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- Author: John Sharples x
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A chess-player is not simply one who plays chess just as a chess piece is not simply a wooden block. Shaped by expectations and imaginations, the figure occupies the centre of a web of a thousand radiations where logic meets dream, and reason meets play. This book aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. It is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster. The history of the cultural chess-player is a spectacle, a collision of tradition and recycling, which rejects the idea of the statuesque chess-player. The book considers three lives of the chess-player. The first as sinner (concerning behavioural and locational contexts), as a melancholic (concerning mind-bending and affective contexts), and as animal (concerning cognitive aspects and the idea of human-ness) from the medieval to the early-modern within non-fiction. The book then considers the role of the chess-player in detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe to Raymond Chandler, contrasting the perceived relative intellectual reputation and social utility of the chess-player and the literary detective. IBM's late-twentieth-century supercomputer Deep Blue, Wolfgang von Kempelen's 1769 Automaton Chess-Player and Garry Kasparov's 1997 defeat are then examined. The book examines portrayals of the chess-player within comic-books of the mid-twentieth century, considering themes of monstrous bodies, masculinities, and moralities. It focuses on the concepts of the child prodigy, superhero, and transhuman.
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It describes that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject whose identity is used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to the mind, body, and society. The book considers three lives of the chess-player as sinner, melancholic, and as animal from the medieval to the early-modern within non-fiction. It also considers the role of the chess-player in detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe to Raymond Chandler, contrasting the perceived relative intellectual reputation and social utility of the chess-player and the literary detective. The book examines Garry Kasparov's 1997 defeat to Deep Blue. It also examines how the spaces of the game, considered again in terms of a haunted house, were instrumental in transforming the encounter into a modern-day Gothic tale for the human contestant.
This chapter considers three chess-playing figures: sinner, melancholic, and animal. It provides prominence to the fragmented shape of the cultural chess-player by successively presenting three short readings of the figure. Within medieval European society, chess-play assisted the education and socialising of the aristocracy. The later middle ages saw that the ambiguous status of chess-play persisted. Indeed, the period had been characterised as both a time of 'progressive relaxation' towards chess-play and a time of hardening religious opinion from disapproval to condemnation. Melancholy was the theme of one of the more impressive efforts of early-modern literature, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, which included chess-play as an activity that, like cards, tables, and dice, was 'often abused'. The sixteenth-century tale of a chess-playing Indian or Iberian ape or monkey was characteristic of the manner in which the animal world was utilised in narratives for self-reflection and also amusement.
The idea of chess as urban, respectable, and rational had become a possible image of the game by the late Victorian period, signalled by the attention given to the 1851 inaugural International Chess Tournament in London. This chapter offers a sense of the chess-player as a figure woven around themes of presence, absence, and excess. George Walker was uniquely well placed to reveal the everyday experience of the chess-player within the context of the game's growth as a literary topic and as a physical feature of the Victorian city. By acknowledging the exterior Café de la Régence (the physical building) as a practised space, somewhere where one goes as someone, one acknowledges the physical experience of interior chess-play. Moving inwards to the café's interior, disreputable behaviour is expressed through a number of behavioural and associational modes.
This chapter considers the chess-player from a different perspective, embracing fictive and imagined properties, namely in terms of a relationship between the chess-player and the literary private detective. As Paul Metzner notes, the chess-player and the detective emerged in literature during, and as a reaction to, 'a period in which outlaws triumphed over established society, that is, during an age of revolution'. Both the cultural chess-player and the literary detective are commonly expressed as physically abnormal. Both produce an emotive impact, whether that is terror, mystery, admiration, or fascination. The marginalising of the chess-player's talents in intellectual terms is most clearly expressed in Jacques Futrelle's stories involving Professor Van Dusen, where the detective takes on a world champion chess-player in a battle of intellect. Despite his varied monstrous aspects, the detective also represents positive qualities, fulfilling a social function.
This chapter considers the context of chess-playing machines, mainly the eighteenth-century Automaton Chess-Player and IBM's Deep Blue and their related forms. It explores how these machines were viewed as behaviourally monstrous, how specific sites of performance and initial impressions determined identity formation, and how resistance to these non-human intelligences highlighted or deprecated specific cognitive processes and mental faculties. The terms of automaton, statue, and magical object coalesce to suggest the resistance of the chess-playing machine to reductionism or essentialism, to constituent parts. The earliest contexts of display regarding the Automaton Chess-Player demonstrate the tensions held by the machine in existing within multiple spaces and between states of being. While the Automaton Chess-Player and Deep Blue fulfilled the definition of virtuosic machines, their contexts of display and masking combined technical achievement, theatrical presentation, and self-promotion. An image such as this represented just one aspect of their cultural representations.
The physical location of Deep Blue's 1997 victory over Garry Kasparov can be seen as a site of twentieth-century uncanny, a scientific experiment gone wrong. This chapter presents Vikram Jayanti's documentary Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine which revisits the contest and demonstrates how the ghost of Baron von Kempelen's machine could infect and destabilise narratives of scientific progress, rational thought, and modernity. Jayanti's documentary centres on the idea of a hero chess-player defeating the invading presence of mechanised thought. The incursions which Anthony Vidler highlights are shown by Jayanti in the form of surveillance cameras, windows stretching from floor to ceiling, harshly lit corridors, and access-controlled doors. This is the technology of the modern Gothic haunted house. The chess-player is a Gothic figure. Its human and machine forms became conjoined in Kasparov's encounter with Deep Blue in the haunted houses of late- twentieth-century New York.
One can raise the initial thought that the Automaton Chess-Player, in popular culture, occupies landscapes of past, present, and future. The original Automaton Chess-Player was a wooden box concealing a full-size human, placed in front of a Turkish-looking human figure able to move chess pieces with its wooden hand. The Automaton Chess-Player embodies a whole host of monstrous qualities, hierarchies, and classifications, each at a distance from the normative spectator. The intellectual distance between the Automaton Chess-Player machine and Stuart Dryden causes discomfort. In Robert Löhr's tale, the human gaze defines and controls the threat of the machine. By the denouement, it is Dryden who has become the emotionless, unsocial, maniacal individual, remorseless after committing murder and, drenched by the rain, appearing to the crow as vaguely comic.
This chapter considers the cultural images of Bobby Fischer, the American-born world chess champion. It analyses the myriad ways in which the cultural 'Bobby Fischer' was represented before his World Championship victory. The chapter examines Fischer's life from his appearance as a prodigy to just before his 1972 World Championship match with Boris Spassky to demonstrate how competing priorities and demands shaped his cultural image. This chapter prioritises Fischer's image as a literary figure, a haunting figure, a historical figure and a distant figure. The early descriptions of Fischer recall the discussions of chess prodigies as players possessing the qualities associated with advanced mental abilities, but accompanied by physical and, perhaps, emotional limitations. Fischer was, in these cultural representations, subhuman, everyday human and supernatural transhuman. Such notions highlight the way that Fischer can be seen in terms of the concept of the monster.
This chapter presents the issues of absence and presence once more within the context of Bobby Fischer's 1972 victory. The selection of Reykjavik as the site of the contest was, unusually for World Championship chess, a matter of business, seemingly confirming Fischer's ability to suck all aspects of the performance into his virtuosic sphere. Fischer's uncultured image was a point of some contention, particularly when his mental faculties were frequently presented in the context of an athletic, physical training programme. Fischer and Boris Spassky's match took place in the Exhibition Hall of the Laugardalshöll Stadium. Fischer's actions during 1972, regardless of his Liberace aspirations, showed a desire to avoid the spotlight as much as to be under it. Chess performance positioned the chess-player body under the spotlight, making it appear as an exaggerated, hyper-sensitive site of cultural image-making and contestation.