil to mark them, ca. 1890s. some letters from bookmakers james peel
Notes on Structure René Morales & Erik Henriksen
[T]hat music of the spheres which underlies each man- made system and every law of nature it is within our power to discern. —Max Bill, The Mathematical Approach to Contemporary Art (1949)
Imagine yourself a fish at the center of a massive, seafaring school. You are driven by an instinctual urge to swim for- ward. Surrounded on all sides, you must at all times preserve a roughly sphere-shaped shell of open water around your body. This sphere is all that separates you from an avalanche of fish. It also comprises the outer limits of your perceptual field and, given that you are incapable of abstract thought, delineates the extent of your conscious being. In “Fish Schools as Operational Structures,” noted ichthyologist Charles M. Breder, Jr. makes a confident assertion: “It is, of course, doubtful if creatures with well organized [sic] locomotor abilities and complex sensory systems are ever distributed in a fully random manner. The systems encountered in nature seem to be mostly those of ordered arrays variously distorted by processes of many kinds, sometimes obvious, but more often obscure or barely
discernible.”1 On the strength of this assumption, Breder looks into the chaotic blur of the school and tries to see in it a latent structure. Bearing in mind those phenomenological fish spheres, he argues compellingly that schoolers arrange themselves not willy-nilly, but according to a specific geo- metric pattern. At the outset, Breder employs the discipline of crys- tallography in his search for order, examining and quickly dismissing the face-centered cubic (FCC) lattice pattern. Arranged by this model, schools would display unnatural regimentation, like the files and ranks one sees upon passing an orchard, a marching band, or a Sol LeWitt sculpture. And yet, a close cousin of the FCC lattice provides a more accu- rate analog. Known as rhombic or hexagonal close-packing (HCP), this configuration can be envisioned, Breder notes, by “figuratively pushing the cubic lattice askew.” Place a fish sphere at each vertex of the lattice, taking care to point them all in the same direction, and we arrive at Breder’s theoreti- cal school. Indeed, fish are often seen adopting something that looks like a crystalline structure, and suggestions of the rhombic lattice can be hard to miss.
89 above: Predator evasion response (ball-packing) in a school of fish.
This hypothetical organization also happens to be that its fellows in water, reducing the ocean’s resistance to their in which identical spherical objects can be made to pack inexorable onward push. Schooling fish close-pack, Breder together most densely within a given volume. For Breder, argues, in order to immerse themselves in as much of their this naturally called to mind a line of mathematical inquiry friends’ slime as possible. known as “sphere-packing” or “the greengrocer’s problem.” Alas, due in part to the tedium of collecting sufficient Though ancient as the need to maximize the amount of grain quantities of fish snot for quantitative testing, “the mucus stored in a single barrel, many of this field’s most funda- effect” remains largely unsubstantiated. More critically, mental questions were put to rest only with the advent of recent research has shed doubt on Breder’s overall theory computers. The long-held intuition that spheres pack more of “sphish-packing,” as computerized ocean-scanning tech- closely in a rhombic lattice than when arranged helter-skel- nology has thus far failed to find definite lattice patterns ter has now been proven with near mathematical certainty. in seafaring schools. With the verdict still out on rhombic Breder would surely have found recent work by a group pelagic packing, new approaches in evolutionary biology of mathematicians led by Aleksandar Donev compelling. have of late prompted ichthyologists to focus less on the
In “Improving the Density of Jammed Disordered Packings question of how fish school and more on why.3 Alongside Using Ellipsoids,” the researchers demonstrate that the better foraging potential, more accurate migratory route oblate spheroid—the shape of an M&M—attains a higher navigation, and ready availability of wanton sex partners, degree of packing density than the sphere.2 While fish the benefits of schooling behavior include what is referred bodies come in a great variety of shapes, fish that school to in ichthyological parlance as a “repertoire of cooperative often resemble sideways-flying versions of M&Ms, turned escape tactics.” Evincing fractal-like relationships between on their edges and variously elongated lengthwise. The the individual spheroidal fish unit and the quasi-spherical researchers note in passing that unusually high densities are form of the school as a whole, these maneuvers are often also obtained by the football-like prolate ellipsoid and the stunning to behold. capsule-shaped spherocylinder, two other very fishy forms. A predator approaches your school. First, the group But why would fish want to spheroid-pack so closely nonchalantly allows him to penetrate. Once inside, he is liter- as to approach Platonic mathematical ordering? Breder ally stupefied by a blaze of bright, shiny objects. By the time believes that the answer lies partly in schooling’s elusive he has recovered his overloaded senses, you have all slipped hydrodynamic benefits: “The advantages of the regimented past him. But he persists, striking again, and suddenly your life in a school, as against the freedom of action common personal sphere buckles on one side. Like a startled driver to the more or less solitary life, are evidently related to the on the interstate, you veer away from the impending colli- effectiveness of the drag-reducing mucus in the vortices. sion, spilling into the spheres of your immediate neighbors. The fishes with the least effective mucus appear to take You are in the throes of the Trafalgar Effect, a wave of body- advantage of the schooling life while those with the most language cues that cascades outward from the predator’s effective mucus are more likely to be solitary.” In other location to the far edges of the school, alerting all to the pres- words, the fluids released by each schooler’s body lubricate ence of danger almost instantaneously. Along with every last fish in the group, you now shift opposite top: The rhombic lattice can be envisioned by “figuratively pushing gears, making a desperate push toward the center to shield the cubic lattice askew.” yourself with the bodies of your peers while they occupy the opposite below: Charles M. Breder examining a flying fish. Washington Post, dangerous margins. Via this response, known as the “selfish 14 January 1935. herd mechanism,” the whole school collapses into a dense above left: A school of striped salemas evades a sea lion via the “burst effect,” ball, and for a moment the predator is cowed by the sudden Galapagos, Ecuador, 1997. Photo David Doubilet. transformation of his bite-size snacks into what appears 91 above right: Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Cubes), 1965. to be a monstrous, single fish. Should he strike again regardless, you have at your disposal the tactic of “flash ting and extrapolates from it a supposed latent geometry, expansion” (or the “burst effect”): With lightning speed and Morris works in the reverse direction, starting with a set of impeccable coordination, the school explodes into a mil- geometric forms and half burying them in the world (not lion silver pieces, leaving the predator empty-mouthed and literally, of course, but vis-à-vis the spectator’s perceptual flabbergasted. You are safe now, but hardly have you had experience). In a typical gallery or museum, Mirrored Cubes a chance to relish the victory when you realize that you are argues with the floors and surrounding white walls, invok- utterly alone. Obligate schoolers like yourself (a.k.a. “obliga- ing institutional critique. In a grassy field, it pits the chaotic torily gregarious” fish) tend to panic when separated from natural world against the orderliness of pure geometry. the collective. Hence after swimming a short distance, the Outdoors, the cubes are unsettling not only because we are school rushes to reassemble, recovering its order, though evolutionarily predisposed to feel a jolt of dissonance in the the relative positions of each fish are entirely reshuffled. presence of unresolvable ambiguities between figure and Not unlike fish overcome by existential dread at the ground (between Seen and Unseen, Known and Unknown), prospect of facing the open ocean alone, humans, too, but also because, as Breder tells us, “ordered arrays” are desperately crave the orderliness and predictability that rarely observed in nature; they are supposed to be “barely schooling behavior represents. To quote ichthyologists Pierre discernible.” Fréon and Ole Arve Misund, “the idea that schooling individ- In his essay “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” Morris writes: uals pack in a certain complicated structure is appealing.”4 “In the simpler regular polyhedrons, such as cubes and pyra- There is something intrinsically likable about the notion that mids, one need not move around the object for the sense of the world is animated by secret, organizing forces. Indeed, the whole, the gestalt, to occur. One sees and immediately we are neurobiologically equipped to perceive them. Take ‘believes’ that the pattern within one’s mind corresponds to gestalt sensations, those cognitive operations by which the the existential fact of the object. Belief in this sense is ... mind fills in missing information about the shape or organi- a kind of faith in spatial extension.” On a cue from phenom- zation of a given object or objects (say, a group of fish) so enologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Morris uses as to generate an impression of continuity or wholeness. As gestalt sensations to imply that our unconscious confidence difficult as it is to describe this utterly pre-verbal phenom- in the know-ability, wholeness, and order of the world is enon with words, it can be easily conveyed with the help unjustified, since it is premised to some extent on perceptual of the classic diagrams of gestalt theory, such as the one in leaps of faith, and thus on leaps of logic. The ultimate aim which we see not the reality of three Pacmen but a fictive is to instill in us, if only for an instant, the deepest possible triangle that partially obscures three fictive circles. A better kind of doubt: Should we really take for granted the truth of representation of the way gestalt processes operate in the those views on the world that our brains glean from our reti- disorderly real world would be a frenzied school of Pacmen, nas? With respect to the question of whether the universe somewhere within which lies a latent phantom triangle comprises a celestial clockwork or just a heaping pile of awaiting a spectator to perceive it into existence. chaos, Morris’s cynicism stands as a word of caution about the natural bias, the wishful thinking, that is secretly hard- wired in our minds. The universe would be truly depressing were it not for an occasional echo of the “music of the spheres,” and it’s no wonder that so many like Breder have attempted to discern it. A notable confrère is R. Buckminster Fuller, who shares with Breder not only nearly the same lifespan (Breder was born in 1897, just two years after Fuller; each died in 1983), but a fascination with sphere-packing and HCP lat- tices. While Breder applied his interest to fish schools, Fuller employed the phenomena to establish “Synergetics,” a baroque theory of the universal structures that ostensibly
Around the time that Dr. Breder was trying to “see govern the cosmos.6 Fuller was of course the messiah of the through the noise” of the fish school to its underlying sphere, which when close-packed provides the blueprint for slanted cubes, the art world was just getting over a serious his geodesic dome. Enervated by “geodesic tensegrity,” this cognitive hangover caused by more than a decade’s worth structure is ultra-stable, purely as a function of its innately of viewing polyhedrons designed to elicit similar visualiza- tense architectonics. Extremely large and sturdy domes tions.5 Like Breder, many Minimalist artists spent much of can be built out of materials as light as paper tubes and the 1960s comparing objects (or groups of objects) situ- Dacron thread and held together without knots, nails, bolts, ated out in the world against their gestalt understanding or struts. The consummate humanitarian visionary, Fuller of geometric structure. An elucidating comparison can be predicted that the principles underlying his geodesic con- drawn between “Fish Schools as Operational Structures” structions would save “Earthians” from inevitable extinction and Untitled (Mirrored Cubes), 1965, by Robert by environmental damage, overcrowding, and weapons of 92 Morris. Whereas Breder begins with a natural set- mass “killingry.” Fuller’s grand schemes might seem a bit out there. But At last, your school reaches deep water. You find your- just two years after his death, an experiment carried out by self suspended amid a cold, black void, without reference to a group of chemists seems to validate some of his weirdest either surface or sea floor. Liberated from all contingency in theories.7 In the process of vaporizing graphite with lasers the world, the school restores its primary shape, blossoming in an effort to replicate conditions inside red giant stars, from amoeboid into discoid into spheroid into sphere.11 The Drs. Smalley, Curl, and Kroto accidentally produced copi- area of open space around you expands, and you instinctu- ous amounts of a “remarkably stable cluster consisting of ally increase your speed. You are a unit in harmony with 60 carbon atoms.” Basing their analysis directly on Fuller’s untold numbers of identical units, keyed into the ecstasy of ideas, they concluded that this species of carbon molecule synchronized flow. Now, once again, there is only the drive could only have the form of a truncated icosahedron— to swim onward.
Fuller’s geodesic sphere. The researchers dubbed the C60 structure “buckminsterfullerene” and in 1996 won the Nobel 1 Fisheries Bulletin 74 (1976), pp. 472. Prize in chemistry for its discovery.8 2 Science 303, Issue 5660 (2005), pp. 990-993. So far, buckminsterfullerene has shown its great- 3 See Julia Parrish, “The Present, Past and Future in Research on Fish Schooling Behavior,” est promise in breeding further esoteric physics research conference lecture delivered at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology (Oahu, Hawaii, Oct. (probing the quantum-mechanical wave-particle duality of 7-9, 2002). matter, for example). But many important utilitarian applica- 4 Dynamics of Pelagic Fish Distribution and Behaviour: Effects on Fisheries and Stock tions have been predicted for its future—from making vastly Assessment (Oxford: Fishing News/Blackwell Science, 1999), p. 73. more powerful batteries to high-capacity spaceship fuel. 5 This is when Minimalist sculpture began to be supplanted by minimal furniture, as if At very low temperatures, it is a superconductor, conduct- spectators had tired of arguing about the movement and now wished to nap on its icons. ing electricity with zero resistance. Buckminsterfullerene 6 See R. Buckminster Fuller, Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of also has potential medicinal uses. Apparently, its distinctive Humanity (New York: Macmillan, 1992). soccer-ball form fits perfectly into the receptors of certain 7 See “C60: Buckminsterfullerene,” H.W. Kroto, J.R. Heath, S.C. O’Brien, R.F. Curl, and R.E. Smalley, Nature 318, 162 (1985). protease enzymes, blocking their activation sites, so C60 can 8 In the last line of their original paper, they write, “We were disturbed at the number of theoretically inhibit the production of the proteins the HIV letters and syllables in the rather fanciful but highly appropriate name we have chosen in virus needs to replicate itself.9 Thus a nano-structure that fits the title to refer to this C60 species. For such a unique and centrally important molecular snugly in the human body was discovered in the attempt to structure, a more concise name would be useful. A number of alternatives come to mind imitate processes that occur in the bellies of red giant stars, (for example, ballene, spherene, soccerene, carbosoccer), but we prefer to let this issue of at an enormous scale and mind-bogglingly far away—some- nomenclature be settled by consensus.” Thus far, the name has stuck. where out there in the cosmos. 9 Vikram Vaz, “Buckminsterfullerene,” Harvard Science Review, Spring (2000), pp. Without diminishing the considerable effort it took 61-63. to stumble upon this connection, it was not anything Dr. 10 “Narrow Line Cooling: Finite Photon Recoil Dynamics” (2004), by T. H. Loftus et al., Smalley and his colleagues could have predicted when they was published as “Scientists Report First Observation of ‘Atomic Air Force,’” on the web- turned on their lasers. As is often the case with explora- site for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It also appeared in the e-maga- tions at the atomic level, luck played a crucial role. Another zine The Agonist and in Meta-religion.com, an online theosophical journal promoting a serendipitous breakthrough along these lines brings us full “multidisciplinary view of the religious, spiritual, and esoteric phenomena.” circle, back to Breder’s lattice: Last year, a group of physi- 11 Fréon and Misund report that “Midwater schools are spherical while schools close to cists supercooled a cloud of strontium atoms, subjecting the surface and bottom are discoidal. This may indicate that the spherical shape is primary.” them to unfathomably cold temperatures (roughly minus We are wont to note some related observations. H.P. Blavatsky, founder of theosophy, 450 degrees Fahrenheit, only millionths of a degree above writes: “[T]he primordial form of everything manifested, from atom to globe, from man absolute zero).10 They did so by irradiating the cloud with to angel, is spheroidal.” Russian constructivist El Lissitsky: ”[T]he universe ... knows only laser light, submerging the atoms in an “optical molasses” curves, not straight lines. Thus the sphere ... is the crystal of the universe.” Lastly, C. W. that greatly reduced their random kinetic energy. Utilizing Leadbeater, in regard to atomic particles: “Units everywhere tend to arrange themselves three lasers focused on a single point, the researchers inci- with relation to certain simple geometric solids, among which are the tetrahedron, the dentally created an intersection of three planes. When the cube, and the sphere.” One of Fuller’s key points is that primary forms are interrelated. atoms aligned with the laser beams, like Breder’s phantom Consider an interesting aspect of sphere-packing: As we have seen, spheres approxi- mate a cube when arranged in a lattice. As layers are added to the lattice, the number of fish formation they unexpectedly took on the form of a cubic straight planes increases, as does the apparent roundness of the whole. Eventually, the lattice. What better than this perfect, die-shaped accident—a polyhedron resembles once again the sphere. Theoretically, this transformation from supercool blend of latent cosmic forces, human intervention, sphere to cube and back again can be extended infinitely. and chance—to sum up the dream of an ordered universe?
right: Emergence of cubic structure in ultra-low temperature strontium atoms under red laser irradiation. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s 2004 press release reports, “While the Air Force and geese prefer a classic ‘V,’ the strontium atoms—choreographed in this experiment with precision laser pulses and ultracold temperatures—were recorded flying in 93 the shape of a cube.” military therapeutics could cure “Christian Pathology.” At spartan UMT camps, which sprung up across the nation, citizen-soldiers were required to pack and carry all their gear in heavy rucksacks. The well-stocked bag was also integral to the BSA, which capitalized on the allure of the Wild West and championed a blend of patriotism, woodcraft, and romantic frontier know-how to build character in boys and girls. The Boy Scouts (with their enduring motto “Be Pre- pared”) looked to the literature of Ernest Thompson Seton and Daniel Carter, reformers whose classics The Birchbark Roll and American Boy’s Handy Book included lists of items Be Ready! essential for living in the bush. Learning how to pack one’s nicolas herman bedroll, cook kit, and first-aid supplies was always the first step in successful scouting. The Scouts also introduced into Within days of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a strident call their repertoire carved sticks and totems, staples of Native for readiness sounded across the U.S. The rhetoric of pre- American medicine bundles—another, albeit unorthodox, kit. paredness, embellished by politician and preacher alike, The UMT and BSA were followed by other preparedness maintained that not only were Americans not ready for movements—from ROTC to Cold War Civil Defense—all of future attacks, they had forgotten how to be ready. which promoted a version of the Go Bag. Fear of nuclear In response, a broad spectrum of public and private fallout precipitated 1950s readiness efforts, including the agencies began to advocate for preparedness. Chief among first municipal programs to encourage preparing for a these was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), hypothetical emergency via building shelters and stockpil- which launched a public service campaign insisting that ing gear. Today, militia and survivalist groups argue for “Every American has a role in strengthening the nation’s more radical preparedness measures that include civilian preparedness,” directing citizens to its instructional website, acquisition of military supplies to shield against biological www.ready.gov, and urging them to call 1-800-BE-READY. or nuclear attack. Today the DHS has honed its message down to three core The Go Bag promoted by the DHS clearly resembles directives: Make a Plan, Be Informed, and Make a Kit. these predecessors not only in content but in context. The most tangible (and marketable) of these direc- Historically and today, in times of civic unrest, social conser- tives is the third. Popularly known as a “Go Bag,” the kit is vatives have promoted preparedness to combat liberalizing designed to be a source of ready succor in the event of an trends in American society. Their call often betrays a strong emergency. Most of the recommended contents are basic religious tone. For instance, some conservative Christian first-aid and household supplies, commonplace items whose groups see America’s liberal social mores as a cause of uses do not begin to match the fervent rhetoric of pre- terrorism, arguing that the attacks of 9/11 represented pun- paredness. What, then, is the function of the Go Bag? Are ishment for moral turpitude. The Go Bag, as a traditional Americans (and the DHS) really concerned with adequate vehicle for reform, assumes that the architecture of a safe preparation for disaster, or is some deeper impulse at work? democracy is built on a prepared society of disciplined and The rhetoric of preparedness and an emphasis on what patriotic families—an argument that mirrors the agenda of might be called “accoutrements of readiness” are not new. conservative movements throughout the twentieth century. They took hold of the American imagination at the beginning As Tom Ridge, first Secretary of the U.S. Department of the twentieth century, a time of dramatic demographic of Homeland Security, tells us: “Terrorism forces us to make change when both immigrant and rural populations moved a choice. We can be afraid. Or we can be ready.” We can to urban centers. In response to the ensuing social upheaval, also be afraid and “ready.” Because, of course, the Go Bag church and community groups sought to renew traditional is all about fear—fear of the unknown. The compunction family values, while patriots evoked heroic images of frontier to be ready, the illusion that we can be ready, the pressure masculinity. These intertwined ideologies formed the back- to clarify one’s needs in the face of an abstract threat, is drop for the two most prominent preparedness movements reduced to a kind of ritual packing and unpacking of seem- of the time—Universal Military Training (UMT) and the Boy ingly essential items into a kit. That the contents of Go Bags Scouts of America (BSA)—both of which exploited fears of remain virtually the same throughout the twentieth century, moral and civic breakdown (characterized by falling Church despite an evolving litany of threats, illustrates that they are attendance and the perceived emasculation of men) as motivated by social concerns more than utilitarian ones. In major themes in their recruitment efforts. light of this, the Go Bag reveals itself as an existential rather The UMT and the BSA alike endorsed military discipline than functional prerogative. and rigorous outdoor activity as means of reforming Ameri- can society and protecting democracy. UMT founder Dr. Leonard Wood, a friend of Franklin Roosevelt 94 (and fellow Rough Rider), argued that his brand of above and opposite: Modern-day go-bag exteriors. Photos Leah Beeferman.
Chance, Intelligence, and Humor: I am just taking my mental activity to the most abstract and An Interview with Gianluigi Buffon absurd level. Mariana Castillo Deball Who is the audience for you? Gigi Buffon is an original. His raw talent rocketed him into the Number One shirt on both Parma FC and Italy’s national On the one hand, an audience’s behavior is always predict- football team, while his personality is characterized by able: they scream, sing, throw objects, but you never know outspoken and enigmatic statements to the press, his fear- what exactly will happen or the degree of intensity; it’s like lessness on the field, and the seemingly suicidal maneuvers a mountain of sand, made of an infinite number of particles. that smother the ball at the feet of onrushing players. Quite spontaneously, these systems reach a critical state. Buffon was born in Carrara, Italy into an athletic family. If you drop grains of sand one by one into a pile, they build His mother Maria Stella was a discus thrower; his father up and up into a cone until an avalanche starts. The slope of Adriano a weight lifter. His two sisters play volleyball and the side of the cone settles down to a critical value, at which his uncle was a basketball player. He is the nephew of point it undergoes small avalanches and big avalanches (and former Milan and Italy goalkeeper, Lorenzo Buffon. Growing avalanches at every scale in between). This behavior is inde- up, Buffon began his career as a midfielder but decided to pendent of the size and the shape of the sand grains, and in change his position to goalie after he lost the will to run. This general it is impossible to deduce anything about the build- proved to be a a stroke of good luck for the game, as Buffon ing from its behavior. In other words, the scale and timing is now perhaps the greatest goalkeeper in the world. of the avalanches don’t depend on the size or shape of the sand grains. How did you start as a goalkeeper? The spectators of a football game can have diverse characters or qualities and be spread out in different spaces, I entered my present profession by accident—a series of countries, and situations. Some people go to the stadium, geographical, personal, and legal coincidences. A blend of but in general they watch the match on television or listen to boredom, curiosity, and vanity. the radio or read the newspaper. In this sense, the audience is not fixed in space or time. It also depends on the distribu- Do you regard football as a pastime or as your primary tion of the information, whether it’s live at the stadium, or obsession? on TV where the story has already been transformed by the camerawork, editing, and the narration of the sports com- You know, the grass is always greener elsewhere. I have mentators who explain the movement of the game. I have an immense curiosity about everything. My interests vary always been very curious about this real-time narration, widely and I have the feeling that I will never answer all made up of a sequence of names and numbers, direc- the questions that life poses. When I get very obsessed by tions, strategies, predictions. It has a specific vocabulary something, I realize immediately that what interests me is and rhythm, very technical but, also full of prefabricated something else entirely or, rather, not anything precise but remarks, and stocked with players’ nicknames, deliberate everything that does not fit into what I’d already consid- descriptions, and quips. ered...the relationship between one thing and all its possible variants and alternatives...everything that can happen in What do you think about the media’s reception of your time and space. My approach to knowledge is playful. I am activity? a Jack-of-all-trades, master of none. If I chose a particular discipline the charm would be gone, because choosing I am responsible for intercepting the ball at a crucial one means dismissing the others. Foremost, I respect my moment; I can only succeed or fail in my attempt. The ignorance, otherwise it would be impossible to maintain my records of my actions are minimal—repetitions of the sense of humor. For me, intelligence is always linked to iro- climactic moments, whether they are mistakes or achieve- ny, otherwise it becomes monotonous and boring. In order ments. I have the idea that although a man’s life is to solve this dilemma, I tried to limit the possibilities, to find compounded of thousands and thousands of moments and an activity in which I could keep the amusement, the plea- days, those many instants and days can be reduced to a sin- sure, but within very specific rules so that I wouldn’t get lost gle one. So my single image in the media is precisely about and distracted by everything. By choosing football, I killed the moments when I try to stop the ball. They are all stills of two birds with one stone. I never really learned how to play, instantaneous decisions. At the end of the day, it’s a collec- I just started playing as a child in the streets; I know noth- tion of images where I always appear in midair—flying. I like ing about formal technique. In football, my thoughts, my it that the entire record of my life is of it occurring in the air. opinions, are not immediately visible; they are made evident I am amazed that I can watch an image of myself at through gestures, reactions, and reflexes. They depend as the precise moment when I am trying to catch the ball. I well on a very specific situation that I need to relate to at that am catching the ball and the media is trying to catch my particular moment; there is no time for hesitation. image; the difference is that they are bombarding me with 99 In the end, every game is a game with language, so their cameras and I have a single chance. They will always capture me; I can always fail. Later, the same instant is there is a kind of forcefield, which is the territory of the story broadcast from different angles at different speeds: slow itself. We might say that the magic object is a visible sign motion, still, backward and forward. Speech also supports that describes the connection between people or events. the image; they talk about my career, my common mistakes For me, the ball plays the role of this magic object in and virtues, all the statistics around my movements, how that for a short period, a group of people are pursuing it and many balls I stopped in my life, how many I’ve let through. millions of viewers are following its route. Maybe it’s stupid to put it this way, but it’s like a moving Why do you think football is so popular? compass. I remember when I was a child we did an experi- ment at school in which we built our own compass, affixing Football is about enchantment. For an hour and a half, the a cork with a magnetized needle. If you float it in a bowl of world stops because a ball is being chased and a different water and wait until it’s still, the needle will work as a com- kind of time unfolds, capturing the concentration of the pass, pointing north. The problem is that the needle is hardly players and the audience and generating its own story. still and its accuracy is very fragile and sensitive to the small- One player or another is praised or blamed, bets are placed. est movement. I like the idea of this improvised and fragile Afterwards, the world is normal again and the spell evapo- object that nevertheless maintains a rule. rates. The game’s interest lies not in the plot but in the shifts, in the changes in the many micro-plots. I’m reminded of Many people talk about football as a circus, and I find it curi- Fastrada’s ring story. You know the story? The one where ous that your name—Buffon—means “clown” or “joker.” the Emperor Charlemagne falls in love with Fastrada. The What do you think about this strange coincidence? barons are in his court, extremely worried because they see that Charlemagne is neglecting the affairs of state. When I like to think that I am a buffoon, a clown, entrusted with the girl suddenly dies, the the task of entertaining people, playing a very stupid role. courtiers feel relieved— I’m often blamed for playing dirty tricks, like if I suddenly but not for long because start kicking the ball outside my area, forgetting my position Charlemagne’s love does at the goal. Being a clown is also a question of playing with not die with her. The the rules. If you play with the rules, you may become a joker Emperor carries her body or a criminal, but in a sense you change people’s own rules to his bedroom, where he of thinking. Many people don’t like the way I play; they think refuses to part from it. I am overacting, screaming too much, trying to win the The Archbishop Turpin attention of the cameras, but I do that intentionally to main- suspects an enchantment and insists on examining the tain the link between sport and the notion that it is truly just a corpse. Hidden under the dead girl’s tongue he finds a ring. circus. Anyway, everyone knows that barking dogs don’t bite. As soon as the ring touches Turpin’s hands, Charlemagne falls passionately in love with the archbishop and quickly has There is a common notion that football players are stupid the girl buried. In order to escape the embarrassing situa- and ignorant, and that they merely know how to move their tion, Turpin flings the ring into lake Constance. Charlemagne legs. What do you think about that? thereupon falls in love with the lake and never leaves its shores. For me, intelligence isn’t about knowledge, but is rather The real protagonist of the story is the magic ring, an activity related to humor, pleasure, and curiosity. I take because it is the movement of the ring that determines the an aesthetic pleasure in an idea; I love its form and shape, actions of the characters and establishes the rela- rather than its tendency to harden into a series of irrefutable 100 tionships between them. Around the magic object facts. Maybe I am talking about an invisible kind of intel- ligence that doesn’t need to As an athlete, do you need to have strong discipline? be written. It relates more to a conversation between At the end of the day, when push comes to shove, I am a friends or with the things very lazy person. I like to think about everything at the same that cross my mind when I time but I have no patience to linger for too long on any sin- am traveling from one city gle subject. I chose an activity where I need to make instant to another. It’s about being and fast decisions about complex situations. This was one awake, outside of com- of the main reasons for taking this shortcut, if we can call it mon ideas about the world; that. As a goalie, my working hours are very short; I really an instant response, a joke, a trick, a flip of meaning that need to put all my attention into what I’m doing. makes you laugh. There is a space opened behind my mind. Sometimes I think that interesting things are always behind Is it true about the goalkeeper’s fear of the penalty kick? senseless connections, they stay hidden there because peo- ple are too serious and they don’t play with notions of truth. I don’t think I have committed every possible mistake— It is a very common mistake that we think we’re igno- because mistakes are innumerable—but many of them, and rant of something because we are unable to define it. You I really enjoy failure and that people keep talking about the could say that we can move toward a definition of some- mistake for weeks. Maybe it’s one of the few moments of thing only when we know nothing about it. Perhaps the the game when they can blame one person, and that’s me. human mind has a tendency to deny statements. Arguments convince nobody because they are presented as arguments. No one has ever won an argument and anyone who believes you can is living in a fantasy world. We look at them, we weigh them, we turn them over, and we decide against them. But when something is merely said or—better still— hinted at, and maybe that’s a trick too, there is a kind of hospitality in our imagination and we are ready to accept it. I think that games are one way to open this space in people’s imaginations.
What is the role of chance in the game?
I think in general, games are about a tension between chance and rules, that’s what keeps the attention alive: the desire and the possibility of breaking the rules, of being lucky or of seeing something unexpected. Maybe in the case of football, this situation is more evident for the audience. Anyhow, every time I start playing I really don’t know what will happen, especially because my position as a goalkeeper is very much about observing, waiting, and then reacting at the right moment. No matter how much I practice, I am unable to control the whole situation and I really 101 enjoy this uncertainty. Buffon’s Needle However, the position of any needle can be characterized by: Mariana Castillo Deball a) The distance of the center of the needle from a line, (d) Buffon’s Needle, one of the oldest problems in the field of b) The angle formed with the direction of the lines, ( ) θ geometrical probability, is a random distribution experiment first posed by the French naturalist and mathematician, the Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). It involves dropping a needle d on a lined sheet of paper and determining the probability θ of the needle crossing one of the lines on the page. The remarkable result is that, because the probability is directly related to the value of π, one can use this method to empiri- cally measure the value of π. The needle will intersect a line if the projection of half the Clearly, the needles can land on the paper in many ways: needle length on the vertical direction is greater than dis- tance d. For example: Projection length exceeds d, so the needle hits a line:
d projection
Projection length is less than d, so there is no intersection:
projection d
In order to actually calculate the probability that a needle will cross a line, let’s look at a specific case. We will make both the distance between the lines, and the length of a needle, each exactly 2 inches. Now, we can plot on a graph all the possible projection lengths against all the possible needle angles (these range from 0 degrees to 90 degrees, or as mathematicians prefer to say it, from 0 to π/2).
When the angle ( ) is zero, the projection is 0: θ
When ( ) is 90 degrees, or /2 radians, the projection is 1 θ π inch:
2 in. 1 in. Since the “projection length” is the opposite side of a right needle length ...... c triangle for which the hypotenuse is 1, the projection length line separation ...... a is just the sine of the angle: number of needles ...... N number of intersections .... M (c must be equal to or less than a)
M P.L./1 = sin The probability of intersection for any given needle = θ N projection θ 1 length so P.L. = sin 2c θ πa
Plotting the graph of the angle versus the projection length 2cN therefore gives a simple sine graph. Therefore, π aM
1 The more needles are thrown, the more accurate will be the figure for π yielded by this empirical method. projection length
0 0 angle π/2
We stated that the needle would intersect a line if the projec- tion length was greater than the distance from the center of the needle to the line. Alternately, the needle crosses the line if the distance from the needle center is less than the projec- tion length. This can now be reworded as:
All needles whose centers are at a distance less than the sine of the angle θ will cross a line.
These needles are represented by the shaded region on the graph. The rectangle represents all possible outcomes. The ratio of the shaded area under the sine curve to the area of the entire rectangle will therefore be the probability that the needle will cross the line. The area under this portion of the sine curve can be calculated by using the method for finding the area under a curve, called “integration”:
π/2 sin .d = 1 θ θ �0
So the area under the sine graph is 1. This means the prob- ability of this needle intersecting a line can be stated as
1 2 1 x π/2 π
This surprising result, where π appears as a probability, can be used to determine the value of π.
Let’s now generalize these results.