Nam June Paik “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan” (#videoarchive)
1. Twenty years ago Norbert Wiener, whose hobby was to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z, anticipated the Intermedia. “For many years Dr Rosenblueth and I had shared the conviction that the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man’s land between the various established fields. Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all intellectual activities of his day. A century ago there may have been no Leibniz, but there was a Gauss, a Faraday, a Darwin. Today there are few scholars, who can call themselves mathematicians, physiologists, or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist, or an acoustician, or a coleologist …..it is these boundary regions of science which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigators..” Eg “the physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician to what he should look”. (Norbert Wiener: Cybernetics.p2). The above conception of intermedia brought a forth an interscience called cybernetics, and the latter pushed the electric age (engineering with the technique of strong current) into the electronic age (control and communication using the technique of weak current), which exploded a the escalated “Mix Media” in Marshall McLuhan’s “global village”.
2. McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message” also existed implicitly in the science of communication since the 1940’s. Norbert Wiener wrote that the information, in which message was sent, plays the same role as the information, in which a message is not sent. It sounds almost Cagean…. Cage might say, “a notation, with music is playable, plays the same role as the notation, with which music is not playable”. I titled several of my pieces as “playable music”, since most of musical compositions are not playable.
3. Another parallel between the two thinkers is the simulation or comparison of electronics and physiology. Wiener’s main theme was “control and communication in animal AND machine” (note: animal comes first), which he put as the subtitle of his main work, “Cybernetics”. He reached to the automatic control of the anti-aircraft gun, an earliest model of today’s huge computer, through the study of feed-backs in animal’s nerve system. Also the binary code of today’s computer has its origin in the “all or nothing” character of our Neuron synapses, which are neither simply “ON”, or simply “OFF”. (No middle value, middle value comes from the vast accumulation of this “ON” and “OFF”).
McLuhan expresses his view in the following way: “We wear all mankind as our skin…. Man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself”. (“Understanding Media” p53, p56).
4. Indeterminism, a core in the thought of the twentieth century from Heisenberg visa Sartre to Cage, reflected also in Wiener and McLuhan. For Wiener indeterminism was entropy, a classical terminology of statistics, and for McLuhan indeterminism was the “cool media with low definition”.
Wiener: “Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganisation, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organisation. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy and the negative logarithm of its possibility. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than the great poems.” (Norbert Wiener: The human use of human beings. p21). White noise has the maximum quantity of information.
McLuhan: “A cartoon is a “low definition” simply because very little visual information is provided. The telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. Hot media are low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience.” (ibid.p36). This (audience participation) might have been the first bait, taken up by Cage.
It is illuminating to seek the common denominator running through these parallels. (Mix-media….. the study of media per se… simulation of electronics and human nerve system.. indeterminism…). Wiener used these characteristics as the micro-form to interpret the psychological and sociological exterior of the electronic age. The unity of micro-form and macro-form almost hints the harmony of Leibnitzian monadology. These are at the same time the original contributions of two thinkers, and one does not discount the other’s significance. (In a what McLuhan put Wiener inside-out, as Marx put Hegel upside-down).
Of course, MIT’s professor of mathematics and McLuhan, the hippie Joycian, could not agree in all the points. The resemblance of the African oral village and American TV culture missed the square professor, whereas the passionate preaching about the delicate but horrible difference of Machine Time and Human Time by Wiener did not bother the elegantly cool essayist. Wiener ended with CIO-Riesman like pessimism of this age, which he created largely by himself; but McLuhan, a convinced catholic, is glaring with Fuller-Cagean optimism.
Art history and musicology suffered too long from the separation of the unseparable. Technological division of work, Darwinian (?) conception of development (no historian started with Picasso and ended with Greece), Woelfflinesque obsession with style, endless peeling of the onion, to find out who influenced whom….. all these toils killed the subject of the study before studying. But if all arts merge into one, as recent movement of Mix Media shows, then the study of various arts should merge too into one by the qualified investigator, who, if I may simulate Wiener, is “a specialist in his own field but possesses a thoroughly sound and trained acquittance with the fields of his neighbours”. The method of Wiener and McLuhan is instructive for this expanded art study. Both McLuhan and Wiener jump around and float over many demarcated zones, that have been off-limits for a single scholar. McLuhan spits out James Reston, Al Kapp, African Village, Finnegans’s Wake, Korean alphabet in one breath. The almighty genius of Wiener can fly over Bergson, Newton, Gibbs, Heisenberg, Cantor, von Neumann, Hilbert, Gestalt, Maxwell, Leibniz, with jet speed. In McLuhan sometimes the quotations are more ‘collage’ than logical demonstrations. Pindar’s “Kunst und Kunste”, “Malraux’s “Musee Imaginaire”, Yoshio Nomura and Blyth’s work can be valued from this point as tentative classic. But the radical thrust in this direction will be a fruitful as cybernetics itself.
“Il n’est pas de mot qui vienne plus aisement ni plus souvent sous la plume de la critique que la mot d’influence. Il n’est point de notion plus vague parrmi des notions vagues, qui composent l’armement illustroire d’esthetique”. (P Valerie). “American TV age is not ‘influenced’ by the African tribal age, but both have certain communications and a rather ‘correspondence symbolistique’”.
*original text ‘The Institute Contemporary Arts Bulletin, London (1967)’
**syndicated from Vasulka Archive
