Oswald Wiener on Dandyism

Abstract

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.