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worlds smartest website IN CONVERSATION JOHN BROCKMAN'S EXCHANGE WITH JOHN NAUGHTON John Naughton I see you've been anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, variously described as a "cultural McLuhan's collaborator, who in turn impresario" and an "intellectual invited me to Fordham University in enzyme". How would you describe 1967 to meet McLuhan, Father John yourself? Culkin and other members of that charmed circle of communications John Brockman Wallace Stevens wrote theorists. The discussion centred on in his poem "Man With the Blue the idea that we had gone beyond Guitar": Freud's invention of the unconscious Throw away the lights, the definitions, and, for the first time, had rendered And say ofwhat you see in the dark visible the conscious. That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. IN OK, so you're deeply immersed in Any attempt to describe myself the avant-garde scene and entranced would end in awkwardness, confusion by McLuhan. But how did you get from and contradiction. Also, I like to keep there to an involvement with science changing the subject, to surprise and technology? myself. 113 It was McLuhan who turned me JN What's your intellectual background? on to The Mathematical Theory of From which of the original "T.vo Communication, the book by Bell Cultures" do you come?M an engineer, Labs scientists Claude Shannon and so this two/three cultures stuffreally Warren Weaver that began: "The word resonates with me. 'communication' will be used here in a very broad sense to include all of the JB In 1944, at three and a halfyears old, procedures by which one mind may I was stricken with spinal meningitis affect another. This, ofcourse, involves and was in a coma for six weeks at not only written and oral speech, Boston's children's hospital. The but also music, the pictorial arts, the doctors had given up on me when, theatre, the ballet and in fact all human unexpectedly, I opened my eyes. I am behaviour." told the first thing I said was:1want to He also pointed me to Oxford go to New York- zoologist JZ Young's 1950 BBC Reith ! arrived there at age 20 in 1961 for lectures entitled "Doubt and Certainty graduate school at Columbia. I was in Science". And I recall his quoting one immediately struck by, and impressed memorable line that has stuck with me with, the argumentative and exciting and informed my thinkingsince that culture in which conversations were day: "We create tools and mould being carried out month after month in ourselves through our use ofthem?" the pages ofliterary magazines such as Commentary, Partisan Review and the UK's Encounter. For a dollar or two, I was privileged `Any attempt to to look over the shoulders of the intelligentsia of the day - Lionel describe myself Trilling. Stephen Spender, Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin et al - as they would end in went at one another over important issues such as the Eichmann trial and/ awkwardness, or more trivial pursuits as to who slept with whom on a particular Bloomsbury confusion and weekend or who was still a Stalinist after the purge trials of 1937. contradiction' It's interesting to note that while I was ostensibly at Columbia to study John Cage had also picked up on economics and finance, my interests all these ideas. He convened weekly and instincts were strictly cultural and dinners during which he tried them I made the most of the resources ofa out, as well as his mushroom recipes, great university and New York City on a group ofyoungartists, poets and to educate myself in the areas that writers. I was fortunate to have been interested me and also to situate myself included at these dinners where we in the milieu where the action was talked about media, communications, taking place. art, music, philosophy, the ideas of McLuhan and Norbert Wiener. JN How did you get involved in the McLuhan had pointed out that by arts? inventingelectric technology, we had externalised our central nervous JB I quickly realised, but did systems; that is, our minds. not articulate, something the Cage went further to say that we anthropologist Gregory Bateson now had to presume that "there's only told me 10 years later: that ofall our one mind, the one we all share". He human inventions, economic man was pointed out that we had to go beyond by far the dullest A friend suggested I private and personal mindsets and come downtown at night and help out understand how radically things had at Theatre Genesis, an off-Broadway changed. Mind had become socialised. theatre in St Mark's in the Bowery, the "We can't change our minds without avant-garde church that also was home changing the world," he said. Mind to a bustling poetry centre. as a manmade extension became our So every night I would show up environment, which he characterised in my three-piece banker's suit and as "the collective consciousness". help set up the theatre. Working which we could tap into by creating "a with me were the 21-year-old Sam global utilities network". In some ways Shepard. a young playwright from the in 1964 and 1965 he was envisioning midwest. and his room-mate, Charlie what would become the internet. long Mingus Jr. before the tools became available for its One of the artists I got to know implementation. was the poet Gerd Stern, who had, Inspired also by Buckminster on occasion, collaborated with Fuller and others, I began to read Marshall McLuhan, incorporating avidly in the field of information live McLuhan lectures into USCO theory, cybernetics and systems intermedia performances. Gerd, theory. I also seized the opportunity with his unkempt hair and abundant to become the first "McLuhanesque" beard, was an odd counterpoint to consultant and producer and soon the buttoned-down classics professor had a thrivingbusiness working with from Toronto, but they got along clients that included General Electric. famously. Through Gerd and other Metromedia, Columbia Pictures, Scott John Brockman New artists, McLuhan's ideas had begun Paper and the White House. York. 2011. to permeate the art world, though it I wrote a synthesis of these ideas Pnotographriy Peter would be several more years before in my first book, By the Late John they hit the mainstream. Gerd introduced me to the Continued overleaf The Observer I 08.01.12 '171E NEW REVIEW 13 EFTA00607425