40th Anniversary Edition
By
The Late John Brockman
By
The Late John Brockman, the first volume of my trilogy was
published in 1969. The book was informed by my experiences in New
York's avant-garde art world. This context is essential to understanding the endeavor.
During that period, I produced the Expanded
Cinema Festival (New Cinema Festival I) at Film-Makers'
Cinemateque (1965), the special projects of The
New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center (1966); I was "Man of the Year" (1966) at Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, I was behind numerous
projects in contemporary culture including Murray the K's World, the
first multimedia discotheque (Life cover); the movie Head,
and "Intermedia '68", a series of a dozen performance
pieces performed at venues such as MOMA, The Brooklyn Academy
of Music, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.
These activities led to an invitation in 1965 from leading Harvard and MIT scientists in biophysics, computation, and cybernetics to bring a group of New York artists, film-makers, and musicians, to Cambridge. The result, possibly the first art-science symposium, was a watershed event and led to a lifelong exploration of the ideas under discussion. The 2003 feature-length German movie Das Netz argued that the interface between the vision of the cybernetic pioneers and the aesthetics of the New York art world is the key element in understanding what has become Internet culture.
During that period the artists were reading, and talking about, science, and finding ways to render visible scientific ideas in their work. One night at dinner, John Cage handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, and said "this is for you". Robert Raushchenberg encouraged me to read about physics, recommending The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, and One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow. Nam June Paik's video art was an example of the cybernetic idea in action. From Warhol's movies "Sleep"
and "Empire" I learned about the perception of time. The work of musicians such as LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela of the Theatre of Eternal Music, and Terry Riley, left deep impressions about acoustical space. And collaborations with the conceptual artist James Lee Byars gave me an appreciation of the interrogative and enhanced a mutual interest in "Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein, and Frankenstein".
I became first "McLuhanesque" consultant, and worked in industry (General Electric, Scott Paper), the military (The Joint Chiefs of Staff) and government (The White House).
Publication of By The Late John Brockman was proceeded by a performance piece of the work at The Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in 1968. I had been invited to participate in a series of a six avant-garde evenings that also included evenings featuring John Cage and Jorge Luis Borges.The book, published in 1969, was printed only on one
side of the page.
The second volume of the trilogy, 37 (Holt Rinehart and Winston), was published in 1971. I wrote a third work, Afterwords, included as Part III of a collected works edition published in paperback in 1973 (Anchor) along with the first two works (Parts I and II). This edition was on the long list (ten books) for the National Book Award that year. After Brockman, a volume of essays by contemporaries exploring the challenges posed by my work, was also published in 1973, the year I stopped writing.
This online facsimile edition of the trilogy, published under the original title, marks the 40th anniversary of the 1969 publication of By The Late John Brockman.
John Brockman
New York City, 2009
"There
are certain writers whose thought is so important that it doesn't
matter whether you agree with them or not. A verbal tension so powerful,
an ascetic appetite so huge and consuming forces us both to accept
the vision as a revelation and to resist it as a duty. By The
Late John Brockman deserves to be read and experienced as few
books do in these times of informational overload.
"For John Brockman is the kind of writer you both agree with
and don't agree with at all. Either way you must pay a profound attention
to what he says in this remarkable book. In short, sharp strokes of
words, he breaks through the very forest of meaning by denying meaning,
eschewing traditional forms of activities, thoughts and emotions.
It is not what he says that is so valuable; it is his whole manner
of negating what can be said. His words backtrack on themselves, stalk
their own meanings, and thrash about in the underbrush of our sensibilities.
There is a total devastation of language, isolating and withering
the very hands our dreams are made of." — Cover Story, San Francisco Review of Books (1969) |
"John Brockman’s trilogy is not as incomprehensible as
it might initially seem; indeed they are at base quite simple. The
first takes information theory — the mathematical theory of
communications — as a model for regarding all human experience.
The second is a print portrait of Heisenberg’s theory of indeterminacy.
The third investigates the limits of words as tools for understanding.
"What distinguishes this trilogy is not their informing hypotheses,
which are familiar to various degrees, but the author’s unfettered
exploration of their implications. I also admire enormously their
style and structure, as well as their remarkable capacity to implant
themselves in the reader’s mind." — Richard Kostelanetz, Author, Conversing with
Cage, in After Brockman (1973) |
| "The
most important book since Wittgenstein's Tractatus." — (The late) Alan Watts, Philosopher, author of The Way of
Zen (1969) |
"Post-Wittgensteinean epistomologists first wrestled with, and are now slowly beginning to understand, the last proposition (No. 7) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "Of which we cannot speak we have to remain silent." Brockman understands. (His words) silence themselves. His last proposition (No. 292) is: "Nobody knows, and you can’t find out."
"OK. If this is so, why bother? Because Brockman takes the mystery of language and puts it right back into its own mystery; that is, he ex-plains the mystery of language by taking language out ("ex-") of the plane of its mystery, so as to become visible to all before it slips back into its plane. This in itself is a remarkable achievement that has been denied to almost all linguists, for they stick to the description of the plane without seeing that it is the plane that holds their descriptions.
"Intrigued, one follows the construction of Brockman’s formidable machinery for doing the undoing, whose cogwheels, levers, pegs, interlocks, springs, etc., are anatomy, anthropology, architecture, astrophysics, biology, cybernetics, epistemology, heuristics, iconography, linguistics, logic, magic, metaphysics, neurophysiology, neuropsychiatry, philosophy, physics, physiology, poetry, proxemics, psychology, quantum mechanics, relativity, zoology, etc. to name a few. All who are concerned about the violence committed in the name of language will appreciate the useful uselessness of Brockman’s un-book. — (The late) Heinz Von Foerster, Chairman Emeritus, American Society for
Cybernetics; Author, The Cybernetics of Cybernetics, in After Brockman (1973) |
"A terrifying book...depressing...as cerebral as it is icy." — Vogue (1969) |
| "Who is this Brockman? I almost regret my curiosity; it has pulled me, kicking and screaming, into a new way of viewing my dead world. No one likes to be bothered that mightily by a contemporary. Brockman cuts away everything — everything — knowledge, meaning, emotion, that we have let grow around us to keep out the cold of nothingness. I doubt that anyone who reads him with understanding will be able to escape his thinking." Michael Perkins, Poet, in After Brockman (1973) |
"My debt to John Brockman is great: he taught me the essential non-existence of the screen of words. By defining, with words, the non-existence of definitions, the experience without words becomes the highest value in the hierarchy. The injunctive use of words (as in a cookbook) pointing to experience yet to be had is the only worthwhile residuum of the filmiest of screens separating ordinary reality from the non-ordinary realities inside one’s inner spaces.
"By The Late John Brockman is a compilation of ideas collected, computed, rescreened, re-ordered, re-created in the biocomputer of John Brockman. Despite his argument that the screen of words is dead, he manipulates the screen in a unique living fishnet which captures important ideas in an American jnana yoga. There are flashes of cosmic humor, dispassionate critiques, important operations of the mind, and a super head trip" — (The late) John C. Lilly, M.D., Author, Mind of the Dolphin, in After Brockman (1973) |
| "Part of John Brockman's radical and yet strangely ancient strategy
is to embrace those various avenues beyond thought and language that
lead directly toward illuminations of the present, toward, in effect,
liberation. To occupy those spaces is to be very high indeed." — Rudolph Wurlitzer, Author, Nog (1969) |
| "Like
a Dead Sea Scroll or long-vaulted Beatles out take reel, By the
Late John Brockman is destined to recontextualize the works of
a century's greatest thinkers. First published in 1969, this
radical, seminal work emerges only now, at the dawn of the 21st Century,
as a remarkably prescient topology of the landscape directly ahead.
This sequence of plainspoken textual fractals are at once soothing
and mind-blowing, disorienting yet familiar. Herein lie the navigational
keys to the ever changing map of human consciousness." — Douglas Rushkoff, Author, Media Virus (1998) |
Enter
[Note: requires either Safari or Firefox browser]
|
