Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology

National Review, March 23, 1998 by James Gardner

Mr. Gardner is NR's art critic.

DAVID Gelernter cares more passionately about everything than most of us do about anything. Such is the catholicity of his concerns that nothing escapes for long the bear-hug of his conviction, not even things that the rest of us accept with relative passivity. You know he means it when he asserts that "today's TV comedy [is] less funny than Sid Caesar's in the 1950s," that Frank Lloyd Wright was "the greatest architect of the century," and that "Liquor brings out the worst in us. TV does too, and so do computers."

In similar terms Mr. Gelernter, a cultural critic and professor of computer science at Yale, takes on the cybernetic revolution in Machine Beauty. Indeed, his latest book is nothing less than a lively attempt to expose the soft and subjective underbelly of scientific advance. Most technocrats believe that progress consists in the disinterested discovery and application of scientific laws. Mr. Gelernter, by contrast, cares about "machine beauty," that is, the physical and technological elegance of the machine itself. This essentially personal and emotional preoccupation is, he believes, "the driving force behind technology and science." At the same time, "machine beauty bothers us. We act as a society as if our goal were not to nurture or celebrate it but to stamp it out." As a result, "We guide our technology enterprises badly." In considering this idea of machine beauty, Mr. Gelernter has included informative chapters on the development of the desktop computer, on software (which he sees as a virtual machine), and on what the future holds for the desktop. And yet even when his writing becomes a little technical, Mr. Gelernter is ever and always composing an essay on the aesthetics of taste.

Now, there is a peculiar conservatism to Mr. Gelernter's taste, an implicit antagonism to the computer culture of which he is so much a part. He reveals a general distrust of postmodernism in culture and postindustrialism in technology. He considers computers to be "graceless, lumpy objects." By temperament he is a nostalgist. It is significant that his longest work to date concerns the 1939 World's Fair, whose industrial-age, art-deco view of the future he prefers to the future we got and to the future we now foresee. Lovingly invoking the Emerson radio of 1938 which sits, no longer usable, in his living room, Gelernter praises both its "extraordinary aesthetic achievement" and the "brilliant culture [i.e., America in the Thirties] that created this thing." As for automobiles, "The Hispano-Suiza cars of the 1920s and 1930s were automotive deep beauty masterpieces."

At one level, I simply don't share Mr. Gelernter's taste. And about taste, as always, there is no dispute. But the reason I don't touches upon a difficulty I have with certain parts of his argument. "The beauty of a proof or a machine lies in the happy marriage of simplicity and power," he says, quoting with approval the words of William Strunk that "a sentence should contain no unnecessary words and a machine no unnecessary parts." Now, even if one endorses this pared-down aesthetic, what strikes me about the art deco that Mr. Gelernter loves is that it offends against this credo in two ways. First, it is defined by its use of ornament, which, precisely because it is ornament, is in a sense "unnecessary." Second, and unlike most other ornamentations, those of art deco presume upon the status of function. Unless, that is, you are prepared to argue that such things as fins on the back of a Pontiac -- a car designed in the deco spirit -- made it move any faster.

How can this contradiction be resolved? Quite easily, in turns out. Mr. Gelernter can love the economy of machines and the superfluity of art deco because, when he speaks of "machine beauty," he is really applying the same label to two disparate things: first, the intellectual satisfaction of solving a technological or philosophical problem; second, the purely personal pleasure one takes in a certain style once associated with machines, namely art deco. But is the beauty of machines really the same thing as the beauty of art, the contention at the core of Mr. Gelernter's argument? Obviously, cars and computer monitors are designed in obedience to aesthetic principles parallel to those of architecture or painting. People have to like the way a thing looks if it is to leave the warehouse. But no matter how beautiful a car might be, if it can't move, we have no use for it. However elegant a mathematical formula might be, if it is simply wrong, it makes no claim upon our respect. But we require nothing of the sort from a painting or a poem. The beauty of a machine, then, is an intellectual beauty, a cognitive understanding of the economic distribution of energy, rather than an aesthetic, that is, perceptual, appreciation of form.

I should also say that I do not share Mr. Gelernter's conviction that computers are ugly, a point which he makes at some length in the penultimate chapter of Machine Beauty. The screen on which I am composing this review is, to my taste, lovely and luminous and wholly conducive to creativity. The machine itself, an elegant black monitor seated upon a PC throne, is an adornment to my workspace. Now the relevance of this observation to Mr. Gelernter's book is as follows: postindustrial technology adorns itself with postmodern design -- which has been perhaps the most successful application of postmodern aesthetics to date, far more successful than in painting, sculpture, or any of the other fine arts. It has rediscovered the purity of design that was the best thing about High Modernism, as opposed to the "mod" exorbitancies of the Sixties and Seventies. And yet, through an increased sensitivity to qualities such as light and touch, it avoids the surly aloofness of High Modernism, the concern with form alone. It is humbler than the designs of the past, less insistent upon purity and proving a point, and more content simply to make human life a little easier. As such it is a notable instance of that union of aesthetics and machinery that Mr. Gelernter argues for in this book.