Oswald Wiener, die verbesserung von
mitteleuropa, roman, Jung und Jung, 2013 [1969]
excerpt
It is a novel, but
one quite different from previous novels. Wiener has disregarded all
laws of punctuation and syntax, any kind of chronological sequence or
descriptive development of plot. (...) Although the novel is not
about anything in particular, Wiener covers the wide range of human
experience. Any concept, any idea or impression is potential material
for the book. (...) It can be considered one of the most important
innovations in the writing of novels since Proust and Joyce." -
Rainer Schulte, Books Abroad
"(T)he reader's
attention is retained by the tension between the scholar's style and
apparatus on the one hand, and the unpredictable leaps and bounds of
the 'open form' on the other" - John Neves, Times Literary
Supplement
"His
extraordinary novel Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa, not published
until 1969, sums up much of the work completed before his break with
the Group in 1959 and is deeply influenced by the development of
Wittgenstein's thought. Its central theme is the basic discrepancy
between the need to express and the inadequacy of the means at the
writer's disposal. Equipped with an impressive knowledge of
experimental art, information theory and linguistic philosophy,
Wiener's book is really an anti-novel -- a self-ironizing treatise
complete with a monstrous academic apparatus. His apparent aim is to
bring language and reality into as sharp a confrontation as possible.
The result is a text of chaotic richness, shot through with flashes
of stringent socio-cultural criticism. In effect, a massive erudition
is marshalled in a sustained attack on its own cultural foundations."
- Hans Wolfschütz, in Modern Austrian Writing (London: Oswald
Wolff, 1980)
I’m not sure
whether I would actually recommend this book to anyone unless,
perhaps, they were particularly familiar with the works of
Wittgenstein. Its central theme is the need for the writer to express
himself and the inherent lack of the means to do so properly. Die
Grenzen meiner Sprache sind die Grenzer meiner Welt [The boundaries
of my language are the boundaries of my world] as Wittgenstein put it
so well. The book, written entirely in lower case and with pagination
in Roman numerals, consist of thoughts, aphorisms, commentaries on
his life, the linguistico-physical relationship between Oswald
(presumably the author) and Helga, all with detailed contents and
annotations. Make of it what you will. Some have described it as
brilliant but, I am afraid, it left me a bit lost but it’s good to
know that there are authors willing to push the boundaries even if
those boundaries may be pushed too far for most of us. - The Modern
Novel
https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/austria/wiener/verbesserung/
The title of this
work, die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman ('The Improvement of
Central Europe, novel') asserts and insists that it be considered a
novel, but it soon becomes clear that it is an extreme example of the
form. Indeed, it is a work that clearly means, in myriad ways, to
categorically challenge literary conventions. This begins with the
presentation.
The title --
and practically the entire text -- are written in lower case,
including the first letter of each sentence -- something that makes
an even stronger impression in German, where all nouns are
capitalized. (The very rare occasions when words are capitalized in
the novel thus stand out all the more so, as in, for example, a
section with a repeated "Ich" ('I'), beginning: "Ich
bin die redensart von descartes" ('I am Descartes' turn of
phrase'). Other exceptions include: "appendix A" and
"appendix B"; "DNS-stränge" ('strands of DNA --
whereby 'Stränge' would normally also be capitalized in the German),
and "TDYST", as in Hanscarl Leuner's transphänomenale
dynamische System (which Leuner himself however abbreviates as:
'tdyst' ...).)
The novel
does not begin with the text itself, but rather a (selected) people-
and subject-index ('personen und sachregister (auswahl)') -- an
inversion of the usual order. (German books do, oddly, often put the
table of contents at the end, rather than the beginning of a book,
but indexes are something rather different.) It is a thorough and
useful index -- but, coming before the fact, also oddly anticipatory;
while many readers might skip over it, it arguably does serve a
purpose in suggesting much of the material addressed in the text
proper. (The novel also does include an extensive bibliography of
sources and influences; this is, however, presented more
traditionally, at the conclusion of the book. (All references here
are also printed in lower case, however.) There is no table of
contents.)
The
pagination then is in Roman rather than Arabic numerals, yet another
twist on presenting a feature of the book that readers expect
(numbered pages) in incongruous form -- an effective variation of
sorts on Brecht's alienation effect. (Interestingly, Brecht is not
among the authors referred to in the extensive bibliography.) The
text goes up to page CCV -- while the Afterword in the Jung und Jung
re-issue is then paginated in Roman numerals, neatly also helping to
separate it from the original.
The epigraph
is tersely presented simply as: "joh. 19,22" ("Pilate
answered, What I have written I have written", in the King James
version) -- though in his notes to his Italian translation, published
also in German as Zur Theorie eines », roman«, (see more below)
Nicola Cipani notes that in the manuskripte-version (in several
issues of which much of the novel was previously presented) and in a
typoscript of the manuscript found in Wiener's literary archive the
original choice of epigraph was a passage from a Giordano Bruno
dialogue -- in English translation (Dorothea Waley Singer, 1950):
"Thou wouldst be more learned than Aristotle wert thou not a
beast, destitute, a beggar, miserable, fed on millet bread, dead with
hunger, born of a tailor and a washerwoman, nephew of Neddy the
cobbler, son of Momus, postilion of whores, brother of Lazarus who
shoes the asses. Remain a hundred devils, you who are not much better
than he." (Cipani's notes also suggest the original book edition
spelled out (part of) the reference -- ὅ γέγραφα, γέγραφα
-- rather than, as the Jung and Jung edition has it, just presenting
the reference ("joh. 19,22").)
The novel
itself then is far from a traditional fiction-narrative. It is
presented in a variety of parts, beginning with an Introduction
('vorwort') that, like much of the work, consists of short pieces of
text on a wide variety of subjects. A short title, printed in
italics, for each suggests what is then addressed or discussed. Like
much of the novel, much here would seem to be more essayistic than
'fiction'; of particular note is how actively (and often
aggressively) Wiener tries to engage with the reader.
The opening
of the Introduction suggests what Wiener hopes to do in and with the
text, a guiding set of principles (that also serve, in some respects,
to guide the reader):
einfach einwirken
auf andere, auf sich selbst einwirken, sätze einnehmen wie sonst
pillen, sich wohin führen lassen, sich in einen zustand versetzen,
lassen, mitteilen wollen, auch wohl sich eine hypothese zurechtlegen.
[simply have an
effect on others, have an effect on yourself, take sentences the way
you do pills, let yourself be guided somewhere, put yourself in a
state of being, allowing, wanting to communicate, probably even
putting together a hypothesis for oneself.]
Some later
sections then are longer, more cohesive pieces: one section is a
'hymne an den erzengel' ('Hymn to the archangel'), another explores:
'kernstücke zu einer experimentellen vergangenheit:' ('Core pieces
to an experimental past'). A piece titled 'PURIM' (a rare instance of
upper case lettering) is not so much a play-script as an entire
play-conception, describing also everything from the time of its
performance ("zu lebzeiterm des autors, jedoch in dessen
abwesenheit. am besten freitags, unbedingt 20h." ('during the
author's lifetime, but in his absence. preferably fridays, without
fail at 8 pm') to a description of the audience. There are 'zwei
studien über das sitzen' ('Two studies on sitting') and the
best-known part of the novel, Wiener's 'notizen zum konzept des
bio-adapters' ("Notes on the concept of the Bio-Adapter'); there
are also three appendices, the first of which also focuses on the
Bio-Adapter concept and which has been translated (by Nathaniel
McBride) into English.
Much of die
verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman deals with language and
communication -- "wie spricht der astronom zum biologen ?
pidginphilosophie, esperanto" ('how does the astronomer speak to
the biologist ? pidgin-philosophy, esperanto') --, Wiener exploring
and considering, including at a very fundamental level, what words
and text can convey. (So also the titling of the introductory section
as 'vorwort' (literally: 'Introduction') can also be read as "vor
Wort" -- 'pre-word' --, as Wiener's reflections tend to even
(and also repeatedly allude to) the Wittgensteinian.)
Pieces
describe the attempt to find expression (in words): "ich suche
nach worten der satz muss verändert werden man muss den eindruck
wettmachen" ('i am looking for words the sentence must be
altered one must make up for the impression'). He is aware -- and
suspicious -- of 'the aura of words', and suggests, to counter its
fetishization: "die liebe zur sprache muss man mit exzessen
neutralisieren" ('one has to neutralize the love of language
with excesses'). Wiener recognizes the seductiveness of the
well-turned phrase -- and takes pleasure in turning no few of them
himself -- but chastises the reader (or reviewer ...) for succumbing
so easily; so also his call: "nieder mit den zitaten !"
('down with the quotes !') -- in a text that frequently quotes, and
refers constantly to and mentions others' words and thoughts.
He playfully
goads the reader -- "die unausweichbarkeit des satzes wer das
liest ist blöd" ('the unavoidability of the sentence whoever
reads this is stupid') -- while also being constantly self-aware and
referential, and often sharply self-critical: on page fifty we find
some paragraphs in summary "kritik der ersten neunundvierzig
seiten" ('Critique of the first forty-nine pages'), and
elsewhere he complains: "das buch ist langweilig und blöd,
blöde wie kunst, wie literatur, blöde wie der glaube, der doch
damit vernichtet wird" ('the book is boring and stupid, stupid
like art, like literature, stupid like faith, which is destroyed by
it'). Wiener argues that nothing worth reading has been published for
ages; he notes and complains that: "jedes arschloch kann sich
eine schreibmaschine kaufen" ('every asshole can buy themselves
a typewriter') -- but: "was man mit der sprache alles anfangen
kann, das lockt doch keinen köter mehr" ('all the things that
can be done with language don't even attract any mutt any longer').
There's humor
to his bite:
mein ideal.
ich schreibe für
die kommenden klugscheisser; um das milieu dieser ära komplett zu
machen.
[my ideal.
i am writing for the
smartasses to come; to make the milieu of this era complete.]
Wiener sees
and presents the "Notes on the concept of the Bio-Adapter' as a
separate and complete-within-itself section of the novel, but also
one that serves as an aid in the interpretation of the rest. Here it
is most clear how Wiener's entire conception is informed by
then-current thinking on cybernetics, linguistics, and artificial
intelligence. If dated, many of the fundamentals are still of
relevance today -- and in his singularity-like conception of the
Bio-Adapter, this part of die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman,
in particular, still impresses (though its significance remains
curiously under-appreciated outside the German-speaking world).
The closing
section of the novel is its Bibliography -- an alphabetical (by
author) listing of the influences on and references in the book -- an
impressive and revealing reading-list that ranges across a great deal
of literature, from the technical to classical fiction to philosophy.
From eight of Hugh Lofting's 'Doctor Dolittle'- novels or seven
Raymond Chandler works and four by William Burroughs to Georges
Simenon (simply listing his: "gesamtwerk" ('complete
works')), there are may more literary influences than a first reading
of the text might have suggested; this too makes Wiener's point of
the difficulty of perceiving everything in what someone might be
trying to express: the appearance -- the words and formulations --
might not obviously reveal everything that in fact they hold.
die
verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman is a challenging, even daunting
text. Wiener's own uncertainty about it, in the form of textual
variants or, for example, acknowledging in a footnote about one
particular piece, that it is a: "misslungenes fragment. ich gebe
es hier trotzdem, weil ich das gefühl habe dass es vielleicht
wichtig ist" ('Misbegotten fragment. I nevertheless include it
here because I have the feeling that it might be important'), are of
a piece in a work that is meant, if not to entirely defy
comprehension, so at least to constantly keep in the reader's mind
the complexity of any sort of understanding.
In this time
of the rise of Artificial Intelligence, Wiener's focus on language
and communication and how he presents this material are also as
timely as ever.
Special
mention must also be made of the one other edition of die
verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman that is available, Nicola
Cipani's Italian translation, Il miglioramento della mitteleuropa,
romanzo, which comes in an edition from il verri that includes a
lengthy essay by Cipani, and extensive annotations to the text; the
essay and the annotations are now also available in German, as Zur
Theorie eines », roman«, from Ergon Verlag. Given also Wiener's
many then-contemporary (and often very Austria-specific) references
the notes are particularly useful for foreign readers coming to the
book now, more than half a century after its first publication.
Cipani's introduction and notes make for an invaluable
companion-piece to this text, and German- and Italian-speaking
readers should certainly consider availing themselves of these if
tackling Wiener's text; there is, regrettably, very little other
accessible secondary literature on it available. (One hopes also that
any English-language publisher that finally takes the plunge on this
one take advantage of this very useful resource and include an
English translation of it with the text.) - M.A.Orthofer
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/austria/wienero.htm
OSWALD WIENER: “SCIENCE AND BARBARISM GO VERY WELL TOGETHER“
Interview by
Hans-Christian Dany
When the Vienna Actionists urinated, masturbated, and vomited at an
event titled “Art and Revolution” in Vienna University’s
Lecture Hall 1 in 1968, the proceedings were accompanied by a lecture
on the relationship between speech and thought by the then
thirty-two-year-old Oswald Wiener. One year later his literary
montage die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (the improvement of
central europe, a novel) was published. With its excurses on
linguistics and cybernetics, it now reads as an astonishing
foreshadowing of the Internet and virtual reality. Later, Wiener
turned to the figure of the dandy, who maintains his difference from
machines by cultivating a practice of self-observation.
Hans-Christian Dany visited him at his home in southeast Austria to
talk about the peculiar standstill of art and science in the digital
age.
The moment I get
into the hire car, I know they’ve given me the right vehicle for my
mission. A small screen shows what I could drive into should I choose
to reverse. I hesitate briefly but resist the temptation. On the way
there I don’t see anything but the road. The world has disappeared
into fog, but a voice is guiding me. My destination is somewhere just
before the border to Slovenia and Hungary. On a mountain there lives
a who professes to have been cultivating idiocy for fifty years.
Where I come from, he enjoys an almost magical reputation. When I
told my friends I was going to meet him, they looked at me in
disbelief. “I didn’t think he really existed”. And indeed, it
isn’t easy to imagine the life of a person who described, fifty
years before the fact, the peculiar irreality that would come to pass
through the Internet. A person who seems to rise above the current of
time, one whose life story reads like a novel. A person who today
hopes that our attention might again shift to the self-observation of
human thought as a form of artistic research.
“You have reached
your destination”. I park the Nissan in front of an inconspicuous
house. The name Wiener really does appear on the door. Ingrid Wiener,
easily recognisable by the melody of her speech, opens it. Further
back, in the darkness of the kitchen, I make out Oswald Wiener. The
seventy-nine-year-old seems real enough, and bears no resemblance to
a fictional character who can travel in time inside his own head. One
wonders whether it was just such an interconnection of real and
linguistic existence that enabled him to write one of the most
shattering novels of the twentieth century. Or whether it was this
way of thinking that enabled him to use the historical figure of the
dandy to cast light on the problems of the artificial intelligences
of the future. For this was the kinetic logic of a writer who it was
impossible to pin down, who would disappear behind pseudonyms or
among gold prospectors at the furthest ends of the world, only to
return with recordings of the songs of wild Canadian dogs. This was
the author of a work that for a long time appeared to be hopelessly
fragmented, but which today has constituted itself as a compelling
intellectual achievement. A blinding sun is shining through the
window. I unwrap my recording device from a white silk cloth. The man
opposite me picks up exactly the same device, and sets it up next to
the first one like a reflection. At one and the same time, both of us
say: a good machine.
You initially wanted
to be a jazz musician, but then you switched from playing the trumpet
to working for Olivetti.
Jazz was implanted
in me at the age of twelve. There was a radio station run by the
American Occupation, the Blue Danube Network, which was a kind of
request programme for the soldiers. It was on seven days a week, and
once a week it played a piece of jazz. This was in 1947/48. I was
living in a reform school at the time, and all the boys had a
germanium diode crystal receiver with a piece of wire that you could
bend and adjust until you got the right frequency. For headphones we
used earpieces stolen from phone box telephones. And with them we’d
listen to the radio under the covers every evening.
Then, in the 1950s,
my childhood friend Konrad Bayer inducted me into the circle of
artists and poets. My interest in poetry grew with my realisation
that my musical talent was not going to turn me into a world-famous
jazz trumpeter. I liked the poems of Gerhard Rühm or H.C. Artmann as
much as I liked music. Then I got sick of all that as well, I saw
that my poetry was a kind of imitation of Rühm’s – at best, an
imitation with different intentions to his own. That was the end of
my foray into art, and now I wanted to do the exact opposite: marry,
have children, take up a bourgeois profession. I very quickly had a
successful career at Olivetti; they were waiting for a guy like me.
That’s where I learned the principles of programming.
Was this applied
programming, or was it linked to the debate over cybernetics that was
going on at the time?
The term cybernetics
had only just reached Central Europe. People didn’t exactly know
what it meant. In 1959 I stole the first copy of Norbert Wiener’s
Cybernetics from the lending library of the Vienna Information
Center, a propaganda institute run by the American occupation forces.
At the time I didn’t entirely understand it. I still don’t know
whether I entirely understand it today.
And then you began
slowly working on an attempt to create the opposite of poetry, to
create its destruction, which led to your book die verbesserung von
mitteleuropa, roman (the improvement of central europe, a novel).
Naturally after a
year at Olivetti I couldn’t stand it any more, I hated the whole
attitude there, the obsession with money, the ever more expensive
cars. I had chosen this career as a protest against my friends. Then
suddenly I was inside it and it didn’t take long until I was asking
myself what I was actually doing there and I started writing the
book. In the beginning I had to struggle against my inhibitions, you
can tell this from the way the book lashes out so much. I would
compose a sentence, and if I didn’t find it hurt enough I’d look
for other words until it became more and more painful. When I had the
feeling that I’d got something I should under no circumstances
write down, that’s what I’d write. That’s how almost the entire
book was written.
You tried charging
language with your own pain?
I was living under
the delusion that something was making me who I was. I didn’t think
I was being manipulated the way a schizophrenic does, but rather in a
far profounder manner to have been pre-formed by the existing culture
that I’d discovered under the name of language. Language was the
cipher for everything that was out of kilter. I found fault
everywhere but within myself, and even to this day I couldn’t
really say what I might have found there apart from gullibility. When
people used to tell me that Hegel was a giant, I believed them. While
I was writing the "improvement", I leafed through Hegel and
wondered what was supposed to be so great about all this bullshit.
And that’s how it went on, effectively there was nothing there any
more, only consciousness. A metaphysics of consciousness was the only
thing that I didn’t condemn and reject.
As well as being a
record of complex state of conflict, the book contains a quite
astonishing passage on the “bioadaptor”, which emerged in
reaction to an object by the artist Walter Pichler.
Walter Pichler saw
himself as a utopian architect, he was one of the first, along with
Hans Hollein, who declared everything to be architecture, as I had
declared everything to be language. He built a helmet with a small
television screen that shielded people off from the world around
them. That was enough for me to dedicate the bioadaptor to him.
The “bioadaptor”*
that you outline in the book foreshadows what would later come to be
called virtual space, You very precisely predict the structures that
would come into being half a century later, at an advanced stage of
the Internet, through social networks or with Google Glass. You
anticipate closed systems where the human gaze no longer operates in
the world around it but only ever reflects its own desires, gradually
forming a closed system. To what extent was this influenced by ideas
like, for example, Ross Ashby’s homeostat**?
The bioadaptor came
out of two strands of thought. One was the idea of society as a
homeostat. I noticed that cybernetics had the particular quality of
functioning as a mechanism that prevents the emergence of
innovations. I drew every possible analogy, such as for example that
Copernicus had had access to modern computers. If he had, the
Ptolemaic worldview might have lasted indefinitely, since the main
reason it was abandoned was that the epicycles kept on increasing and
the calculations were becoming ever more complicated. However, an
enhanced capacity to perform calculations might have prevented the
emergence of the Copernican worldview. Perhaps not for ever, but for
a hundred years. At a time when the contradictions are no longer
manageable and the leap into a qualitatively new state, another way
of conceiving the world, is imminent, the computer would function as
a means of prolonging the old, existing state of affairs.
The other strand
came out of certain epistemological problems. It’s difficult to
ignore the fact that we only have representations of reality in our
heads which we improve, worsen, adapt. We haven’t been able to get
rid of the idea that the world is effectively pre-stabilised for life
forms like ourselves. I’ve evolved into this physical world, I know
only a tiny part of this physical world, namely the one that is
crucial to my being able to continue living, the one to which my
organs react, the one I can act on using my motor skills. So the
pre-stabilised relation to reality, produced by evolution, is already
a bioadaptor.
But is this really
what cybernetics is? The homeostat that constantly seeks to maintain
itself, or the feedback loops that Norbert Wiener developed – are
these really simply means of preventing innovations? Wiener initially
thought of the feedback loop as an object of scientific study, and
then pretty soon applied technologies were being developed from it
which were mostly geared towards stabilisation, security,
homogenisation and normativity. Was it really cybernetics in its
original form that led to this innovation-suppressing apparatus which
always seeks to stabilise itself, or was it the way that cybernetics
was relatively rapidly taken up and applied?
The American profit
mentality is “we want new technologies”, and it bears most of the
blame for the whole thing. One of its consequences is that the
ideological framework reacts in turn upon the feedback loops, to
balance out the effects of the loops and manipulate them to have a
conserving effect. What is conserved? Values. Back then we had the
McCarthy era and the debate over what was American and what was
un-American. The point was to preserve the Christian heritage and the
lifestyle of the white families, naturally only that of the
tax-paying families. On the other hand, revenues needed to increase.
Whether cybernetics inherently tends towards conservation is
something I wouldn’t like to say, but in actual fact we haven’t
seen anything different.
To what extent is it
worth trying to separate some strands of cybernetic thinking from its
application in attempts to stabilise, and again try to use it in an
entirely different manner? The whole thing really was an own goal,
because the gradual institutionalisation of a cybernetics that aimed
at security, stability and the avoidance of the new has led to the
extremely stagnant state of contemporary society. It’s a society
that can barely come up with any kind of vision, which is actually
afraid of thinking about the future in any shape or form, and whose
innovations are, for that reason, regressive. The whole thing is
slowly drifting towards a kind of heat death.
Agreed. André-Marie
Ampère, who invented the term cybernetics, saw it as a form of
statecraft, and introduced it as a potential policy measure. The
things that should really be getting attention from any sensible
person today are being initiated by individuals who have not been
incorporated into the feedback loop. In the impoverished
neighbourhoods of European cities there are immigrants whose lives
are being wasted because of a lack of opportunities; they are
disqualified solely on the basis of their accent and their
appearance, and have no hope of a future. These people have not been
incorporated by cybernetics. That they are now making headlines
should surprise no one.
Those not
incorporated into the system would also be the only forces who could
produce real innovations, actual game-changing breakthroughs.
The question is
whether they are capable of innovation. They are capable of
destruction, but I don’t know what the Islamic State has come up
with in terms of innovations that could delight us or command our
respect. Because if one thing is clear, it’s that science and
barbarism go very well together. The scientists needn’t necessarily
be barbarians themselves, they need only shut their eyes or want to
live nice lives or have a voice within the structures of power. The
stagnation isn’t just in the social or aesthetic fields, but is
also present in the natural sciences. In physics there has been no
new idea that has really pushed things forwards for a hundred years.
This is perhaps putting it very crudely, but thousands of the best
researchers would cut off their own right arm to have an idea that
amounted to a comparable scientific advance as quantum physics a
hundred years ago. All kinds of things are going on, but, in the best
cybernetic tradition, the simulation apparatuses are reconciling the
contradictions between the theories of physics – it’s known as a
“handshake” – and innovation is being thwarted.
Many of the
simulation techniques used by physics are successful: weather
forecasting, for example, has become a lot better, but they cannot
explain why. The method is to calculate on different levels that are
incompatible with each other. These different levels are then glued
together by a form of creative accounting. The glue they use is the
same cybernetic kind that I make fun of in the improvement of central
europe. It’s a pure invention, a fiction, but nevertheless it
works.
I feel that the text
is, in part, a remarkably precise description of what has come to
pass: that the world around us has been replaced by largely
narcissistic self-reflection. And, at the same time, by communication
systems that make it ever easier to turn us into controllable
objects.
I incorporated
several digressions into the text. That this machine, the bioadaptor,
is itself intelligent and invents, so to speak, new needs. But that
is also pure fantasy. Such devices don’t exist yet, we still don’t
have intelligent machines. The machines that prevail against humans
do so in a different way than humans do. Their so-called thinking is
not human thinking, but something else. It makes me feel creepy just
thinking about it. What has several different levels in a human takes
places on a single level in a computer, the level of the sign. It is
just signs that are moved around, according to certain rules. This
involves the sophisticated use of statistics, with the final result
that machines function faster than human beings and can perhaps even
be funnier. But they aren’t really funnier, they only seem that
way, because machines cannot understand. Human beings can understand,
they understand the phrases that are fed into them, they understand
other phrases as properly answering these phrases, but machines can’t
understand any of that. Of course, we can’t predict what will
happen if this surface technology continues to develop.
In reality, basic
algorithms from statistics and information technology have nothing to
do with intelligence. Intelligence is here replaced by the management
of exceptions. Once you’ve grasped what a harmonic vibration is,
you can express this understanding in a formula. You can derive
anything from it because you understand what the formula describes. A
computer doesn’t need this formula, it needs only speed and memory
capacity, and starting from rather primitive premises it carries out
a vast number of generate-and-test experiments in order to achieve
the same result as you, who have spent two years finding this
profound formula. This makes me a little nervous. Perhaps what we
call consciousness and meaning was only necessary for a particular
era in the evolution of the universe. In the time before, there was
no meaning and no consciousness, and nor will there be meaning and
consciousness afterwards. It is easy to imagine a time when human
beings are no longer necessary. Popular philosophers like Vernor
Vinge or Ray Kurzweil have already suggested that we have got to the
point where machines are about to take over everything.
I have to say I have
my doubts about whether things are looking quite so good for
machines.
So do I, but it’s
being debated.
But also in the
context of a vast system of machines that supposedly functions
marvellously, but which not everyone is necessarily able to perceive.
This management of exceptions, as you described it, hadn’t really
been developed very far in Austria in 1968 – as it hadn’t in most
countries – at that time the system relied on much blunter
disciplinary measures.
Yes, it was no
longer possible to live here. The pressure was so great, people would
tap me on the shoulder in the street, take out their ID and say,
“Herr Wiener, come to the police station today at three o’clock,
the commissioner would like to speak to you”. We were under
surveillance here – that’s not paranoia, that really happened.
Then you had to
leave the country, and you opened a café-bar in Berlin called Exil.
Exil had already
been an artists’ club in Vienna, the name came from H. C. Artmann.
It was the name of a kind of secession, where several of the more
important younger artists took refuge from the Art Club. We took it
up again in Berlin because it suited the situation so well. We were
in exile.
Was there a whole
group of Viennese artists who went to Berlin?
Günter Brus and his
wife, Ingrid and I, Rühm and his girlfriend were already there.
Three people who knew each other well and had worked with each other
before – that’s all you need. Once we had our café-bar, people
kept joining us. You could earn money there, and work
unconventionally …
Did you really serve
proper meals there?
Totally. Seven days
a week. It was exhausting, but we were young and strong enough.
Was it more of a bar
or a restaurant?
It was both. Even
today you can’t run a café-bar unless you sell a lot of booze. You
only earn money from alcohol and coffee. There’s no money in food.
After eleven o’clock at night it was an art bar, and that went on
till six o’clock in the morning. There was no closing time.
Starting out from
the dandy’s desire for self-fashioning, it was in Berlin that you
began your investigations into the observation of the self, something
you continue to this day. This involves observing what happens in
your head when you touch a table or imagine a certain shape. Is the
point to work out where a machinelike formalism operates, and whether
thinking follows a human dynamic?
The dandy actually
has a great deal in common with the bioadaptor. I understand the
dandy not as a sort of tailor’s mannequin but as a philosophical
problem. The dandy is still a metaphysician, he suffers from the
thought that that he is comprehensible and explicable, and he
experiments ruthlessly upon himself in order to learn more about
himself. He is under the illusion that he becomes more fluid the more
he understands about himself, and that he can use this to extend his
capabilities. This information must not, of course, come into the
possession of other consciousnesses. He tries to control others and
make them more predictable, while at the same time not letting
himself become predictable to others. He “sins against the Holy
Ghost” in that he denies others such fundamental attributes as
being human, regarding them instead as sets of rules, as machines. He
proceeds in a similar manner against himself, and this in itself
makes a small but crucial difference. The bioadaptor can be seen as a
kind of self-regulating narcissist, but it can also be seen as an
experimental workshop. If there are billions of bioadaptors in the
world, this doesn’t mean that they will bring evolution to a
standstill. Though it might be possible that feedback loops could be
developed which work against evolution and in favour of
stabilisation. But there’s a very long way to go before we get
there.
Is the dandy a
figure who necessarily remains unknowable to himself?
Not necessarily, and
you can also put it another way: it’s a kind of self-contempt. You
are merciless towards yourself, you try to see yourself through the
eyes of others – though not in order to influence them but rather
to alter your own point of view. Real life teaches you after all how
difficult it is to change yourself. I’m almost eighty and I’m no
longer the same person who wrote the improvement of central europe, a
novel. I’m no longer so egocentric, no longer so full of myself,
and I don’t hate like I used to. An old man doesn’t hate with the
same intensity as a young man. But in this case something else also
happened, and indeed in a dandyish manner. I simply tried to see
myself through the eyes of others and found a great deal that I
didn’t like at all. Simply the fact of seeing something you don’t
like is itself a great step forward.
I wanted to bring up
the dandy and language again.
In the dandy you
find the peculiar phenomenon that’s very well exemplified in
Shakespeare’s Othello or, in slightly kitschified form, Jean
Cocteau’s Children of the Night: the phenomenon of other people
being controlled through language. There’s something magical about
this ability to control others through language – the fact that an
opinion can be brought into existence by vibrations in the air. When
I’m on very good form, I’ll almost always succeed. Back then, it
was the fact that it was effected by means of physics that really
fascinated me. The fact that there’s really just this bridge of
language between my idea and what I’m trying to induce in another
person’s head. That’s why I equipped the bioadaptor with the
ability to speak to the adaptee in the manner of a benevolent older
colleague. Not acting directly on the nerves, but rather simply
turning a belief on or off by means of words, depending on what the
situation lends itself to. The dandy is excellent at this. Oscar
Wilde at his peak could surround himself with a cluster of
intelligent members of London society every evening and completely
fascinate them by the manner of his speech alone. … That’s
another link between the bioadaptor and the dandy.
But language is also
always full of ghosts.
Perhaps not so much
language itself, but what it brings about. The spoken word is a
sequence of vibrations in the air. It conveys no content. The
contents are produced in people’s minds by means of a very
complicated operation, it is not simply transferred.
The contents are
produced, but as something quite different to what arrived as a
vibration. Don’t you think ghosts are involved somewhere here?
To me a ghost is
rather something that leaves you at a loss when trying to explain it.
Ask almost any contemporary psychologist what consciousness is and
he’s at a loss to explain it. That’s what ghostly is. No one
today is brave enough to say, as John B. Watson once did, that
there’s no such thing as consciousness, that mental images don’t
actually exist – it’s also a rather cocky thing to say, but he
had no shortage of cockiness. He doesn’t actually say that there’s
no such thing as consciousness – I think – he says that the study
of consciousness cannot be a subject for scientific research. Why, he
asked, should we concern ourselves with consciousness?
Well, there is at
least still art.
Is there?
It is disappearing
somewhat.
I think that art is
degenerating into a business of mystification. The last remaining
value of art is its ability to capture the viewer’s attention. It
functions by capturing people’s attention, and the nature of that
attention is irrelevant. That was already true of the Vienna
Actionists. When they disgusted people, they at least captured their
attention and thus legitimised their work as art. They weren’t
actually being serious, they didn’t kill themselves, and even if
they had it would only have been an attempt to make a particularly
strong impression. There are still countless ways to make an
impression, you just need to punch harder and become ever more
extreme. This extremity is not about how much noise you make, but
about your choice of subject matter. In Russia, Pussy Riot can still
successfully capture people’s attention, at the cost of their
personal freedom. Whoever comes next will have to climb a rung
higher, because the effect is weakened each time. Perhaps you’d
need to kill someone, or perhaps someone will come along and say that
the Islamic State is a work of art.
How do we move out
of this society of the spectacle that is forever turning in its own
circle? I think that art still has the potential to do this, but that
it has to a large extent subjected itself to a logic of this kind –
including the logic of escalation that you describe, which at the end
of the day is also a technological and economic logic. The question
is rather, where are the ways out of it. The idiot’s act of
disengaging is not enough; it’s merely a way to create other
spaces.
It is no longer an
expressive gesture; it’s a way of defending yourself.
But that’s not
enough.
Idiocy is not just
something you cultivate – the idiot actually does something. It’s
just that he no longer addresses the public. It’s true that he
still addresses others, but they are his equals, and to a certain
extent he considers them to be capable. And that’s really how it
has to be. An art that from the start isn’t after anything but
money won’t get very far. It’s clear that there’s a huge amount
of money in the world. And obviously the majority of artists want
nothing but lots and lots of money and fame. If that’s the only
thing it’s about, then I bid it farewell. And then along comes the
idiot who’s heading back in the other direction and who rejects
these terms. He’s happy with only a little money… you need to
have bread, and maybe some butter. But it doesn’t always have to be
caviar. You have to say what really matters. If there’s still
something as old-fashioned as interest and curiosity for something
that can perhaps be discerned but is not yet understood, then we
haven’t strayed too far from the right path. And this curiosity and
this possibility of knowledge seem to be categories that are as
outdated as just about anything one can imagine. But I can’t help
it, they’re the only values I have left.
Translated by
Nathaniel McBride
https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/oswald-wiener-science-and-barbarism-go-very-well-together
Oswald
Wiener's Theory of Thought: Talks on
Poetics, Formalisms, and
Introspection. Ed.
by
Thomas Eder, Thomas Raab and Michael
Schwarz, De Gruyter, 2023
The article introduces readers to Oswald Wiener's writings on
dandyism from the late 1970s and early 1980s and relates them to
Wiener's previous work with the Vienna Group and his seminal text
“the bio-adapter.” At the core of Wiener's aesthetic, according
to the author, is a problematization of human behavior as it was
conceptualized and operationalized by behaviorism and cybernetics.
Drawing on systems theory and on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari the article argues that what is at stake in Wiener's texts
is not so much a hypothetical difference between human and machine as
the question of how different components, such as humans and
computers, are assembled into a machine through recursive
communication. - Jakob Schillinger
Oswald Wiener was born in Vienna in 1935. With
the poets H.C. Artmann, Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer and
Gerhard Rühm he was part of the Wiener Gruppe in the 1950s. From
1959 to 1967 he worked as a data processing specialist at Olivetti.
He participated in various actions of the Vienna Actionists, and his
groundbreaking work die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (the
improvement of central europe, a novel) was published in 1969. In the
70s Wiener co-ran the legendary Kreuzberg café-bar Exil before
settling in Canada in 1984. From 1992 to 2004 he was a professor for
aesthetics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Today he lives in
Kapfenstein in Austria. In 2015, Suhrkamp will bring out a volume of
Wiener’s research in the field of the psychology of thinking.
