- Stewart Brand, ‘Theory of Game Change’, in The New Games Book, ed. Andrew Fluegleman (San Francisco: New Games Foundation, 1976), 137.
- John von Neumann cited in Sylvia Nassar, A Beautiful Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 84.
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 16.
- Two recent examples include Any-Space-Whatever, organised by Nancy Spector at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (October 2008-January 2009), and The Art of Participation, organised by Rudolf Frieling at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (November 2008-February 2009).
- Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Presses du Reel, 2002), 27.
- Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110, Fall 2004, 51–79. Bishop uses Mouffe and Laclau's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to interrogate what she sees as Bourriaud's (and others’) misreading of poststructuralist theory in the context of curatorial practice: that the notion of interpretation as ‘open to continual reassessment’ is confused with the idea that ‘the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux’ (52).
- The same could be said for its impact on the humanities, especially with regards to its legacy in rationalchoice theory. For example, see the proceedings of a conference sponsored by the Modern Thought and Literature program at Stanford University (www.stanford.edu/group/RCTandHumanities/).
- Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 44.
- See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Network (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). I'm indebted to extensive discussions with Turner about the game-theoretic turn of mid-twentieth-century ‘visual culture’ and the question of interdisciplinarity as it is organised around models derived from systems and operational analysis.
- Stewart Brand, The New Games Book, 8. While Brand was one of many figures involved in New Games, he was by no means its founder. The work of Bernie de Koven, Pat Farrington, and George Leonard was critical to the success of the New Games Movement, which continues today in fractured form.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 9.
- Ibid.
- Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi advances a compelling argument on the Cold War avant-garde in her book on nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of Thermonuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). See, in particular, her chapter, ‘Faith and Insight in War Gaming’, 149–80. For a fascinating account that treats simulation relative to civil defence (and thus bears implications for The New Games Foundation and its appeal to everyday citizens), see Tracy Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). In the culture of post-war gaming, one must also acknowledge, if in passing, the experiments in World Game Design proposed by Buckminster Fuller. Fuller and Brand's relationship has been extensively discussed. For her important new research that discusses Fuller's World Game Design and attends to the totalising dimension of his ecology, see Felicity D. Scott, ‘The Environmentality Game’, paper presented at the Clark/Getty Workshop Art and Environment, Getty Research Institute, 20 February 2009.
- The art-critical notion of interactivity, which has been banalised to mean any artwork in which an audience might actively ‘interface’ with the object (and hence participate in its perpetual reconstitution), is typically treated in democratising terms. The ‘art of participation’ means that the artwork no longer sits at an aesthetic remove from its audience and that the artist allegedly no longer maintains authority over its meaning. This perspective is forcefully challenged by, and chimes with, Claire Bishop's critique of the ‘creative misreading’ performed on poststructuralist theories of authorship by contemporary curators of ‘relational aesthetics’ (see note 6). My point here is that a theory of interactivity and the artwork as necessarily democratising needs to accommodate the more historical implications relative to systems analysis and cybernetics, where various and often competing notions of interactivity are elaborated.
- Stewart Brand, ‘Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums’, Rolling Stone, 7 December 1972, reprinted in The New Games Book, 138. For a discussion of this essay as it paves the way to the cyberculture of the following decades, see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 116–7.
- Consider the description of game theory that Shaun P. Hargreaves-Heap and Yanis Varoufaki give in their book Game Theory: A Critical Text, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2004). The book's back cover reads, ‘Game theory now provides the theoretical underpinning for most areas of economics. Moreover it has spread fast to other disciplines, energized by claims that it represents an opportunity to unify the social sciences, to found a national theory of society on a common bedroom of methodological individualism.’ Also of great relevance here (if precisely from a game-theoretic perspective) is Varoufaki's ‘Modern and Postmodern Challenges to Game Theory’, Erkenntnis 38, no. 3, May 1993, 371–404. Elsewhere, Varoufaki has argued that postmodernism ultimately serves the orthodoxy of neoclassical economics.
- ‘Rationality’ has become among the most vexed issues within the discourses of game theory. For example, in an early paper for RAND, Thomas Schelling questioned the application of ‘rational strategies’ to non-zero-sum games, that is games involving co-operation and mutual dependence—the basis for his subsequent work on international relations. See T. C. Schelling ‘Prospectus for a Reorientation of Game Theory’, P-1491, The RAND Corporation, 17 September 1951, 1–2. Note also the question of irrationality in among the most famous game-theoretic scenarios, the ‘Prisoner's Dilemma’.
- For instance, in the founding text of cybernetics, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948), Norbert Wiener is vehement about the larger implications of game theory, the market, and the alleged rationality of its players, taking von Neumann especially to task. Wiener notes, ‘Naturally, von Neumann's picture of the player as a completely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction and a perversion of the facts’ (159). For his part, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who aggressively laid claim to the historic priority of his ‘General System Theory’ against Wiener's example, likewise inveighed against the self-interested and rational agent of game theory. ‘Game theory’, he noted, ‘was hopefully applied to war and politics; but one hardly feels that it has led to an improvement of political decisions and the state of the world: a failure not unexpected when considering how little the powers that be resemble the “rational” players of game theory’. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (New York: George Brazillier, 1968), 23. What both positions underscore is the not insignificant fact that game theory's terms are not ideologically congruent with either cybernetics or general systems theory.
- See Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn. Fred Kaplan's The Wizards of Armageddon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983) is the standard reference on RAND and the culture of the think tank. Also, see the more recent text, Alex Albella's Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire (New York: Harcourt, 2008).
- A productive argument to this end is S. M. Amadae, Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Amadae's thesis is directed specifically to the work of Kenneth J. Arrow, James M. Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and William H. Riker. It describes the evolutions of their thoughts relative to debates on individual versus collective agency against the historical backdrop of totalitarianism in the 1930s followed by the Cold War. For my purposes, her reading of Kenneth J. Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values (New York, London, Sydney: John Wiley and Sons, 1951), particularly its groundbreaking contribution of Arrow's ‘Impossibility Theorem’, is especially critical.
- The canonical text here is Kenneth J. Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values.
- This is an insight from an episode titled ‘Fuck You, Buddy’ in the BBC-produced documentary, The Trap, which in part narrates the rise of neo-liberalism in the UK through terms established in game-theoretic discourse around the Cold War. Directed by Adam Curtis and broadcast in 2007, this episode highlights the relationship between Thatcher's neo-liberal revolution and the public-choice theory of James Buchanan.
- It is through his formulation of communicative action in particular that Habermas's relationship to game theory has been understood as most proximate. On this relationship, see James Johnson, ‘Habermas on Strategic and Communicative Action’, Political Theory 19, no. 2, May 1991, 181–201. Johnson's essay attempts to understand the relationship between strategic action and communicative action in Habermas relative to its game-theoretic implications, though he notes that Habermas's critical theory might seem at a radical remove from game theory. As Johnson notes, Habermas himself acknowledged the potential utility of game theory ‘for studying strategic interaction’ (182). One must also acknowledge Habermas's confrontation with Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems in Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (New York: Beacon Press, 1975).
- See Shaun P. Hargreaves-Heap and Yanis Varoufaki, Game Theory: A Critical Text, 27.
- William Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma (Anchor: New York, 1993), 62. Poundstone's is an exceptionally clear, non-technical introduction to game theory, detailing its emergence in relation to the life of John von Neumann.
- Shaun P. Hargreaves-Heap and Yanis Varoufaki, Game Theory: A Critical Text, 3.
- The groundbreaking essays that at once depart from and correct von Neumann's example are John Nash's ‘The Bargaining Problem’ and ‘Non-Cooperative Games’, both reprinted in Classics in Game Theory, ed. Harold Kuhn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). It is the later essay, originally published in 1950, that takes a more oppositional stance to von Neumann (14–26).
- Shaun P. Hargreaves-Heap and Yanis Varoufaki, Game Theory, 26.
- Ibid., 28.
- Ken Binmore's Game Theory and the Social Contract: Playing Fair (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7; my emphasis. These ideas are explored further in Binmore's subsequent Game Theory and the Social Contract: Just Playing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 3.
- The foundational text on the issue of periodisation and postmodernism is Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 4.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 14.
- Ibid., 8.
- Ibid., 38.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 11.
- Ibid., 11e, no. 23, original emphasis.
- In his most important work, The Differend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and the series of conversations with Jean-Loup Thebaud published as Just Gaming (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), Lyotard expands upon the fuller implications of the language-game and the ‘heterogeneous genres of discourse’ through the differend: the condition in which ‘phrases in dispute’ produce a new philosophy for conceiving of politics. On this note, I need to acknowledge a conversation with Thierry de Duve (21 February 2009, Getty Research Institute) regarding Lyotard's Kantianism. De Duve suggested that The Postmodern Condition was, in fact, something of a ‘one-off’ for its author, in part due to its status as a commissioned text for the Canadian government. The observation is consistent with many thinkers on Lyotard, who regard the text as relatively incidental within his oeuvre. Be that as it may, it does not disqualify the importance of this text within debates on postmodernism and its peculiar reception in art history. In retrospect, one could argue that Lyotard has provided the reader with a shorthand for what is later extensively elaborated in The Differend.
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 10.
- Ibid., 88 n 33.
- Ibid., 16.
- Ibid.
- Öyvind Fahlström, ‘Take Care of the World’, in Manifestoes: A Great Bear Pamphlet, ed. Alison Knowles (New York: Great Bear Press, 1966), 9.
- I borrow the term ‘geopoetics’ from Jean-François Chevrier's essay on Fahlström, ‘Another Space for Painting: Concrete Lyricism and Geopoetics’, in Öyvind Fahlström: Another Space for Painting (Barcelona: MACBA, 2001), 8–30.
- For example, see Öyvind Fahlström, ‘Breeze’, reprinted in Öyvind Fahsltröm: Another Space for Painting, 118–21.
- On these debates, see my ‘Eros and Technics and Civilization’, in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 4–34.
- Antonio Sergio Bessa provides a thorough and fascinating account of Fahlström's semiotic investigations in Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Here, he positions the artist specifically in relation to the movements of concrete poetry in Brazil, particularly the work of the Noigrandes group and Eugen Grominger. By citing Haroldo de Campos's essay, ‘Concrete Poetry: Language-Communication’, Bessa's reading suggests a cybernetic interpretation of concrete poetry that converges with Fahlström's subsequent investigations into gaming. He argues that De Campos acknowledges the work of Sessue Hayakawa, W. Sluckin, and Juergen Ruesch, among other well-known figures in cybernetic circles, in the making of a poem through the process of feedback (23–4).
- Öyvind Fahlström, ‘Statement for Venice Biennale’ (1966), in Öyvind Fahlström: Another Space for Painting, 173.
- Öyvind Fahlström, ‘Manipulating the World’ (1964), in Öyvind Fahlström (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1982), 45.
- Öyvind Fahlstrom, ‘On Monopoly Games’, in ibid., 82.
- For example, see his World Map (1972) in Öyvind Fahlström: Another Space for Painting, 250–1.
- Öyvind Fahlström, ‘On Monopoly Games’, 82.
- Ibid.
- Designed by Hans Goldschmidt, Theodore J. Gordon, and Olaf Helmer. The original patent for the game is available online (www.freepatentsonline.com/3473802.html). Helmer, a mathematician and logician, was the inventor of the Delphi method of technological forecasting and became a central figure in the development of futures studies. He was also among the first researchers to join the RAND Corporation, arriving around 1946 and leaving in 1968 to form his own institute of Futures Studies. My thanks to Amy Balkin and Josh On for introducing me to this game as well as for shared discussions around games, cybernetics, and game theory, and the important role of Stafford Beer in his capacity as systems-management consultant to Salvador Allende shortly before Pinochet's coup in 1973.
- Some of these associations would include John Chamberlain's tenure at RAND and Richard Serra's work with Kaiser Steel in the production of his famous Skullcracker series.
- Öyvind Fahlström, ‘Cold War Game Painting’, in Öyvind Fahsltröm: Another Space for Painting, 169, my emphasis.
- Öyvind Fahlström, in Öyvind Fahlström: Another Space for Painting, 174.
- Öyvind Fahlström, ‘Opera’, in ibid., 40.
- Ibid., 47.
- See note 46.
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 2.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 10, 2009 - Issue 1: The Conference Issue