Jessica Riskin The Defecating Duck

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The DefecatingDuck, or, the Ambiguous Originsof ArtificialLife

JessicaRiskin
My second Machine,or Automaton,is a Duck.... The Duck stretchesout its Neck to take Corn out of your Hand;it swallowsit, digestsit, and dischargesit digestedby the usual Passage.
-Jacques Vaucanson,letter to Abbe Desfontaines,17381
Squirtis the smallestrobot we havebuilt .... Its normal mode of operationis to act as a "bug,"hiding in darkcornersand venturingout in the directionof noises.
Don't PlayChess,"19902 -Rodney Brooks,"Elephants
An eighteenth-century mechanical duck that swallowed corn and grain and, after a pregnant pause, relieved itself of an authentic-looking burden was the improbable forebear of modern technologies designed to simulate animal and intelligent processes. Quaint as the Duck now seems, we remain in an age that it inaugurated;its mixed careerset in motion a dynamic that has characterizedthe subsequent history of artificiallife.3 JacquesVaucanson, the ambitious son of a Grenoble glove maker, put his defecating Duck on display in Parisin the winter of 1738in a rented hall, the grand salledesquatresaisonsat the Hotel de Longueville.Its companions were two android musicians, a Pipe-and-Tabor player and a Flute-player that had first appearedat the Foire St.-Germainthe previous February(fig. 1).4 The price of admission was a substantial three livres, about a week's
aremy own. Exceptwhereotherwiseindicated,all translations This essayand another,"Eighteenth-Century Wetware" no. 83 [Summer (Representations, life and intelligence,hence the 2003]) arepartsof a largerprojecton the earlyhistoryof artificial in each essayto the other. frequentreferences 1. Jacques "Letter to the AbbeDesfontaines" LeMecanisme Vaucanson, (1742[1738]), dufluteur trans.J.T.Desaguliers automate, abbreviated "L." (Buren,The Netherlands, 1979),p. 21;hereafter Thiseditionof Vaucanson's treatise includesboth the originalFrench versionandDesaguliers's translation. Forthe sakeof consistency, allpagenumbersreferto the English translation. English 2. RodneyA. Brooks,"Elephants Don't PlayChess,"Robotics andAutonomous 6 Systems
(1990): 9.
3. By artificial life,here and throughout,I mean all attemptsto understand livingprocessesby to the using machineryto simulatethem. Artificial Life,with capitalletters,will referspecifically research field that arosein the mid-twentiethcenturyin which computerscientists,engineers, and othershavetriedto use information-processing cognitiveand neuroscientists, machineryto simulatelivingprocesses,such as reproductionand sensation. 4. See AndreDoyon and LucienLiaigre, mecanicien degenie (Paris,1966), Vaucanson, Jacques pp. 33,61;hereafter abbreviated JV
CriticalInquiry29 (Summer2003) ? 2003 by The Universityof Chicago.0093-1896/03/2904-ooo5$10.oo. All rights reserved.
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the Duck, and the Pipe-and-Tabor F I G U RE 1. The Flute-player, player.Fromthe produ automata,Vaucanson,LeMecanisme spectus of the 1738exhibitionof Vaucanson's Universityof California, fluteurautomate.WilliamAndrewsClarkMemorialLibrary, Los Angeles.
wages for a Parisian worker. Nevertheless the people poured in, earning Vaucanson in a single season severaltimes what he had borrowed to finance
JEss i CA Ri s KIN is an assistant professor of history at Stanford University.She is the author of Sciencein theAge of Sensibility:The SentimentalEmpiricists of the FrenchEnlightenment (2002) and is currentlyworking on a history of artificiallife and intelligence circa 1730-1950.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003
6oi
the project (see IV, pp. 30-34). In addition to making money, the three automata capturedthe fancy of Voltaire,who celebratedtheir inventoras "Prometheus's rival"and persuaded Frederickthe Greatto invite their maker to join his court. Vaucanson,sensing he could do even better at home, declined the offer.5 His own monarch did in fact have anotherprojectin mind for him, wondering if he could "executein this manner the circulationof the blood." Louis XV ultimatelysupportedVaucansonin a protractedeffortto do so (see
JV, pp. 55-56, 133-35,141,151-61).6 In the meantime in 1741,the king's finance
minister, Philibert Orry, recruited Vaucanson to become Inspector of Silk Manufactures.Finally,overcomingacademicians'habitualsuspicion ofcommercial projects,the automata helped Vaucansonto secure a much-coveted appointment to the ParisAcademy of Sciences as "associatedmechanician" in 1757(a contest in which he beat out Denis Diderot) (IV, p. 308; see also pp. 142-45). In short, they were utter successes:entrepreneurial, philosophical, popular, and professional. Their success lay in their author's transformation of an ancient art. Automata, "self-moving machines," had existed from antiquity,but as amusements and feats of technological virtuosity.7Vaucanson's automata were philosophical experiments, attempts to discern which aspectsof living creatures could be reproduced in machinery,and to what degree, and what such reproductions might reveal about their natural subjects. Of course, his automata were also commercial ventures intended to entertain and demonstrate mechanical ingenuity. But their value as amusements lay principally in their dramatization of a philosophical problem that preoccupied audiences of workers, philosophers, and kings: the problem of whether human and animal functions were essentiallymechanical. The Abbe Desfontaines, advertisingVaucanson'sshow to his readership,described the insides of the Flute-playeras containing an "infinityof wires and steel chains... [which] form the movement of the fingers, in the same way as in living man, by the dilation and contraction of the muscles. It is doubtless the knowledge of the
10 vols. (Paris,1877), 5. Voltaire,"Discoursen verssur l'homme"(1738),Oeuvres completes, the Great's invitation,see MarieJeanAntoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquisde 9:420.ForFrederick de Condorcet, ed. A. CondorcetO'Connorand Condorcet,"Elogede Vaucanson" (1782),Oeuvres M. F.Arago,12vols. (Paris,1847),2:650-51; hereafter abbreviated "EV." 6. [LouisPetitde Bachaumont],Memoires secrets de la Republique des pourservira l'histoire Lettres en France, 36 vols. (London,1777depuis1762jusqu'anosjours,oujournald'unobservateur, On Vaucanson's 89), 23:307. projectto simulatethe circulationof the blood, see also Riskin, Wetware." "Eightenth-Century 7. On ancientautomata,see AlfredChapuisand EdouardGelis,LeMondedesautomates: Etude 2 vols. (Paris,1928),vol. 1, chaps.1-4; Chapuisand EdmondDroz, et technique, historique Automata: A Historical and Technical trans.Alec Reid (New York,1958),chaps.1-2; and Study, Derekde SollaPrice,"Automata and the Originsof Mechanismand MechanisticPhilosophy," and Culture Technology 5 (Winter1964):9-23.
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(quotedin anatomyof man ... that guidedthe authorin his mechanics"

JV, p. 51).8
is apparent to automaton-making Thenoveltyin Vaucanson's approach automaton an for betweenhis machinesand a 1644design in the contrast Isaacde Caus(fig.2).9 An owl slowlypivotstoward engineer by the French Asthe owlfacesthem,thebirds andchirping. a groupof birds,allfluttering thebirdsperkup again. the owl as and silent. still become Then, pivotsaway, andordered Themotionsaredrivenby a waterwheel by a peggedcylinder, the distancebetweenthe mechas in a musicbox. The designdramatizes auand earlyeighteenth-century anismand the imitationin seventeenthis allsubterranean themechanism is literal; tomata.Inthiscase,the distance allon top. But,evenin caseswherethe mechanism andthe imitative figures which it playedno partin the imitation, withinthe figures, was contained of to the ParisAcademy An artificial was purelyexternal. swan,presented mechanism contained its mechanician named in a Sciences 1733 Maillard, by insideitself(fig.3). Theswanpaddled throughthewateron a paddlewheel Itwasintended whilea set of gearssweptits headslowlyfromsideto side.10 the behavior of a natural to represent swan,but by no meansto reproduce its physiology. aswell wereimitative automata internally century, Bythe lateeighteenth Cartesian as well as in appearance. in processand substance as externally, from mechanistreduction, dualism,which had exemptedconsciousness for an infinity of possible allowed which had and "hypotheticalism,"1l visiblebehaviors, nature's mechanisms gavewayto anemergent underlying
CLXXX sur le fluteurautomateet l'aristipe modeme,"30 8. SeeAbbe Desfontaines,"Lettre The reviewof surlesecritsmoderne, Mar.1738,Observations 12:340. 34vols. (Paris,1735-43), dessfavansalso emphasizedthe role of in the Journal treatiseon the Flute-player Vaucanson's in informingthe android's anatomicaland physicalresearch design.See "LeMechanismedu dessfavans(Apr.1739): fluteurautomate,"Journal 441. avecquelques 9. See Isaacde Caus,Nouvelleinventionde leverl'eauplus haultquesa source de la conduitd'icelle mouvantes (London,1644),p. 25 machines par le moyende l'eau,et un discours and plate13. et in Machines machinesinventeesparM. Maillard: 10. See "Diverses Cygneartificiel," inventions present; RoyaledesSciences depuisson etablissementjusqu'a par l'Academie approuvies I havefound one possible ed. M. Gallon,7 vols. (Paris,1735-77), avecleurdescription, 1:133-35. did not try to reproduce exceptionto the generalrulethat automatonmakersbeforeVaucanson physiciannamed designedin the 167osby a Wiirttemburg livingprocesses.This is a "statue" man demonstrated circulation,digestion,and Accordingto reports,this artificial Reyselius. to man in all the internalparts"("LeMechanismedu fluteur with great"resemblance respiration see ThomasL. man of Reyselius, dessavants[1677]: automate," Journal 352).On the artificial and theImagination Instruments (Princeton,N.J.,1995),p. 182, Hankinsand RobertJ.Silverman, to simulative and JV,pp. 117-18,162-63. Fora fullerdiscussionof the shift from representative Wetware." automata,see Riskin,"Eighteenth-Century The Impactof 11. The term is from Laurens Laudan,"TheClockMetaphorand Probabilism: 22 (June1966):73Annalsof Science Descarteson EnglishMethodological Thought,165o-1665," 104.
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materialism and to a growing confidence, derived from ever-improvinginstruments, that experimentation could reveal nature'sactual design. These developments brought a new literalism to automata and a deepening of the project. The designers now strove, not only to mimic the outward manifestations of life, but also to follow as closely as possible the mechanisms that produced these manifestations. Thus the hands of three automata built by a Swiss clock-making family named Jaquet-Droz in 1774 were probably designed with the help of the
Critical Inquiry / Summer2003
605
FI GURE 4. The simulativehandofthe Jaquet-Droz family's1774 Lady-musician. FromAlfredChapuis and Edmond Droz, Automata,p. 282.
village surgeon, their skeletalstructuresmodeled on real,human hands (fig. 4).12 During the century that separatedthe Jaquet-Drozautomata from de Caus's birds, the array of technological devices available to automatonmakers did not change significantly.In fact this arrayremained fairlyconstant from the late sixteenth century, when mechanical musical devices began to incorporate pinned barrels, through the addition of electric motors in the earlytwentieth century.13But the way in which these mechanisms were deployed did change importantly: the design of automata became increasingly a matter, not just of representation,but of simulation.14
12. See CharlesPerregaux and F.-Louis et Leschot Perrot,LesJaquet-Droz (Neuchatel,1916),pp. 31-34. 13. On the adventof the pinned cylinderin the late sixteenthcentury,see SylvioA. Bedini, "TheRole of Automatain the Historyof Technology," and Culture Technology 5 (Winter1964):35, and MauriceDaumas,"Industrial in A Historyof Technology and Invention: Mechanization," theAges,trans.EileenHennessy,ed. Daumas,3 vols. (1962-68;New York,1969Progress through On the continuityin automatatechnologybefore electronics,see ReedBenhamou, 79), 3:178-79. "FromCuriositeto Utilite:The Automatonin Eighteenth-Century Studiesin EighteenthFrance," Culture 17(1987): Century 95. 14. I intend the word simulationin its modernsense,which originatedaroundthe middleof the twentiethcentury,to mean an experimental model from which one can discoverpropertiesof the naturalsubject.Simulation in its eighteenth-century and had a negative usagemeant "artifice"
606
Jessica Riskin / Originsof Artificial Life This new, simulative impulse embraced, not only the mechanisms underlying living processes, but also the matter of life, its material aspect. Indeed, the two were inseparablein the eyes of eighteenth-century designers of simulative machines. How, for example, could one build a circulatory system that worked like natural ones without using an elastic material for the veins? So Vaucanson incorporated into his plans for a "moving anatomy" an exotic new material: rubber.15 The Jaquet-Droz family were also innovators in this regard,using lifelike materials such as leather, cork, and papier-mache to give their machines the softness, lightness, and pliancy of living things. By imitating the stuff of life, automaton makers were once again aiming, not merely for verisimilitude, but for simulation; they hoped to make the parts of their machines work as much as possible like the parts of living things and thereby to test the limits of resemblance between synthetic and naturallife. Eighteenth-centurymechanicians also produced devices that emitted various lifelike substances; not only did their machines bleed and defecate, but, as we will see, they also breathed.16 Vaucanson'sDuck markedthe turning point in these developments (fig. 5). It produced the most organic of matters;and Vaucanson made the imitation of internal process explicitly central to his project. He boasted that the Duck was transparent-its gilded copper feathers were perforated to allow an inside view-and wrote wittily that although "some Ladies, or some People, who only like the Outside of Animals, had rather have seen ... the Duck with Feathers,"his "Design [had been] ratherto demonstrate
connotation,implyingfakery.(I am gratefulto EvelynFox Kellerfor pressingme to clarifymy use to automata.I in reference uses of simulation of the term.) I havenot found eighteenth-century and his contemporaries' becauseit describesVaucanson's employit here despitethe anachronism to automataand in orderto suggestthat theirworkhad a pivotal approach newlyexperimental placein the historyof attemptsto simulate(in its modernsense) life processes.Foran analysisof the meaningand implicationsof simulationand an argumentthat the projectof simulatinglife For Wetware." originatedin the mid-eighteenthcentury,see Riskin,"Eighteenth-Century automataweresimulativein the modernsense,see Doyon and argumentsthatVaucanson's 10 Dialectica "M(thodologiecompareedu biomecanismeet de la mecaniquecomparee," Liaigre, GeorgesCanguilhem,"TheRole of Analogiesand Modelsin Biological 292-335; (1956): Historical and Mrs.G. Kitchin,in Scientific trans.Mrs.J.A. Z. Gardiner Change: Discovery," and Technical Conditionsfor Studiesin theIntellectual, Discovery Social,and Technical Scientific Price, ed. A. C. Crombie(NewYork,1961), pp. 510-12; Invention, fromAntiquityto thePresent, and DavidM. Fryerand JohnC. and the Originsof the MechanisticPhilosophy"; "Automata 20 (Jan.1979): and Culture Vaucanson," "TheMotivesof Jacques 257-69. Marshall, Technology and Linda ElianeMaingot,LesAutomates 15. See "EV," (Paris,1959),p. 18;JV,pp. 118-19; 2:655; and Popular of Science,Technology, A Studyin the Interface MarleneStrauss,"Automata: SanDiego, 1987),pp. 71-72.ForVaucanson's Culture"(Ph. D. diss., Universityof California, introductionof the phrase"movinganatomy"("anatomiemouvante")to describemechanical models,see JV,p. llo; see also pp. 18,34. physiological 16. On eighteenth-centuryautomaton designers'interestin lifelikematerialsand textures,see Wetware." Riskin,"Eighteenth-Century
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F I G U R E 5. One of a mysteriousset of photographsdiscoveredaround 1950by the curatorof the labeled Musee des Artset Metiersin Paris.The photographswere in a folderleft by his predecessor, "Picturesof Vaucanson'sDuck receivedfrom Dresden."From Chapuisand Droz, Automata,pp. 233-38.
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F I G U R E 6. A nineteenth-centuryinventor'sillustrationof his own imaginedversion of a mechanicaldigestingduck. An arrowhelpfullyindicateswhere the main action takesplace.From 2:151. Chapuisand EdouardGelis, LeMondedes automates,
the Manner of the Actions, than to shew a Machine" ("L,"pp. 22-23, 22). The Duck was powered by a weight wrapped around a lower cylinder,which drove a larger cylinder above it. Cams in the upper cylinder activated a frame of about thirty levers. These were connected with different parts of the Duck's skeletalsystem to determine its repertoireof movements, which included drinking, playing "in the Waterwith his Bill, and mak[ing] a gurgling Noise like a real living Duck" ("L,"p. 23) as well as rising up on its feet, lying down, stretching and bending its neck, and moving its wings, tail, and even its larger feathers.17 Most impressively,the Duck ate bits of corn and grain and, after a moment, excreted them in an altered form (fig. 6). Vaucanson said these processes were "copied from Nature,"the food digested "asin realAnimals, by
17. See Chapuisand G6lis,LeMondedesautomates, and Chapuisand Droz,Automata, 2:149-51, pp. 233-42.
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Dissolution.... But this,"he added,"I shafll... shew ... [on] another Occasion" ("L," p. 21). By claimingthathis Duck digestedby dissolution, Vaucanson entereda debateamongphysiologists overwhetherdigestion was a chemicalor a mechanical his postponement process.Unfortunately of furtherexplanations to "canother occasion" aroused suspicions. Already in 1755a critic accusedthe Duck of being "nothingmore than a coffeeof theDuck's grinder" P. 479).Thenin 1783,a closeobserver (JV, swallowing mechanismuncoveredan even greaterdeceit:the food did not continue down the neck and into the stomachbut ratherstayedat the base of the mouth tube. Reasoning that digestingthe food by dissolution wouldtake than the brief the Duck took between andexpullonger pause swallowing concludedthat the graininput and excrement sion, this observer output were entirelyunrelated and that the tail end of the Duckmust be loaded 18 TheDuckthatpioneered beforeeachactwith fakeexcrement. physiological simulation was, at its core,fraudulent. Yet,this centralfraudwassurroundedby plentyof genuineimitation.Vaucanson was intenton making his Duckstrictlysimulative, exceptwhereit wasnot. Eachwingcontained overfourhundredarticulated pieces,imitating everybumpon everybone of a naturalwing. All the Duck'smovements(exceptthe one just menstudiesof natural ducks.'9 tioned)weremodeledupon exhaustive What,then,is the meaningof this hybridanimal,partlyfraudulent and and partly(ostensibly) chemical, partlygenuine,partlymechanical partly andpartlyingeniously Consider thepointsof emphatransparent opaque? sis in Vaucanson's He is carefulto saythathe wantsto show, description. not just a machine,but a process.But he is equallycareful to saythatthis is a process only partialimitation.He wrote,"Idon't pretendto givethis as a perfectDigestion.... I hopeno bodywouldbe so unkindasto upbraid me with pretending to anysuchThing"("L," p. 22). The deceptively feathers not hid, justa trick,but an implicit transparent of mechanism. Thepartially fraudulent Duck judgmentof the boundaries
1 travers 18. See Friedrich et la Suisse,2 VOlS. (Berlin,1783), Nicolai, Chronique l'Allemagne 1:284. The magicianand automatonmakerJeanEug~neRobert-Houdinclaimedto havemadethe same discoveryin 1845, while repairingthe Duck'smechanism.SeeJeanEug~neRobert-Houdin, Memoirsof Robert-Houdin, trans.Lascelles Wraxall(i858;New York, 1964), PP.104-7. The parts Robert-Houdinrepaired Duck. On this question,see may or may not havebeen fromVaucanson's LeMondedesautomates, Chapuisand Gd1is, 2:151-52,and Chapuisand Droz,Automata, pp. 248, in generaland its discovery,see IV, pp. 125-29, and Barbara 404 n. 17. On the Duck'sfraudulence MariaStafford, and theEclipse ArtfulScience: EnlightenmentEntertainment of VisualEducation Mass.,1999), PP. 193-94. (Cambridge, 19. See "L," and Godefroy-Christophe Bereis,letterdated2 Nov. 1785,quoted in Chapuisand Droz, Automata, P. 234; see also pp. 233-38 and n. 14.
610
the two defining novelties of Vaucanson's work.The encapsulated perfectly innerprocess. firstwashis interestin reproducing Andthe second,no less washis organizing thatthe imitationof life'sinner important, assumption in had limits. The its mademanifest Duck, processes partialfraudulence, both the processof mechanical simulationand its boundary. Thiswasexof the perpetual actlythe lessonthat the marquisde Condorcet, secretary in of of derived from the Duck his Vaucanson. Sciences, Academy eulogy didnotbelievein thedigestive Condorcet buthewrote partof theimitation, faultif... natureoperated herfunctionsin "itwasnot M. de Vaucanson's a wayotherthanthose he couldimitate" ("EV," 2:648). Historians andothereighteenth-centuryautomwritingon Vaucanson's takenthem as straightforward renditionsof life in maata havegenerally and recent writershave continued to read the automataas chinery,20 of an unbridleddevotionto mechanism.Forexample,Gaby emblematic Wood suggeststhat Vaucanson's mechanistambitions projectsexpressed the boundsof reason." thatwent "beyond She diagnosesa kind of "madness"in whatshe seesas his attempts to "[blur]the line betweenmanand Anotherexampleis machine,betweenthe animateand the inanimate."21 work dramatized the DanielCottom,who argues that Vaucanson's similarly reduction of bothlife (in the Duck)andart(in the Flute-player) mechanist "Inan ageof mechanical to bodilyprocesses: digestion,one of the central betweenart and problemsof aestheticjudgmentmust be to distinguish not It seemsto me, on the contrary, that the automata shit."22 expressed, betweensuchconvictionandits mechanist conviction,but the tug-of-war thatshat, a machine thatplayed thefluteandanother antithesis. Bybuilding ratherthan demonand placingthem alongsideeach other,Vaucanson, of artand shit as the productsof mechanical the equivalence prostrating of each,the artistic andtheorganic cesses,wastestingthe capacity product, the creatures that producedthem from machines.In other to distinguish to havebeen ofVaucanson's automata I find the most feature words, striking enactmentof both the samenessand the incomparatheir simultaneous bilityof life and machinery. to designing his experimental Vaucanson automata, approach developed were neitherin a contextin whichmechanisttheoriesof bodilyprocesses
in a Mechanical Mirror: Automataas Doubles and as 20. See for exampleStrauss,"Reflections and Society lo (1996):179-207, in which the authorascribesto automata"the Tools,"Knowledge (p. 183). complexculturalrole of doublesor doppelgangers" A MagicalHistoryof theQuestforMechanical 21. GabyWood, LivingDolls: Life(London,
2002), p. xvi.
no. 22. DanielCottom, "TheWorkof Art in the Age of Mechanical Digestion,"Representations, and Materialism 66 (Spring1999):71.Fora thirdexample,see DanielTiffany,ToyMedium: ModernLyric 2000), chaps.2-3. (Berkeley,
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dominant,as in mid- to late seventeenth-century physiolog y,23nor in one as in earlynineteenthin which such theorieswere largelydiscredited,
moment ofprofound anintervening during century biology,24 but,instead,

mechanism.This uncerabout the validityof philosophical uncertainty of natural materialism the eighteenth-century taintyaccompanied rising Evenas their insistenceon the primacyof matterseemedto philosophy. of nature,leadingEnlightthe groundfor mechanist explanations prepare Buffonnonetheless dissuch as Diderotand Georges enmentmaterialists and vital tendencies such propertiesof explanations, invoking paraged The ontological matterthat, they argued,defied mechanistreduction.25 processeswere essentially questionof whethernaturaland physiological and the accompanying mechanistic, questionof whether epistemological was to understand mechanism the to take the philosophical rightapproach natureof life, preoccupied minismonarchs, academicians, philosophers, ters, and consumersof the emergingpopularscienceindustryduringthe middledecadesof the eighteenth Neithermechanist nor antimecentury. chanistconviction, but rather a ambivalence about mechthen, deep-seated
23. On the role of mechanismin seventeenth-centuryphysiology, and on the developmentand influenceof Ren6Descartes's see TheodoreM. Brown,"Physiology and physiologyin particular, the MechanicalPhilosophyin Mid-Seventeenth-Century Bulletinof theHistoryof England," Medicine Microcosm:BodilyPassions,Good Manners, 51 (1977): 25-54; PeterDear,"AMechanical in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments and Cartesian Mechanism," of NaturalKnowledge, Lawrence ed. StephenShapinand Christopher Duchesneau, (Chicago,1998),PP.51-82; Fran~ois Leibniz(Paris,i998), chaps.2-3; Julian "TheProblem LesModdesdu vivanrde Descartes e4 Jaynes, of AnimateMotion in the SeventeenthCentury," Journal of theHistoryofIdeas31 (Apr.-Jun.1970): the Sceptics,and the Rejectionof Vitalismin 219-34; and PhillipR. Sloan,"Descartes, Studiesin theHistoryand Philosophy 8(1977):1-28. Seventeenth-Century Physiology," of Science life scienceshas been treated 24. The rejectionof classicalmechanismin nineteenth-century See for exampleTimothy mostly in the context of Germanromanticismand Naturphilosophie. in NineteenthandMechanics German Lenoir,TheStrategy ofLife:Teleology Century Biology and the Historical-Genetic Methodin RomanticBiology" (Dordrecht,1982) and "Morphotypes and L. S. Jacyna, "Romantic in Romanticism and the Thoughtand the Originsof CellTheory," ed. AndrewCunninghamand NicholasJardine Sciences, 1990), pp. 119-29,161-68; (Cambridge, and the Kingdomsof Nature,"in Cultures Jardine, "Naturphilosophie of NaturalHistory,ed. "The Jardine, J.A. Secord,and E. C. Spary(Cambridge, 1996), pp. 230-45; and MylesW. Jackson, Stateand Natureof Unity and Freedom: GermanRomanticBiologyand Ethics," in Biologyand theFoundation ed. JaneMaienscheinand MichaelRuse (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 98-112. of Ethics, On late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century from the mechanistexplanationof living departures see EvelleenRichards, The Romantic processesoutside Germany, "'Metaphorical Mystifications': Gestationof Naturein BritishBiology"and PhilipF.Rehbock,"Transcendental in Anatomy," Romanticism and theSciences, A. Williams,ThePhysical and the pp. 130-43,144-60; Elizabeth Moral: and Philosophi calMedicine in France, Anthropology, Physiology, 175o-85o (Cambridge, "Darwin's RomanticBiology:The Foundationof His Evolutionary 1994); and RobertJ. Richards, Ethics,"in Biologyand theFoundation of Ethics, pp. 113-53. 25. I treatthe mid-eighteenth-centuryturn againstphilosophicalmechanism,and its and ambivalences, in Riskin,Science in theAgeof Sensibility: The underlyingunce'rtainties Sentimental Empiricists of theFrench Enlightenment (Chicago,2002), chap.3.
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the contextfor the emergence anismand mechanist explanation provided such commanded Duckandits companions life.Thedefecating of artificial two dramatized because a such at moment, attention, contradictory they andthatliving machines wereessentially claimsatonce:thatlivingcreatures allowed incoherence Itsmasterful of machines. werethe antithesis creatures threecenturies thatis continuingnearly a discussion the Duckto instigate later. beliefin both propositions-that animallife is essenA simultaneous to mechandthatthe essenceof animallifeis irreducible tiallymechanistic to to this day,drivenattempts anism-has, fromthe Duck'sperformances arof Not that the in it life understand by reproducing machinery. history on tificiallife has been the simpleunfoldingof a suprahistorical dialectic; a historical the dialectic the contrary, moment,one in whichwe represents that froma combination derive convictions arestillliving.Itscontradictory a withus:first, widely andremains in the earlyeighteenth century emerged of thistheory lifeand,second,theinability heldmaterialist theoryof animal Insofaras to explainthe core phenomenonof animallife, consciousness. transand the scientific and thiscombination technological persists, despite of we live in the age Vauof the last two and a half centuries, formations canson. beliefsthatlifeis mechanism At eachsuccessive moment,the competing with scientific, haveengaged and thatlife is nonmechanism technological, to producecontinually social, and culturaldevelopments26 changinghypothesesaboutthe line dividinglife fromnonlife.Thusthe contradiction life hasbroughtabouta conspicuous at the heartof the projectof artificial Is it possibleto designa maof that in the basicterms project. contingency chine able to talk, write, reason,play chess, makemusic, drawpictures, of such A succession havefeelings,express emotion,learn? sense,interact, InArtificial Life and of Artificial the has motivated disciplines questions this conBut in the mid-twentieth fromtheirinception century. telligence tinually changingfield of questionsin fact dates back to the time of
26. Examplesfollow.But one sort of culturaldevelopmentthat figuredcentrallyin the life duringthe eighteenthand nineteenthcenturiesis not directly changingfortunesof artificial An exampleof the changingroleof and religiosity. treatedhere:the shiftingtides of secularism life is that religiousobjectionsto simulatinglife arose,as faras I religionin the historyof artificial havebeen ableto tell, only in the earlypartof the nineteenthcenturyand wereconspicuously absentfromthe conversation duringthe precedingperiod.I mean to treatthis aspectof the story the in the largerprojectfromwhich this essayis drawn.On religiousattitudestoward"animating Mass.,2001), p. 50. Fora see VictoriaNelson, TheSecret (Cambridge, inanimate," Lifeof Puppets and of the magicaland wondrouselementsof earlymodernautomata,see Stafford presentation in a Box to Imageson a Screen Fromthe World Devicesof Wonder: (LosAngeles, FrancesTerpak, 2001), esp. pp. 35-47 and 266-74.
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contradiction Vaucanson's Duck, as does the underlying they express.To askwhethera machinecan digest,converse,or emote is to raisethe possibilitythat animaland human abilitiesare the sheerproductsof animal and humanmachinery. But the questionsalso identifyprecisely those caat a given momentto be the pacitiesof livingbeingsthat have appeared likeliest to defymechanistic reduction. In short,the projectsof artificial life havebeen attemptsto reachthe outerboundsof mechanism. The attemptto reproduce life in machinery, in tandemwiththe attemptto findwheremechanical would reproduction fail, has resultedin an ongoing taxonomicexercise,sortingthe animate fromthe inanimate, the organicfromthe mechanical, the intelligent from the rote,with eachcategory defined,as in anytaxonomy, crucially bywhat is excluded fromit. Asdesigners of artificial lifehavesoughtto explain living with mechanical theirunderstandings processes by analogy arrangements, of life and of mechanism havealso developed in mutualopposition.Vaucanson'sDuck and its companionslaunchedthis taxonomicdynamic.In its apparent of the most animalof processes, the mechanical performance Duckdramatized, not justthe reducibility of animals to machines, butalso the problemof wherethe machineendedand the animalbegan. The Flute-player did not involvedeception,but it did similarly testthe limitsof mechanization of a processperformed a creature by living (fig.7). the Flute-player a statueof a satyr Outwardly, reproduced byAntoineCoysevoxentitledShepherd to the PlayingtheFlutethat stood in the entrance Tuillerie and is now at the Louvre. The mechanism wasmovedby gardens to two sets of gears.The bottom set turnedan axlewith weightsattached cranks thatpowered threesetsof bellows,leading into threewindpipes, givTheupperset lungsthreedifferent ingthe Flute-player's blowing-pressures. of gearsturneda cylinder with cams,as in the Duck,triggering a frameof leversthat controlledthe Flute-player's fingers,windpipes,tongue, and lips.27The mechanized satyrwasthe firstexampleof whatDiderot's Encyclopediedefined as an "androide,"that is, a human figure performing human functions.28 This meant that the Flute-playerwas not, as people at first believed it must be, a music box with an autonomous mechanism inside and a purely decorativefigureoutside. It played a realflute, blowing airfrom its lungs and exercising soft, flexible fingers, lips, and tongue. It was said that one could even substitute another, similar flute and the Flute-player
27. SeeVaucanson, "AnAccountof the Mechanismof an Automatonor ImagePlayingthe GermanFlute"(1742),LeMecanisme pp. 1o-20. dufluteurautomate, 28. Jeand'Alembert, "Androide" ou dictionnaire raisonne dessciences, des (1751), Encyclopedie, ed. Denis Diderotand d'Alembert, arts,et desmetiers, 17vols. (Paris,1751-72), 1:448.
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Jessica Riskin / Origins of Artificial Life

FLUTEUR DE VAUCANSON
MClangerUI
F I G U R E 7. Diagramof the Flute-player's mechanismdrawnby Vaucanson's Andre biographers, Vaucanson, Doyon and LucienLiaigre.FromDoyon and Liaigre,Jacques p. 81.
would play that one, too.29 To design a machine that played a flute, Vau-
canson studied human flute players in minute detail. He devised various

29. "Onecan substituteanotherflute entirelyin the placeof the one he plays"(Charles surla courde LouisXV,3 vols. [Paris, du Duc de Luynes Philipped'Albert,duc de Luynes,Memoires the Abbe Desfontainesemphasizedthat it was "thefingerspositioned 1860],2:12-13). Similarly, variouslyon the holes of the flute that varythe tones.... In a word arthas done here all that
CriticalInquiry / Summer2003 ways of transmitting aspects of their playing into the design of his android. For example, to mark out measureshe had a flutist play a tune while another person beat time with a sharp stylus onto the rotating cylinder.30 To persuade people that the Flute-playerwas genuinely playing his flute, Vaucanson submitted a memoir explaining its mechanism to the Paris This memoir begins with a theory of the physics of Academy of Sciences.31 sound production in the flute, the firstknown such theory.Vaucanson'sidea was that the pitch of a note depended upon the speed of the air'svibrations as it left the flute. This in turn depended upon three parameters:blowingpressure, the shape of the aperture, and the sounding-length of the flute damping the vibrations, which was determined by the player'sfinger positions. Vaucanson wanted to test the influence of these three parameters on pitch, and his Flute-player was an acoustical experiment; he told the academy that he had investigatedthe "PhysicalCauses"of the modification of sound in the flute "by imitating the same Mechanism in an Automaton."32
As an experiment, the android tested, not only Vaucanson'stheory ofthe acoustics of the flute, but also-in his choice of a subject-the experimental potential of mechanical simulation. Likethe chemical process of digestion, the flute was a deliberatelyunlikely choice for a mechanical imitation. Vaucanson explained that he had chosen the flute because it was unique among wind instruments in having an "undetermined"aperture,which depended upon the position of the player'slips and their situation with respect to the flute's hole. This made flute playing subject to an "infinity"of variations, which he claimed to approximateusing only four parameters.The lips could open, close, drawback from the flute'shole (to approximatetilting the flute outward), and advance toward the hole (to approximate tilting the flute
naturedoes in those who playthe flutewell. Thatis what can be seen and heard,beyond a doubt" sur le flfiteurautomateet l'aristipemoderne,"quoted in JV,p. 50). CLXXX (Desfontaines,"Lettre On audiences'initialdisbeliefthat the Flute-player was actuallyplayinghis flute,see Chapuisand MusicalInstruments, trans.IrisUrwin Droz, Automata, p. 274;AlexanderBuchner,Mechanical dufluteur (London,n.d.), pp. 85-86;and DavidLasocki, prefaceto Vaucanson,LeMecanisme p. [ii]. automate, 30. SeeVaucanson, "AnAccountof the Mechanismof an Automatonor ImagePlayingthe GermanFlute,"pp. 19-20. This processwas the ancestorof the procedureby which the first musicalrecordings weremade,duringthe second and thirddecadesof the twentiethcentury, when pianistssuch as ClaudeDebussy,SergeiRachmaninoff, Arthur GeorgeGershwin, See Larry the Rubinstein,and ScottJoplinmarkedout rollsfor player-pianos. Givens,Re-enacting Artist: A Storyof theAmpico Piano(New York,1970). Reproducing 31. SeeVaucanson,LeMecanisme JV,pp. 70-72,76-80; and Registredes dufluteurautomate; des seancesfor 26 Apr.1739and 30 Apr.1739, Archivesde l'Academiedes Sciences, proces-verbaux Paris. 32. Vaucanson,"AnAccountof the Mechanismof an Automatonor ImagePlayingthe GermanFlute,"p. 1o.
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JessicaRiskin / Originsof ArtificialLife
Vaucanson was able to producethe lowest note by using the inward).33 furtherattenuated weakestblowing-pressure, by passingthrougha large Thehighernotes flute's full and the sounding-length. aperture dampedby smallerapertures, and octavesresultedfrom strongerblowing-pressures, his hypothesis that Theseresultsconfirmed and shortersounding-lengths. and thethreeparameters aperture, soundingtogether-blowing-pressure, length-governed pitch.34 the precisemodid not claimto reproduce Thus,althoughVaucanson choseaninstrument tionsof a humanfluteplayer-indeed, he deliberately able thatinvolved motionshe couldonlyapproximate-hewasnevertheless The Fluteof its natural to discover features to use his simulation subject. imitationand mademanifest both the constraints upon mechanical player its epistemological utilitydespitetheseconstraints. andVauwasanother acoustical ThePipe-and-Tabor experiment, player a of what it to cansonchosethepipe,too, because seemed occupy boundary The pipe, unlikethe flute,had a fixedapone couldimitatemechanically. erture,but it had only threeholes,whichmeantthat the notes wereproofblowing-pressure variations ducedalmostentirely bythe humanplayer's He Vaucanson's and tongue-stops. projectwas to imitatethesesubtleties. a muchgreater foundthathumanpipersemployed rangeof blowing-prestheenormous labor andhe emphasized suresthantheythemselves realized, of leversand springs. involvedin producingeachone by an arrangement alimit, thatseemedto indicate ThePiperalsoyieldeda surprising discovery hadasVaucanson reduction. if not to mechanism, at leastto mechanical sumedthateachnote wouldbe the productof a givenfingerpositioncombut he discoveredthat the bined with a particularblowing-pressure, for a givennote dependedupon the preceding note, so blowing-pressure to producea D afteran E than aftera C, more pressure that it required as notes (see "L," him to havetwiceas manyblowing-pressures requiring morestrongly note resonate of the overtones higher pp. 23-24). (Thehigher in the pipe thanthe lowerovertonesof the lowernote.) Butpipersthemfor this effect,and the physicsof selveswere not awareof compensating von Helmholtz.35 in the 186os was explained overtones by Hermann only
33. Ibid.,pp. 4,16-17. of some contemporary 34. Thiswas in factin conflictwith the recommendations published deniedthat pitchwas controlledby blowing-pressure. flute tutors.JohannQuantz,in particular, zu spielen(Berlin,1752), die Flotetraversiere einerAnweisung SeeJohannJoachimQuantz, Versuch actualpractice.See Lasocki, even about fluteplayers' chap.4. Therewas much disagreement preface,pp. [v-ix]. vonden 35. Hermannvon Helmholtzexplainedthe effectsof partialsin his Die Lehre derMusik(Braunschweig, alsphysiologische 1863).I Grundlagefirdie Theorie Tonempfindungen for helpingme to figureout the causesunderlyingVaucanson's am gratefulto MylesJackson acousticaldiscovery.
Vaucanson's and Thus,likethe Flute-player, Piperwasalsoan experiment, of boththeoryandcommon a successful one;it yieldeda resultindependent
experience.
Philosophesand mechanicians immediately beganto use Vaucanson's automata to gaugethe limitsof the mechanical imitationof life,andin the secondhalf of the centurytheybecamepreoccupied by questionsof posand Their discussion focused sibility impossibility. upon two phenomena that seemedto lie at the crux of the distinctionbetweenanimateand inhumanandnonhuman. Thefirstphenomenon wasperpetual moanimate, tion. Enthusiasm for this problemwassuchthatin 1775 the Paris Academy of Sciences announced it wouldno longerconsider forperpetual proposals motion machines,36 the Aristotelian reaffirming principlethat self-generated motion distinguished the animatefrom the inanimate.The second life was phenomenonthat seemeda crucialtest of the limits of artificial spokenlanguage. In 1738,the Abbe Desfontainespredictedin a reviewof Vaucanson's that the simulationof humanspeechwould proveto be imFlute-player because one couldneverknowprecisely "what possible goeson in thelarynx and glottis... [and]the actionof the tongue,its folds,its movements, its variedandimperceptible allthe modifications of the jawandthe rubbings, wastoo organica processto be simlips"(quotedin IV, p. 162).Speaking ulated.The mechanistmaverickJulienOffrayde La Mettriedisagreed. atVaucanson's he concluded thata speaking machine Looking Flute-player could "nolongerbe regarded as impossible."37
and 178os, severalpeople took up the projectof artificial During the 1770os
namedWolfgang vonKemspeech. Amongthemwasa Hungarian engineer he published a "description of a speaking machine"38 inwhich pelen.In1791, he reported bellowsandresonators to musical instruments havingattached that resembled the humanvoice, such as oboes and clarinets; he had also triedmodifyingvoxhumana organpipes (fig.8). Through twentyyearsof such attempts, he had been sustained must by the convictionthat "speech be imitable." The resultwas a contraption box consistingof a resonating
36. "TheAcademyvoted that henceforthit will not receivenor examineanypaperconcerned with squaringthe circle,trisectingthe angle,duplicatingthe cube, and perpetualmotion, and that this decisionwill be madepublic"(quoted in RogerHahn, TheAnatomyof a Scientific Institution: TheParis Academyof Sciences, 1971], [Berkeley, p. 145). 1666-1803 37. JulienOffrayde LaMettrie,Man a MachineandMan a Plant,trans.Richard A. Watsonand (1748; MayaRybalka Indianapolis, 1994),p. 69. 38. SeeWolfgang von Kempelen,"Dela machineparlante," LeMecanisme de laparolesuivide la description d'unemachine abbreviated "MP." On pp. 394-464;hereafter parlante(Vienna,1791), and others'attemptsto simulatehuman speechin the lastthirdof the eighteenth Kempelen's Instruments and theImagination, century,see Hankinsand Silverman, chap.8, and Riskin, Wetware." "Eighteenth-Century
I:
nT.
h1 )j j
.X
ji
..... ......
FIGU RE
8. Kempelen's speakingmachine. FromWolfgangvon Kempelen,LeMtcanismede la pa-
role,p. 439.
619
with a bellows letting into it on one side, acting as lungs, and a rubber "mouth" on the other side. Inside the box was an ivory reed that Kempelen likened to the human glottis. By means of three levers on the box, two connected with whistles and the third with a wire that could be dropped onto the reed, one could produces Ss, Zs, and Rs. Two little pipes in the lower part of the box served as nostrils ("MP,"p. 405; see pp. 395-400). This machine yielded an empirical finding reminiscent of Vaucanson's discovery that the blowing-pressure for a given note depended upon the preceding note. Kempelen reported that he had first tried to produce each sound in a given word or phrase independently but failed because the successive sounds needed to take their shape from one another: "the sounds of speech become distinct only by the proportion that exists among them, and in the linking of whole words and phrases" ("MP,"p. 401). Like Vaucanson, Kempelen had tried to atomize patterned sound in mechanizing it, and his results, like Vaucanson's,had indicated a particular check on mechanical reduction, namely, that the parts relied upon the pattern, and not just the pattern upon the parts. In general,though, Kempelen'smachine was only moderatelysuccessful. It pronounced vowels and consonants in a childish voice, said words like "'Mama"'and "'Papa,'" and uttered some phrases, such as "'you are my friend-I love you with all my heart"' ("MP,"preface, ?243), "'my wife is and "'come with me to Paris,"' but only indistinctly.40 Its conmy friend,"'39 versation bored Goethe who, after meeting it, pronounced it "not very loquacious."41 Kempelen and his supporters emphasized that the machine was imperfect and claimed that it was not so much a speaking-machine as a machine that demonstrated the possibility of constructing a speakingmachine (see IR, p. 49). Listening to his machine's blurred speech, Kempelenperceiveda further constraint upon the mechanization of language: the reliance of comprehension upon context (see "MP,"p. 401). This observation raised another problem in which he was keenly interested, that is, the possibility of mechanizing thought itself. In a sense, Kempelen had alreadybeen working on
39. KarlGottliebvon Windisch,InanimateReason: or a CircumstantialAccount of that PieceofMechanism, M. de Kempelen's (London,1784),p. 47;hereafter Astonishing Chess-Player IR. abbreviated 40. Strauss,"Automata," p. 123. 41. JohannWolfgang von Goethe,letterto HerzogCarlAugust,12 June1797,quotedin Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and theImagination, p. 196.Several yearslater,Goethesaw Vaucanson's threeautomatain Helmstadtand reportedthat they were "utterly the paralyzed," had fallen"mute,"and the Duck "stilldevouredhis oats brisklyenough,but had lost Flute-player its powersof digestion"(Goethe,Annals,orDay and Year trans.and ed. Charles Papers 1749-1822, New York,1901o], Nisbet [1805; p. 113).
....
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F I G U R E 9. Von Kempelen's chess-playingTurk.From KarlGottliebvan Windisch, sur lejoueurd'echecs Lettres de M. de Kempelen (1783). Courtesyof the Departmentof SpecialCollections,StanfordUniversityLibraries.
this problem. Like Vaucanson, he designed both genuine and fraudulent automata, and he too remains best known for a spectacularlyfraudulent automaton, the chess-playing Turk,built in 1769 and exhibited across Europe and America by Kempelen himself and then by others through 1840 (fig. 9).42 The Turknot only played human opponents, but it also generously corrected their mistakes, and in the course of its long careerit bested Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, and Charles Babbage.43 In
42. On Kempelen's Turk,see CharlesMichaelCarroll,TheGreatChess chess-playing of Automaton Simon Schaffer, Dancerand the Impresarios (New York,1975); "Babbage's in Cultural ed. FrancisSpuffordand Mechanism," Time,and Invention, Babbage: Technology, in TheSciences in Automata," JennyUglow (London,1996),pp. 65-75and "Enlightened ed. WilliamClark,JanGolinksi,and Schaffer(Chicago,1999),pp. 154-64;and Europe, Enlightened TomStandage,TheTurk. TheLifeand Timesof theFamousEighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine(New York,2002). 43. See [GeorgeWalker],"Anatomy of the ChessAutomaton," Fraser's Magazine l9 (June1839): "Dr.Kempelen's Automaton Automata," p. 162;AleckAbrahams, "Enlightened 725;Schaffer, Notesand Queries, 8 Apr.1922,pp. 155-56; and Henry p. 134; Strauss,Automata, Chess-player," Allan Poeand BaronvonKempelen's (Kenton, RidgelyEvans,Edgar Chess-PlayingAutomaton Ohio, 1939),p. 14.
Critical Inquiry / Summer2003
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additionto playingchess,it couldperforma Knight's Tour44 and respond to questionsfromthe audience, out its answers spelling by pointingto letterson a board.45 In the event,the Turk's motionsweredirected by human in its pedestal. thisfraud, like concealed chessplayers ingeniously Although until the middleof the next century,46 was not established Vaucanson's, asa mere"bagatelle" and himselfspokedeprecatingly of theTurk Kempelen in it hadbeen to createan "illueveninsistedthathis majorachievement whichwasfueledby a Yetthis did not detractfromits fascination, sion."47 in life andin its limits. interest both the mechanical simulation of growing the bounds of Evenwhile they insinuatedthat the Turktranscended dumb mechanism, Kempelen's promotersalso arguedthat its interestlay of this same boundaryseparating mere mechanism in its dramatization Karl fromwarmlife.In 1784, a friendof Kempelen's, Gottlieb vonWindisch, attipublishedan accountof the Turkthat epitomizedthis contradictory tude. In his account, entitled InanimateReason, Windischextolledthe Turk'sengagementof the understanding as comparable to Vaucanson's of "the ear." At the same Wintime, however, Flute-player's engagement was "adeception" dischwas also certainthatthe Turk andthat,as such,it did "honorto humannature." Windisch identified two separate "powers," a visible"vismotrix"and a hidden"visdirectrix." And it was Kempelen's abilityto unitethesetwo powers-in otherwords,to carryout the fraudcelebrated as "theboldestideathateverenteredthe brainof thatWindisch
a mechanic" (IR,pp. 39,13,34, v). He admiredKempelen'saccomplishment,
not of an identitybetweenintelligence and machine,but of a connection of betweenintelligence on one side theboundary andmachine on theother. Windisch's of the Turkwas pickedup by latercommentators and analysis remainedinfluentialwell into the followingcentury.In 1819,Babbage Reason to a demonstration of the Turkat broughthis copy of Inanimate in Londonandtook careful notesin its margins, SpringGardens returning In the sameyear,ananonymous laterto playtheTurk.48 reviewer wrotethat
44. A Knight's Tourentailsmoving a knight,startingon anysquareand using the rule governingthe knights'moves,to all the other squaresin successionwithout touchingany square twice. See IR,pp. 23-24, and Observations on theAutomatonChess Now Exhibited in Player, p. 24. London,at4, SpringGardens (London,1819), 45. See IR,pp. 15,18,and Carroll,TheGreatChess Automaton. 46. Forprominentdebunkingsof the Turk,see RobertWillis,An AttempttoAnalysethe AutomatonChess and Edgar Allan Poe, "Maelzel's (London,1821), PlayerofMr.de Kempelen " ed. EdmundClarenceStedmanand GeorgeEdward "Eureka,and Miscellanies, Chess-Player," vols. (New York,1914), o10 Woodberry, 9:173-212. 47. TheHistoryandAnalysisof theSupposed AutomatonChess Now PlayerofM. de Kempelen, in ThisCountry Exhibiting byMr.Maelzel(Boston,1826),p. 5. See also IR,p. lo. "Dr.Kempelen's 48. SeeAbrahams, AutomatonChess-player," and Strauss,"Automata," p. 155, p. 134.
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Jessica Riskin / Originsof ArtificialLife although the Turkmust be directedby "some human agent,"it nevertheless "display[ed] a power of invention as bold and original, as any that has ever been exhibited to the world."49 Defecation and chess playing had something in common: both seemed beyond the bounds of mechanism and therebyprovoked mechanicianswho were interested in testing the limits of their craft to become conjurers. As conjurers,though, they did something of genuine interest:they createdmachines that straddled the breach between the possible and the impossible. In 1836,EdgarAllan Poe wrote admiringlyofVaucanson'sDuck and then used it to examine the plausibility of Kempelen's chess player and of the other automaton then in the news, Babbage'sDifferenceEngine. If the Duck was "ingenious,"he wondered, "what shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can... compute astronomical and navigation tables?" He decided he did believe in the calculating engine because arithmetic,like digestion and flute playing, was "finite and determinate." However, he did not believe in the chess-playing automaton because he said chess was an "uncertain"process.50 Looking over the history of automata since Vaucanson, Poe tried to define a criterion of possibility. Only "determinate"processes, he decided, could be mechanized. To a twenty-first-centuryelectricalengineer or computer scientist, Poe's Why must a machine carry out only a predetermined logic is perplexing.51 sequence of moves?Why could it not respond to each move of its opponent as it went along? It is striking that Poe should have believed this to be impossible. Even at the time he was writing, machines that responded to external conditions by means of feedback loops-thermostats and steam engines, for example-had been in plentiful supply for almost a century (and in existence for much longer). But Poe nevertheless took such responsiveness to be essential to mind and beyond the reach of machine. He was not alone; people began to understand machines that employed what we now call feedback as responsive to their environments only around the two centuries after the proliferation of middle of the twentieth century,52
at 4, SpringGardens, ChessPlayer, Now Exhibited in London, 49. Observations on theAutomaton pp. 30,32. On Poe and the chess-playing 50. Poe, "Maelzel's Turk,see Evans, pp. 176,177. Chess-Player," AllanPoeandBaronvonKempelen's Chess-PlayingAutomaton. Edgar seminarsat of Computers" 51. I am indebtedto the studentsin my 1998and 1999"Prehistory to Poe'sessayand to Deep Blue. MITfor the responsesdescribedin this paragraph the concept of 52. The MITengineerNorbertWienerplayedthe leadingrole in formulating and Communication in theAnimaland the feedback.SeeNorbertWiener,Cybernetics; or,Control Machine(Cambridge, 1948).Forother earlydiscussionsof machinesas informationprocessors "AnImitationof with theirenvironments, see W. GreyWalter, capable,like animals,of interacting 182(May1950): Brain(New York,1953), Life,"ScientificAmerican 42-45 and TheLiving chaps.5 and 7, and Otto Mayr,TheOriginsof Feedback Control (Cambridge, 1970).
623
such machinesduringthe Industrial In the wakeof this conRevolution. artificial that can to ceptualshift, bugs respond noises,suchas the one describedin a passagequotedat the beginningof this essay,haveassumeda thatdefecating Ducksheldin the mid-eighteenth century: they significance an operation-arguablytheoperation-that previously seemedto perform typifylivingcreatures. How peopledistinguish betweenmachineandanimalcapabilities is not determined by the sorts of machinesin existenceat a givenmoment.Inof machinesand of humanshave,since the emerstead,understandings in simulation the of shapedone anotherin earlyeighteenth century, gence the ongoing dialecticthat this essayhas been tracing.When IBM'sDeep BluebeatGary in 1997, mostArtificial researchers and Kasparov Intelligence decidedthatchessplayingdid not require commentators after intelligence allanddeclared a newstandard, theability to playGo.5Others pointto this shiftas evidencethatwe aremovingthe goalpostswith eachnew achievement. But this recentredefinition of intelligence, to excludethe abilityto andthelonghistoryof suchrevisions before feature, playchessas a defining it seemto me ratherto demonstrate the historical of anydefcontingency initionof intelligence andthecomplexity of the forcesthatinteract to shape such definitions.Not only has our understanding of whatconstitutes into what we have been able to make machines telligencechangedaccording do but, simultaneously, our understanding of what machinescan do has alteredaccording to whatwe havetakenintelligence to be. The problemof whatconstitutes actionas measured intelligent against mechanical of themid-to lateeighaction,whichpreoccupied philosophers teenthcentury, wasby no meansof purelyphilosophical Theepisinterest. of thelimitsof mechanical simulation wasinextricably question temological tied to a set of economicandsocialproblems andimplications. WhenVaucansonwasappointed of SilkManufactures in 1741,he onceagain Inspector assumedthat automation was specificto a certaindomainand set out to its boundaries and to reshape industrial around them.4 identify production
53. See, for example,KatieHafner,"Inan AncientGame,Computing's New York Future," Times, iAug. 2002,P .5. 54. Foran argumentthat "beforethinkingof automatingmanuallabor,one must conceiveof thelimbsof man,"see Jean-Claude etses mobiles Beaune,L'Automate mechanically representing careeras his centralcase.He returnsto this (Paris,i980), p. 257. BeaunetakesVaucanson's fromautomatato industrialautomation,simulationto replacement, in "TheClassical trajectory An Impressionistic Age of Automata: Surveyfromthe Sixteenthto the NineteenthCentury," trans.Ian Patterson, in Fragments for a Historyof theHumanBody,ed. MichelFeher,Ramona Naddaff,and NadiaTaxi,3 vols. (NewYork,i989), 1:43i-80. It seems to me however,and I have been arguinghere,thatthe epistemological, technological,and economic aspectsof simulation shapedone another-rather than the epistemological precedingthe technicalthat in turn precededthe economic.Theseelementswereall inextricably presentin the very constitutionof the questionof whatwas essentialto life or of what constitutedintelligentbehavior.
624
Jessica Riskin / Originsof ArtificialLife The result was a transformedunderstandingof the nature of human labor. This understandingderived from a new way of drawingthe distinction between intelligent and unintelligent work, locating the divide somewhere along a spectrum from intelligenthuman at one end, throughless intelligent human in the middle, and arrivingat the other end in machinery. In other words, in political economy, as in experimental philosophy, the firstexperiments in automation were devoted to determining its uppermost limits, which simultaneously meant identifying the lowest limits of humanity. Vaucanson did not think, for example, that automation was relevant to the biggest problem confronting French textiles, which was the difficulty of procuring good primary material domestically. In the case of silk, the primary material was the long fibers drawn from cocoons and reeled into thread. Silkthread availableon the domestic marketwas so poor that Frenchmanufacturersoften had to import their threadfrom Piedmont. Orry, the finance minister who had recruited Vaucanson, was especially worried about Italian competition in silk. So Vaucanson'sfirst effort as silk inspector was directed at improving domestic primarymaterial (see JV,pp.
142-45).
His diagnosis was that silk reelingwas a delicate and skilledjob, requiring workers to adapt themselves to the quality of individual cocoons. But Frenchpeasantswho raisedsilkwormsgenerallytook the cocoons to market and sold or traded them to merchants and artisansof all types. These people would then reel the silk themselves or hire peasant women to do it. Vaucanson complained that "everyoneindiscriminatelywants to reel silk without reason or knowledge."To remedy this situation, he proposed to educate a population of expert tireuses,women trained in silk reeling, and to establish standards. He would accomplish both by creating a company of silk merchant-manufacturers, who would in turn establish seven factories, where comprising a Royal Manufacture guaranteedby the Royal Treasury, silk would be reeled under ideal conditions. The factories would serve as "seminaries"for silk reeling (JV,pp. 456,462). CharlesGillispiehas pointed out that this was an early example of a combination that would be characteristic of the post-Revolutionary French economy: expert consulting, But at the same private money, and government guaranteeand oversight.55 time it representedthe reverse of another subsequent trend, the deskilling of factory work through mechanization. Vaucanson'sautomatic loom, discussed below, was an early example of that. But the Royal Manufacture,on the contrary,was a program to industrialize skill.
55. See CharlesCoulstonGillispie,Science andPolityat theEndof the OldRegime(Princeton, N. J.,198o),p. 416.
CriticalInquiry / Summer2003 This program proved ill-fated. Establishedby a regulation of the city of Lyon in 1744, the Royal Manufacture was instantly embroiled in a fierce strugglebetween the roughly 250 silk merchant-manufacturersof Lyonand the roughly 3,000 master workerswho ran their shops and who sometimes succeeded in setting up their own (there were about 160 independent shops in 1744). The workers had recently won a repeal of certain merchant-manufacturer monopolies, increasing their chances of becoming independent. Vaucanson wanted the cooperation of the merchant-manufacturers,so he restoredtheir monopolies and provoked a silk-workers'strikeaccompanied by some of the worst pre-Revolutionary rioting of the century. He was forced to flee Lyon in the dead of night, disguised as a monk, and the regulation was annulled (see JV, pp. 191-203). Back in Paris, Vaucanson turned his attention from education to automation and from silk reeling to weaving. His efforts culminated in the automatic loom of 1747,which is now at the Musee des Arts et Metiers in Paris (fig. 1o). The loom looks in retrospectlike a very differentsort of automaton, intended for utility ratherthan mimesis. However,this distinction, between machines designed to replace human or animal functions and machines designed to simulate aspects of human or animal life, is misleading when applied to the earlyhistory of artificiallife. Forone thing, most earlyprojects in artificiallife combined the pragmatic with the mimetic (just as, we have seen, these projects represented other distinctively Enlightenment combinations, such as experiment and entertainment, philosophy and entrepreneurialism). Automaton makersdesigned simulations for specific,practical uses. Vaucanson's "moving anatomies," mechanical models of bodily processes such as respiration and circulation, were intended for physiological experimentation and to test medical therapies such as bleeding.56The Jaquet-Droz family borrowed devices and materials from their automata to construct prosthetic limbs.57Reciprocally,the mimesis involved in automata often served an experimental function, as has been most strikinglyapparent in Vaucanson'sandroid musicians. One might be tempted to distinguish mimetic from pragmatic devices by their outward resemblance to their natural subjects, but in fact some devices designed for particularuses, such as the Jaquet-Drozfamily'spros56. On Vaucanson's For moving anatomies,see JV,pp. ino,18,34,and chap.5, and "EV," 2:655. other examplesof moving anatomies,see FrancoisQuesnay,Essaiphisique sur l'oeconomie animale (Paris,1736),pp. 219-23,and Doyon and Liaigre, compareedu biomecanismeet de "Methodologie la mecaniquecomparee," pp. 298-99. See also Riskin,"Eighteenth-CenturyWetware." 57. On the Jaquet-Droz and F-Louis Perrot,Les family'sprostheses,see CharlesPerregaux et Leschot (Neuchatel,1916),pp. 31-36,89-91,1oo-111, 140;Strauss,"Automata," p. Jaquet-Droz and Riskin,"Eighteenth-Century Wetware." og9;
625
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F I G U R E 10. Vaucanson's automaticloom. FromClaudetteBalpe,"Vaucanson, mecanicienet montreurd'automates," La Revue,no. 20 (Sept. 1997):36.
thetic limbs, closely resembled their natural subjects, while some designed for the sake of imitation and experimentation, such as Kempelen'stalking machine, did not. That the simulation of appearanceand of function came in various combinations was an expression of the experimental impetus
627
behind projects in artificiallife. Automaton designers used their devices to study the relations between the outer and the inner: form and process, bodily movement and physiology, action and thought. Even when a simulation was purely functional, with no attempt to reproduce the outward appearanceof the naturalmodel, it provokedthe same kind of philosophical speculation as mimetic machines; Kempelen'stalking machine is one example, and the automatic loom provides another. The loom did not reproduce the motions of a human weaver in the way that the Flute-playerenacted those of a human flutist. However, it took over a function that had hitherto been, not only human, but highly skilled:the weaving of patterned fabrics. On that basis, its designer and other commentators drew from it the same sorts of implications regardingthe nature of human life, work, and intelligence that they drew from android automata. The fact that a machine could do this human job belonged, for them, in the same category as the fact that a machine could play a musical instrument. Whether the machine performs the function in the same way as human beings perform it is a more recent worry. We take it for granted that machines can replace a greatvariety of human functions without actuallysimulating human performances of them and that functional replacements of human activities do not have the same implications for how we understand But in the earlydays of artificial those activities as simulations would have.58 life the mere fact that a machine could carry out a complex human activity had the same salience as a mimetic automaton; it could serve as evidence for a materialist-mechanist understanding of life, and, at the same time, it could provoke a rethinking of the boundary dividing humanity from machinery. The automatic loom constituted just such a provocation. The loom was a close cousin of Vaucanson'sthree automata;it was built
58. A recentinstallationby the BelgianartistWim Delvoyemakesmanifestthe current willingnessto separatefunctionalfrom mimetic simulation.Cloaca, Delvoye'sdigestingand bench,with a systemof tubesand pumpsleading defecatingmachine,looks like a laboratory vats containingenzymes,bacteria,acids,and bases.SeeWim througha seriesof six transparent New and Improved (New York,2001). Despitethe fact Delvoye,Cloaca(Ghent,2000) and Cloaca, that his machineis a purelyfunctionalsimulation,Delvoyeinsiststhat its purposeis solelyartistic and in no way experimental. Thus functionalsimulationshave,in the earlytwenty-first century, assumedthe role that clockworkamusementssuch as de Caus'sbirds,which reproduced only externalbehaviorand not inner function,playedduringthe seventeenth.At that time, the simulationof inner functiondid not yet commandphilosophicalinterest,and automatonmakers confinedtheireffortsto reproducing animals'outwardbehaviorsfor artisticpurposes.Now, the simulationof inner functionis familiarenough that,exceptin the contextof mentalprocesses,its philosophicalinteresthas waned.Perhapsfor this reasonfunctionalsimulationscan become purelyartisticprojectsthe way clockworkamusementsonce were.In between,however, automatonmakersand commentatorswerekeenlyinterestedin the relationsbetweenoutward and inner function;thus theireffortsto reproduceeachwere as inseparable as were appearance the artistic,technological,and philosophicalcomponentsof theirwork.
628
and it workedsimilarly. A rotating artisans, by the sameParisian cylinder was perforated It to the to be woven. turned pattern againsta according frameof horizontal needlesconnected to vertical cordscomingup fromthe Thespacesin the cylinder needles warp-threads. pushedthecorresponding whilethe holes allowedthem to remainin place.The needlesreforward, to the corresponding cords,werethenraised mainingin place,attached by a bar,raisingthe selectedwarp-threads.59 an ox, an assmakes boastedthatwith his machinea "horse, Vaucanson fabricsmuch morebeautifuland much moreperfectthanthe most clever workersof silk."He imaginedan animistfactoryin which "one sees the ... the warp fabricweaveitselfon the loom withouthumanintervention itselfthrough, thereedpoundsthecloth,thecloth opens,the shuttlepropels rollsitselfonto the cylinder." Theseclaimswerequotedin an enthusiastic reviewof the loom in November 1745in the Mercurede France(JV,p. 210). to hisbiographers, Vaucanson wantedto eliminate thesilkworkAccording erswho hadrunhim out of town.60 Butthefullstorywasmorecomplicated. Vaucanson's automatic simulation of a weaver, was loom, his functional the categories andunintelligent of intelligent work. intendedto transform a identified Frederick WinslowTaylor's methods,Vaucanson Anticipating to set of tasksgenerally takento requireintelligence but which,according even a very him, need not.61Anyhumanactivitythat couldbe simulated, VauThe "reading of designs," complexone, did not requireintelligence. in cansonnoted,was "theoperationthat demandsthe most intelligence" or to "It is so difficult it three four that requires years silk-production. became"sosimplethat learn." But,on the automatic loom, this operation is to know how to count to ten."Thusthe ... the only sciencerequired could be "substituted for those who "mostlimitedpeople,"even "girls,"
... [are] more intelligent, [and] demand a higher salary"(quoted in JV,pp.
468-69).
constituted neither A hybridentity,the loom andits "limited" operator inertmachinenor full human.Thehybridwasthe productof a newprinto whichone measured humanlabor,not cipleof classification, according only againstotherhumanlabor,but alsoin relationto workthatcouldbe done by a machine. This taxonomicprincipleworkedto transforma
59. SeeJV,pp. 206,225-35;Almut Bohnsack,DerJacquard-Webstuhl (Munich,1993),pp. 27-28; Vaucanson Conservatoire Nationaldes Artset Metiers,Jacques (exhibitioncatalogue,Musee "Industrial Nationaldes Techniques, Mechanization," Paris,1983),p. 16;and Garanger, pp. 179-81. sous l'impressionprofondedes evenementsde Lyon,il va montrer,et avecquel 60. "Encore brio, qu'il est possiblede se passerd'un grandnombred'ouvriers pour actionnerles metiersdes canutslyonnais"(JV,p. 208). 61. ForTaylor's applicationof the distinctionbetweenintelligentand unintelligentwork,see WinslowTaylor,ThePrinciples Frederick (New York,1911), chap.2. of Scientific Management
629
in place.Vaucanson did not inventthe divisionof workers schemealready into the intelligent andunintelligent. political Contemporary economyrelied on this demarcation and other,similarones. The French Physiocrats' between of economicreform,for example, restedon a distinction program Theparticular discrimination and"'sterile" workers. between ('productive" was the of the and work central to social hierarchy intelligent unintelligent Old Regime.Diderot'sEncyclop6iie defined artistas the name given to the mostintelligence, in the mechanical workers artswhoseworkrequired the leastintelligence.6 Butby making while the workof artisans required the uncertainboundarybetweenhuman and machinethe centerof the spectrumof labor,and populatingthis borderregionwith hybridscomVaucanson redefined the andlimitedhumans, prisedof complexmachines old categories. cameto seemlesshumanandothersmore humanoccupations Certain to whatmachines couldandcouldnot do. Forexample, human,according madeit possibleto automate cerwhen the sophisticated use of camshafts becameunintelligent tain kindsof patterned workmovements, weaving Vaucansondemoted the readingof designs,which had been the most intelligentwork,to the verybottom of the hierarchy-but the comparativelylowlytaskof silk reelingremaineda matterof humanskillandwas therefore elevated to a higherposition.6Artificial life andartificial intellievenas they genceimpliednew meaningsfor reallife andrealintelligence, took reallife and realintelligence to were shapedby whattheirdesigners Dastonhasobserved thatcalculation was be. Alongthe samelines,Lorraine demotedat the beginningof the nineteenthcenturyfrombeingparadigand therefore the antithesis of matic of intelligenceto being mechanical If a machinecould calculate, then somethingelse-say, deintelligence.M of humanintelligence. cisionmakingor language-must be emblematic was preceded This development a and by century a halfof reevaluation
in Encyclop6die, 62. See "Artisan" and "Artiste," and 1:745.See alsoWilliamH. Sewell,Jr.,Work Revolution in France: TheLanguage 1980), P. 23. of Labor from theOldRegimeto1848(Cambridge, 63. Schaffer has writtenthat "enlightened scienceimposeda divisionbetweensubjectsthat could be automatedand those reservedfor reason.Sucha contrastbetweeninstinctualmechanical laborand its rationalanalysisaccompaniedprocessesof subordinationand rule"(Schaffer, Automata," p. 164). I would add to this the suggestionthatthe divisionwas a "Enlightened dynamicone, continuallyredrawn throughan interactionamong the naturalsciences,moral philosophy,technology,and politicaleconomy.At some moments in this ongoing process,reason lay on the oppositeside of the line frommachinery,and instincton the same side. But at other moments a rationalprocesssuch as readingfabricpatternslandedon the side of machinery, while an intuitiveprocesssuch as makingthe subtleadaptations to reelsilkproperlyremained required the provinceof human beings. 64. See Lorraine Critical Daston, "Enlightenment Calculations," Inquiry21 (Autumn1994):
182-202.
630
Riskin / Originsof ArtificialLife Jessica of human versus machine capabilities. Early designers of calculating machines defined human intelligence by contrast with what they believed machines could do, while at the same time their assumptions about what machines could do were shaped and reshaped by contrast with what they took human intelligence to be. Consider the divisions of labor they drew. Blaise Pascal placed the line between judgment, which he assigned to the human operator of his mechanical calculator,and memory, which he said the machine would supply.65 G. W. Leibniz,and later CharlesBabbage,both took computation itself to be the antithesis of intelligent work. Leibnizsaid it was "unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation."66 And Babbageplaced computation at the bottom of a tripartite hierarchy into which he divided the making of tables. The top of the hierarchy,establishing the formulas, had to be the work of "eminent mathematicians."The second level, working out how to apply the formulas to a given calculation, required"considerableskill."And the third, carryingout the actual calculations, required so little ability that Babbage believed it could be done by his calculating engines. He attributed this "division of mental labor"to the French engineer GaspardRiche de Prony,who in turn said he had been inspired by Adam Smith's description of pin making, which had indicated to de Prony that he could reduce table making to operations simple enough that they could be performed by unskilledworkers-as it happened, de Prony hired hairdressersleft unemployed by the transformed hairstyle of the post-Revolutionary era-and their ability to do the job implied for Babbagethat a machine could do it, too.67 The social, the epistemological, and the economic dimensions of determinations of intelligence were everywhereinseparable.The two categories, human and artificialintelligence, natural and synthetic life, continually resurle sujetde la machine 65. SeeBlaisePascal,"Lettre dedicatoirea Monseigneurle Chancelier nouvellementinventeeparle sieurB.P.pour fairetoutes sortesd'operationsd'arithmetique parun a ceux qui aurontcuriositede voir mouvementreglesansplume ni jetons, avecun avisnecessaire ed. Bookin Mathematics, laditemachineet s'en servir"(1645),trans.L.LelandLocke,in A Source DavidEugeneSmith (1929; New York,1959),p. 169. in qua non additiotantumet subtractio arithmetica 66. GottfriedWilhelmLeibniz,"Machina sed et multiplicationullo, divisiovero paenenullo animilaboreperagantur" (1685),trans.Mark Bookin Mathematics, Kormes,in A Source p. 181. andManufactures 67. CharlesBabbage,TheEconomy (1822),TheWorks of Charles of Machinery See Daston, vols. (London,1989),8:136,137. ed. MartinCampbell-Kelly, o10 Babbage, A Historyof andWilliamAspray,Computer: and Campbell-Kelly Calculations," "Enlightenment theInformation Machine(New York,1996),chap.1.The tableswere computedby the method of the relevanttheorembeing that for a polynomialof degreen, the nth differenceis a differences, notions of human and machineintelligenceand mentallabor,see also constant.On Babbage's 21 Schaffer, Inquiry Calculating Enginesand the FactorySystem,"Critical "Babbage's Intelligence: zur in EcceCortex: and "OKComputer," Dancer," (Autumn1994):203-27,"Babbage's Beitrage ed. MichaelHagner(Gottingen,1999). Geschichte desmodernen Gehirns,
CriticalInquiry / Summer2003 defined one another by opposition. And, yet, the driving force behind the projects of artificiallife was the assumption that life could be simulated and that the simulations would be useful by being analogous to naturallife, not by being its antithesis. So these categories reallyredefined one another,not only by opposition, but also by analogy, and the early history of artificial life was driven by two contradictory forces:the impulse to simulate and the conviction that simulation was ultimately impossible. Each new simulation implied a new territory beyond the reach of imitation. Vaucanson promised that his automatic loom would open vast "new fields ... to the genius of fabric-designers"(quoted in JV,p. 471).Carrying automation to its limit on one side of the boundary would expand the horizons, on the other side, of genius. This notion of machinery on one side of the boundary and genius on the other brings up another dimension of the investigation of the limits of artificiallife, its aesthetic dimension. Vaucanson's automatic musicians set off a discussion of whether artistic creativity could be automated. In 1772,a skeptic observed that "ever since M. de Vocanson caused a piece of wood dressed as a man to play a flute-concert," simulating the motions of music making had been possible, but, he continued, "I defy M. de Vocanson and all the machinists on earth to make an artificialface that expressesthe passions, because to expressthe passions of the soul, one must have a soul" (quoted in JV, p. 56 n. 13). On the other hand, two years later, Pierre Jaquet-Droz designed a "Lady-Musician,"a harpsichordist, whose eyes followed her fingers and whose breast heaved with the music (fig. 11).68She gave so titillating an impression of the bodily manifestation of powerful emotion that she seemed to confirm LaMettrie's argument that the passions and the artistic creativity they fueled were, of all human attributes,the most mechanical.69 Vaucanson'sproject to identify the boundaries of artificiallife was pursued after his death. In his eulogy of Vaucanson, Condorcet proposed a redefinition of the "mechanician" as one who made machines "execute operations that we were obliged, before him, to entrust to the intelligence of men" ("EV,"2:649). But an 1820treatise on mechanical simulation took Vaucanson'sachievements to represent an outer limit, stating that the only
68. On the Jaquet-Droz see Chapuisand Gelis,LeMondedesautomates, Lady-musician, 2:270de la 78;Chapuisand Droz,Automata, pp. 280-81;and Comitedes Fetesdu 25oeanniversaire naissancede PierreJaquet-Droz LesOeuvres desJaquet-Droz, et Montres, Pendules, (1721-1790), Automates (LaChaux-de-Fonds, 1971). 69. "Ifwhat thinksin my brainis not a partof thatvital organ,and consequentlyof the whole body,why does my blood heat up when I am lying tranquillyin bed thinking.... Askthis of men, of greatpoets, of those who areravished sentiment,who are imaginative by a well-expressed transported by an exquisitetaste,by the charmsof nature,truth,or virtue!"(LaMettrie,Man a MachineandMan a Plant,pp. 63-64).
631
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"vital functions that mechanics [could] imitate" were respiration and digestion.70With the elaboration of artificiallife in the century afterVaucanet theatrales, vol. 8 of Traite de mecanique imitatives 70. J.A. Borgnis,Des machines complet aux arts(Paris,1820), p. 118. appliquee
633
son's automata, natural philosophers and engineers became continually more interested in its limits. In 1854,Helmholtz criticized what he took to be an earlier tendency in the mechanical arts to consider "no problem beyond its power." He called Vaucanson's Duck "the marvel of the last century,"but he observed that after Vaucanson people had stopped trying to build multiply imitative automata that would "fulfilthe thousand services required of one man" and had turned instead to building machines that would perform only one service, but in performing it would "occupy. .. the place of a thousand men."71 This formula encapsulated the conflicting impulses that had informed Vaucanson's career and the early history of artificial life and intelligence more generally.Artificiallife could be hugely powerful, Helmholtz advised, but only if it were sharply restricted. The contradictory convictions-that one could understand life and intelligence by reproducingthem, on the one hand, and that life and intelligence were defined precisely by the impossibility of reproducing them, on the other-went into operation in the early part of the eighteenth century. They worked in continual engagement with philosophical developments such as the rise of a materialismthat coexisted with a profound ambivalenceabout mechanist explanations of nature;with culturalfactors,notably the emergence of a public for popular science, eager to witness the quandaries of natural philosophy dramatized;with technological innovations, principallythe automatic loom; with social taxonomies like the Old Regime distinction between artists (intelligent) and artisans (unintelligent); and with economic projects such as industrial rationalization. The resultwas a continual redrawingof the boundarybetween human and machine and redefinition of the essence of life and intelligence. Insofar as we are still, in discussions of modern technologies from robotics to cloning, redrawingthe same boundary and reevaluatingits implications for the nature of life, work, and thought, we are continuing a project whose rudiments were established two and a half centuries ago by the defecating Duck that didn't.
71. Helmholtz,"Onthe Interactionof NaturalForces"(1854), trans.JohnTyndall,Popular Lectures on Scientific trans.H. W. Eveet al. (1873; New York, Subjects, 1895),pp. 137,138.

Jessica Riskin The Defecating Duck

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Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

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