Oswald Wiener was born in Vienna on October 5, 1935.

He studied law, musicology,

mathematics and African languages, and worked as a professional jazz musician from 1952
to 1959. Wiener was one of the key figures of the Vienna Group from 1952 to 1959, one of
the most important and—at least in the United States—still largely unknown neo-avant-
garde groups in postwar Europe, comprising Wiener (who wrote its first manifesto, “The Cool
Manifesto,” in 1954) and the poets H. C. Artmann, Friedrich Achleitner, Konrad Bayer and
Gerhard Rühm. Comparable in its radical projects to the Situationist International in Paris
and the Independent Group in London, and in many of its performances and actions
anticipating or paralleling the emerging practices of Fluxus, the activities of the Vienna
Group focused on a synthesis of various linguistic and poetical legacies from Russian
Formalism to Dada poetry, attempting to fuse these theoretical approaches to poetical production
with the scientific, cybernetic and philosophical models (Norbert Wiener and Ludwig
Wittgenstein) that had emerged from Viennese culture in exile during the war and the immediate
postwar period. Wiener broke his ties with the Vienna Group in 1959, destroying his literary
production up to that moment, and in 1962 began the preparations for a project entitled Die
Verbesserung von Mìtteleuropa (The Improvement of Central Europe), a novel-
type prose structure published in 1969 in Hamburg that is now widely perceived as a chef
d’oeuvre of postwar culture. In 1963 Wiener became director of logistics and later of the data
processing department for the Olivetti Corporation (the same year George Maciunas performed
his “In Memoriam to Adriano Olivetti”). In 1967 Wiener canceled his contract with Olivetti
to move to Berlin, where he became a notorious host for international anarchist and avant-
garde figures in various pubs and restaurants that he founded and managed. In the middle
of the ’80s, Wiener moved to the Yukon Territories and Dawson City in British Columbia,
and is now primarily engaged in projects and programs concerning artificial intelligence. In
1992 Wiener was nominated Professor of Poetics and Visual Aesthetics at the Academy of
Fine Arts in Duesseldorf, and received the Grand Austrian National Prize for Literature in
1990 and the Grillparzer in 1992. The short text published here served as an introduction to
a recent exhibition catalog documenting the activities of the Vienna Group; beyond its
documentary quality, we would like to see the publication of this essay as a first gesture of
tribute to Oswald Wiener and the Vienna Group.

—Benjamin Buchloh
 Remarks on Some Tendencies
of the “Vienna Group”

OSWALD WIENER

Translated by David Britt

Caveat
In the piece that follows, I interpret a number of memories from my present
standpoint. This is convenient, indeed probably unavoidable; but from the outset
I would like to avoid giving the impression that the attitudes I now hold were
already clearly formulated at the time. Some notions were, however, already present
in my consciousness. In the publications I have seen on the “Vienna Group,” these
ideas have been mentioned only in passing, if at all; this is because their signifi-
cance in relation to the work of my friends was quite different. I speak of them
here primarily as they concern myself, since they formed the basis for my own
subsequent development; but perhaps also in terms of a wider relevance, since it
can now be seen that parallel tendencies and efforts emerged at the same time in
a number of locations that had no direct communication with each other. There
is no point in debating issues of precedence, since relative emphases varied so
widely in different places, and since these differing value judgments left their
mark on subsequent developments. By the 1960s, the various groups and individuals
had become visible to each other, however indistinctly; by that time, though, they
had diverged, obscuring the things that they had originally had in common.

Politics
Did we (K and O) merely flirt with radicalism? So it must have seemed, to
outsiders (and probably also to A and G). All the same, K was radical: the physical
involvement (e.g., drugs); the tendency to demonstrate his ideas in public, in
order to experience them and to test himself against the unpredictable and
against fear itself; above all, the “social action” in which symbols have concrete
and irreversible consequences; also coldness, almost to a fault. I had inhibitions; I
sought ways to avoid action and to achieve, or at least to promote, comparable
results by other means—my motive (my excuse) being that to date we had insuffi-
cient insight to warrant taking action. My fault was a tendency to work inwardly (a
feeling, not yet critically examined, that inner changes are not irreversible: wash

OCTOBER 97, Summer 2001, pp. 121–130. © 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
122 OCTOBER

up, but don’t get wet). Escape into theory—escape from thought—detaches you
from experience, and also from your own thoughts. Thoughts need time. Ad-hoc-
ism is a special case of escapism.
Breton’s “fire . . . blindly . . . into the crowd”: Surrealism, too, had become
bogged down in the mere dogma of “absolute revolt, total insubordination, oblig-
atory sabotage.” Those who made the transition from symbolic action to genuine
action were those who could not wait (intervention of Citizen Whitman, vvm
CXLVI), or who were at any rate less hung up on theory, or who supposed their
present insight to be sufficient (RAF). Action in the name of an “ascent of the
mind to a world that is habitable at last” (Breton): one of the roots of Leftist
terrorism lies in Surrealism (Kunzelmann, “Subversive Aktion”). Here the need
for action leaves art far behind; but, in our own case, the need for insight led to
nonartistic, flexibly anti-artistic attitudes (art against art). An important factor,
here as elsewhere, was a tendency toward extreme individualism (which in my own
case led to conflicts that I would perceive only in retrospect). The result was an
individualistic anarchism that accepted the consistent transgressor (and above all,
later and more maturely, the inconsistent, opportunistic transgressor) as a variant
worth considering (N.B.: jazz as art of transgression; Serner). So not Bakunin but
Stirner; not the gangster but the fiend who purloins society’s intellectual capital
(and, incidentally, also lives on its material capital). “Everything must be done, by
any means whatever, to obliterate the ideals of Family, Country, Religion”
(Breton). Or rather, everything must be done to crush the ideals of Ego, Mind,
Language, and Meaning, because they impede our insight into the nature of
interpretation. Only the ideal of Insight remained intact (for me, for the time
being).
In Central Europe, and in Austria in particular, there was a fundamental
shortage of historical and contemporary information. Lack of money, travel
difficulties, language problems. Mass culture was taking over, wholly unanticipated
and to a great extent resistant to diagnosis, but alerting us to its presence through
those of its characteristics that were akin to our own concerns. Alongside the pre-
meditated actions of the human products of an individualistic culture (the classic
case here being Leopold and Loeb), unconscious literary precedents were rife and
led to “juvenile” actions (“killing for kicks” and nondesperate suicides, as first
exemplified in Vienna by the game of Russian roulette with mopeds). This was
probably not due to the osmotic spread of the influence of classic texts (Sade,
say); rather, the mental situation that had given rise to those texts persisted and
was now dimly present in the consciousness of wider sections of the population
(pulp fiction; movies that presented the transgressor as the victim of provocation,
as Ducasse did; Cain). As yet, few were aware that the major corporations are in
fact dictatorships. Gradually, there crystallized in us a tendency to leave it to these
new States—as we did to the old—to minister to the inescapable automatism of
the body; but to wrest from them, while living as parasites, at least our mental
autonomy. (K and I drafted a story, die katzen (the cats), in which we lived with
Remarks on Some Tendencies of the “Vienna Group” 123

successful people as human beings live with domesticated animals; also a “labor
union opera,” in which the word “I,” whenever it occurred, was sung by a chorus.)
Overt literature, an exploitation of trivial psychologies, had become unendurable,
because its response to the future—mechanistic life, formalism, “loss of meaning”—
was not a constructive and affirmative one (e.g., that of seeking new space and
scope for the individual). At best, it guessed at the problem and then threw in the
towel (Beckett). Fatally, a deactivated form of modernism was disseminated as if by
a mass inoculation program: exhibitions of Surrealist paintings in the absence of
any explanation of their (all too often marginal) connection with the original the-
ory; the plays of Ionesco; the philosophy of Sartre. All sense of danger seemed
already to be history; all receptivity to ideas that might lead to progress was
neutralized (“You people do nothing different, and not even so well”).

Surrealism
I discuss Surrealism, not because it invented the ideas I have adumbrated
here, but because Breton was the first to attempt a far-reaching theory. The
generation of the 1920s made their pilgrimages to the old men in Paris, but they
brought back no information on the underlying ideas, let alone the ideas of the
underground. All that became known, in fragmentary form, was the kitsch
imagery and the work of the newly successful second wave, together with just a few
highly impressive productions (Péret). The interpretations handed down by the
nascent artistic establishment spurred us to introduce the new and provisional
category of “Symbolism.” “Symbolism” represents the continuation of modern
descriptive literature (Proust, Musil) into supposedly elemental realms of the psyche,
where it is left to stagnate in parabolic imagery. Ulysses conserved the message of a
“human condition” by laying on a high gloss of popular psychology. On every side,
“linguistic mastery” was exercised on clichés. “Symbolist” images and texts were
reminiscent of dream narratives, but it was already clear that this dream narrative
followed a literary schema—or at all events that it could not grasp dreams (in any
case, I have never been able to see the epistemological importance of dreams).
Freud figured as a “scientist of the mind”: a poet of empty analogies, who
must be countered with a materialistic program (we still knew nothing of his early
work). To us, Breton was not (as he was in Paris) the father figure who had to be
resisted: he was laughed out of court as a “Symbolist.” For us, at the moment in
question, it was his examples of the surreal (Nadja; L’Amour fou) that invited our
rejection. His aim of “resolving the states of dream and reality, which seem so anti-
thetical, into a kind of absolute reality” (as I would read later) appeared to be the
overwrought language of a delusion: the delusion of a monism that sought to set
itself up as a fusion of idealism and materialism. The concept of le hasard objectif
(“objective chance”) had to be unmasked as the product of a lazy refusal to
understand: an empty analogy (K, in his life, nonetheless experimented with that
very analogy).
124 OCTOBER

As very little of Breton’s written work was accessible to me, I did not know
that he had propounded a program similar to ours. With only superficial knowledge
to go on, I dismissed his ethos of Marxism and psychoanalysis as bankrupt: my
ideal was physics and physiology. Not that I had a positive approach to put forward,
either—nothing beyond the need for such a program. With the benefit of hindsight,
it appears that Breton lived in the very same state of intellectual dichotomy that
tantalized and stimulated us: on the one hand, a powerful and vocal reductionism
(rendered still more attractive by a constant sense of its heroic nature, and by the
impotent hostility that it provoked in others); on the other, the undeniable fact
that experiences—and also some art works—exerted an enormous effect that
appeared to be immune to analysis. The dichotomy went like this. On the one
hand, one could cancel out the effect by comprehensively explaining the
mechanisms involved; this knowledge made it possible to contrive and create
effects at will, relativizing one’s own heightened emotion and making the
manipulator proof against manipulation. On the other hand, one must intensify
the effect of art as far as humanly possible: art must generate effects comparable
to those of bodily injuries or major life-changes. One instance among many that
occurred to us was the idea of an improvised theater with an internal space that
could be drastically altered in the real-time presence of the audience: thus, the
auditorium drops twenty or thirty meters in free fall; the seats tip and rotate;
there are centrifuges and storms; it turns freezing cold; the roof opens to reveal
the moon; and so forth. This was a conversion of the Prater amusement park for
higher purposes, and it has since become more or less a reality (minus the higher
purposes) in the shape of Disneyland and its various offshoots. Anything that hap-
pens in a space sealed off from everyday reality (“play”) is not art; the indirect
social consequences of art (“art” as an economic complex) are also irrelevant—
individuals must be exposed to art, and defenseless against it. The temple is a
danger zone.
In my own case, this dichotomy led to wild oscillations between mentalistic
philosophy and behaviorism. Naiveté dictated the following compromise. In the
1950s I turned myself into a fanatical artist, because I regarded art as the supreme
means of gaining knowledge. Art was experimental, because its varying effects on
others, and above all on myself, could be observed and could thus give rise to
hypotheses concerning the underlying mechanisms. Being an artist was more
important than making art. Artmann (whom I regarded as the Apollinaire of the
“Vienna Group”) spoke of the “poetic act”; I adapted this to mean that, somehow,
it was possible to have both emotion and insight, and (this was the apotheosis of
“self-referentiality,” the ubiquitous slogan that had by then supplanted Hegel’s
notion of “synthesis”) emotion through insight. One would find material—
another point of kinship with Surrealism, as I now know—in powerful impressions
in everyday life, in the perseveration of rhythms and mental images, and in
“infiltrations” (Breton) that had become conscious and could be extensively
reworked by extrapolating from and analyzing those (few) works of art that have
Remarks on Some Tendencies of the “Vienna Group” 125

an effect. Given the primitive state of psychology, our scope for research was
immense. Our awareness of this mission set us apart from other poets who had
begun to do things superficially similar to our work. I regard Rühm’s experiments
with sexual emotion, for example, as interpretative manipulations that extend far
beyond any open-ended or even moralistic game-play with the material (“language
games,” in the sense of Gertrude Stein’s “a language tries to be free”).
It was not until the 1970s that I realized that Breton’s program (not his
results) had anticipated one aspect of our work. If Surrealism is a “pure psychic
automatism, whereby one seeks to express, in writing or by any other means, the
true process of thought,” then in a sense I was looking for the same thing. The
“true process of thought” had as far as possible to be documented. However, the
art work was not the documentation. It was not about the process of “expressing”
anything—indeed, that process was the problematic thing—but about observing
the impression made by the given text; and that text must not be based on
“automatism” but must embody experimental traps (see, however, my remarks on
cooles manifest [cool manifesto], below). What affects me in particular, today, is
Breton’s demand for “self-observation,” which in suitable artists “is of extraordinary
value and can to some extent compensate for the dissatisfaction that remains
behind when so-called ‘artistic’ states of the psyche are explored by men who are
most often not artists but doctors.” I fully subscribe, of course, to his critique of
those Surrealist dream narratives whose authors wrote “without observing what
was going on within themselves . . . instead of supplying any profitable insight” into
the “interplay” of “dream elements.” Breton’s critique demonstrates that Surrealism
did not fulfill its intentions.
Breton himself fell short of his own demands: “The decisive act of Surrealism
was to demonstrate the continual succession of such sentences [the so-called
half-sleep or waking sentences]. Experience showed that very few neologisms
crept in, and that there was neither a fragmentation of syntax nor a disintegration
of vocabulary.” I respect the empiricism of the approach, but to me these
“demonstrations” seem to be of very little value, and their stated purpose to be con-
servative. They would still be of very little use even if they did not so glaringly
contradict experience; for it all comes down to the general explanation of the
process of interpretation, in which signs patently play a part that Breton was not
alone in failing to appreciate.

cooles manifest
In this, three levels of perception were postulated (this is my present, didactic
formulation). On the first level, it was supposed that the body sorted the modula-
tions of energy that reached it and offered them as gestalts (to whom?) to the
consciousness (to itself). In this phase, all emotions were to be suppressed; where
this was not possible, they were to be ignored as irrelevant intrusions. On the second
level, the consciousness constructed (as many as possible) different situations by
126 OCTOBER

(a) breaking down the gestalts in as many different ways as possible and (b)
reordering their component parts into new relationships. On the third level,
(who?) one (the body) observed these situations (structure of connectedness) and
made a selection—if, that is (as was to be expected), the given capacity were to fail
to achieve a perfect superimposition. Only at this point would one add emotion
and permit himself to identify, in the short term, with the selected interpretation.
That is to say, one would follow the clues supplied by the selected situation and
force himself to be convinced.
This was conceived, ideally, as a way of life, which would lead to phases of
self-identification under conscious control, and to abrupt revisions (and this, of
course, minus the conscious awareness and the capacity for distancing, is actually
the lifestyle of everyday life, up to the point of final definition). The goal was, as I
would put it now, a growing and consistently controllable repertoire of delusion.
In practice, of course, this program can be applied only piecemeal: specific art
works; theories; selected (emotionally stirring, or whatever) everyday experiences.
In most cases, “piecemeal” means “for a few minutes at a time.” As a number of
their recorded comments show, my friends saw cooles manifest predominantly in
terms of the manipulation of the response to “bad” offerings of all kinds. The pun
as an empty analogy is one obvious example. The point is to give it a context of
interpretation in which it formulates a new and viable insight; if all you can bring
yourself to do is to enjoy it, you have dodged the requisite work. The project was
directed against connections that offered themselves, theories that were understood,
art works that worked; it was an assault on automatism in interpretation. Soon
after writing cooles manifest and having my friends sign it, I destroyed it. Its formula-
tions no longer satisfied me, because they pointed to implications that required
working out. I shall mention some of these.
• Art as interpretation, interpretation as art. The role of the art work in the
art process is now just this: to be neutralized by an effort on the viewer’s
part. If the viewer’s interpretation is merely identical with that of the
producer (“successful communication”), the process has failed. The
maker is thus superfluous and his intention, if any, nonauthoritative.
Not only can the viewer impose his own interpretation on someone
else’s art work and sign it to give it a meta-consecration; the artist must
call a halt to his own production and delegate to others the task of
submitting objects for his approval.* From this a path leads directly to
the real-world environment (“randomly” present in any given instance)

* The only notable attempt to enact the collective reinterpretation of a given object took place
some time later, in Berlin in the early 1960s, when Brus, Roth, G, and I handed over to a complete
stranger, without comment, a commission that we had received from the TV station Sender Freies
Berlin to make a short film based on two anecdotes from the work of Kleist:
Remarks on Some Tendencies of the “Vienna Group” 127

as a task for artistic interpretation; but this path—as pursued for example
by Cage, of whose work we knew nothing except some prepared
piano—seemed to us suspect, since it precluded intellectual work and
left the whole thing ultimately subject to a metaphysics of hasard objectif.

• The acceptance of the “bad,” and the use of its effects for artistic
purposes. This is based on the discovery that the “ineptitude” of others
affects us “emotionally,” and not only in a distancing way. The next step
is to accept our own ineptitude and put it to constructive use. Inept
intention produces something new; fumbling leads to formulations
and effects beyond the reach of virtuosity (children’s opera).
Logically, this leads to the suppression of self-criticism, thus totally
negating the program outlined above. The results are to a great extent
unendurable to the person who produces them, and his only possible
excuse is the viewer’s enjoyment; he salvages his self-image by holding
on (and initially by clinging) to the conviction that it is all done on
purpose, and that this is “not really him.” The real benefit of teamwork
is secured when the team members are at different stages, and when
one or the other persists in going for quality and applying genius as
conventionally understood; this is the moment to let one’s hair down
(to a degree) and enjoy the self-inflicted disasters, the psychodramas, as
highlights of the collective experience (selten gehörte musik [rarely heard

“Title of Film” (to be supplied by filmmaker)

A Film
By
Günter Brus, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener
Concept, script, direction, and editing
By
“Name of Filmmaker”

(This credit title, an important contractual stipulation, was omitted by the filmmaker, no doubt
because he thought he had done it all himself). It was for us to provide an interpretative framework
that would make the resulting film appear worthy of attention. It was to be my task to show, in a live TV
debate set up by the station, that the banality of the artwork was solely due to the simplistic interpretation
adopted by the other participants (who had made their own versions of the subject). In the (unlikely)
event that the filmmaker produced a respectable offering—which he would do only if he went beyond
the brief that we gave him—we would have to postpone our contribution.
The experiment failed—purely, I remain convinced, due to external causes. The filmmaker was
an obsessive, who reneged on the agreement. After fobbing us off from one day to the next, he worked
through the night before the broadcast. We had kept to our stated intention of refusing to look at any
work in progress. We had only two or three hours left for our main task. I bluffed my way through the
debate as best I could.
128 OCTOBER

music]). The team therefore welcomes technically adept, serious, and

thoughtful members—not because anyone wants to make an exhibition
of them, but because they serve to structure the connection with a
cliché that is needed to create a genuine tension. What is gained in the
long term is a modification of the self-image: “This really and unalterably
is you, but now you can take it into account.”
Somewhere behind all this, there is of course a flickering awareness
(K, especially) that insight does not have to be conscious; that one
always understands already. The religion of the wisdom of the body.
Comparatively uncoordinated though I am, I am well aware of its
attraction.

• The need to “prove one’s individualism.” Freedom of interpretation

(the focus of personal freedom) is supposedly founded on the fact
(init ially t aken as read) t hat indiv idual interpret at ions are
incommensurable (Bebuquin); that there is an infinity of ways in which
meaning can be attached to any possible collection of stimuli. The next
step is to find empirical corroboration for this working hypothesis; but
for this artistic interpretation is too slippery. From this point, as far as I
am concerned, the path lies through scientific training.
At that time the “linguistic turn” was upon us (I feel constrained to
point out that it did not reach academic circles, let alone the general
public, until considerably later). Conscious reflection was prompted,
circa 1955, by Wittgenstein. If bodies of data, of whatever size, were sub-
ject to an infinity of possible consistent interpretations, the immediate
task was to look for parameters that would exclude all but a few
long-term, noncontradictory interpretations. In this we assigned a central
position to language (Whorf) and to the social institutions that (pre-
sumably) derive from it. The path veers round and back into politics:
one must use his own work to counter society’s sovereign authority
over language, but without falling into his own trap. It was from this
ver y st andpoint , with the last remark deleted, that progressive
conservatives were to define “political correctness.”

All in all: just say something, and the meaning will take care of itself (Karl Kraus).
Posit the very formulations that basic research has eliminated. For instance: deny
the value of experience (Feyerabend, of whom—these qualifications are getting
boring—we at that time had never heard). Objectivity is political coercion.
Science is tribal religion. The laws of nature are consequences of language. What
is so bad about contradiction? “The mathematicians’ superstitious fear and awe of
contradiction” (Wittgenstein). The meaning-factory that I ( joylessly) am is
hermetically sealed off, and so I am free—as soon as I can shed my conditioned
fear of the consistency business—to attack any meaning that threatens to take
Remarks on Some Tendencies of the “Vienna Group” 129

control of me. To make cynical use of the language of the prisoners of language:
the light only goes out when the skull slaps against the wall. But sleight-of-hand,
however radical, still has its laws. The world of “anything goes” is pink noise, and
as such is dependent on a recording apparatus. That is to say, random space has
structure.

The “Vienna Group” and other groupings

Of all the affinities between the “Vienna Group” and the Independent Group
in London, I shall cite here only one: the “subversive affirmation” (Brock) of
advertising and technology. Around 1960, K discovered Pop art as a kindred form
of chutzpah. Virtuosity decries content (Hamilton): the diametrical opposite of
“Fantastic Realism,” which seeks to use it as a prop for content. (The truly
astounding, detailed similarity between the two initial situations is described by
George Melly in Revolt into Style and Owning Up.)
From our viewpoint, the Parisian avant-garde remained buried in a vacuous
bohème. The first time I came across the word “Situationists,” in the 1960s, something
about it caught my attention, though the newspaper report contained no usable
information. In the 1950s the “situation”—the apprehension mobilized in a given
individual at a given point in time—had been one of my own central concepts
(almost-concepts). It was possible, at all events, to “prove” or at least confirm the
working hypothesis—that no two individuals have a situation in common—by forcing
the other person into a new situation through manipulating the environment on
the basis of one’s own situation: a form of control intended to produce intensive
art , the art of the life-impression. The magazine Situationist International
(1958–69), published in German translation in 1976–77, reveals that comparable
tendencies were present in Paris at the same time (such as the project of a
labyrinth for Amsterdam, which significantly enough was torpedoed by its own
originators); la dérive (“drift”) as defiance of interpretation (in Germany, this later
degenerated into the ideology of the “roaming hash rebels”).
There are numerous other convergences. Take the demand for a self-denying
ordinance in the making of art: given the present state of the world, and of theory,
there is no concrete action that can meet the due requirements. The best that can
be hoped for is to act in a way that gives a pointer to future achievements. In pursuit
of this demand, those friends who produce are excluded, and this exclusion
constitutes the only possible production: that is Debord’s art. (In 1959 I broke off contact
with the entire “Vienna Group” for just this reason.) A profound mistrust of built
architecture (built environments, apparatuses of control, obey and thus reinforce
a primitive consensus). A rejection of economic life (the goal of economic activity
is to disable judgment). A hostility toward academic science, and particularly
toward psychology and “cybernetics” (which threatens to impose a simplistic
model of intelligence); a wish for an antiscience. A hostility to the media; to public
and especially artistic institutions (museums, galleries, publishing houses),
130 OCTOBER

whether governmental or private; and of course above all to the justice system, the
police, and the military. Overall, a campaign against “spectacle” (a key word in
Surrealism, according to Sarane Alexandrian): a struggle to disabuse people. A
conspiratorial attitude (Surrealism and Breton are hushed up); the perpetual
formulation of placards, often right up to the moment of issue. Such tendencies,
as I have said, were shared in varying degrees by my friends, and are also to be
found, in a strongly marked form (together with some others that go further), in
my text die verbesserung von mitteleuropa, roman (The Improvement of Central
Europe, a novel), which in these respects derives from my time as a member of the
“Vienna Group.”