Nicola Cipani, Thomas Eder — HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark

Talk

Oswald Wiener’s die verbesserung von mitteleuropa can be seen as the groundbreaking coming-of-age novel of the second half of the 20th century: on the one hand, as a document of the author’s intellectual transition; on the other, as a diagnostic and prophetic work on the socio-historical, political, and scientific developments of the Western world since 1950. The “novel” functions as a self-subverting essay — which is simultaneously its own parody — modeling the development of Western industrial societies as an amalgam of politics, state governance, and statistics. The dominance of behaviorism is thereby exposed as a pervasive mindset that shapes science and politics and leads to the conditioning of the individual to the point of losing individuality. At the same time, the text highlights the inadequacy of available forms of dissent: criticism and resistance themselves appear to have already been co-opted by the systems described or to be structurally limited. The concluding section on the “bio-adapter” ultimately serves as a distorting mirror of this development. In short essays, Nicola Cipani and Thomas Eder present central elements and theoretical proposals for die verbesserung von mitteleuropa and engage in a discussion regarding their undiminished relevance, even in light of current debates on artificial intelligence, which Wiener characterizes as a “dummy intelligence.”

Artists

Participating artists

earned his doctorate at Humboldt University in Berlin with a dissertation on Renaissance mnemonics. He teaches at New York University, where he offers comparative literature seminars on literary machines, visual poetry, and sound poetry. He has also translated Oswald Wiener’s verbesserung von mitteleuropa into Italian and provided a commentary on it. His commentary was published in German by Ergon Verlag in 2022 (On the Theory of a “Roman”: Oswald Wiener’s “verbesserung von mitteleuropa”). In parallel to his academic work, he has occasionally been active in the field of experimental music. He is currently working on an edition of Giordano Bruno’s On the Shadows of Ideas.

is a literary scholar specializing in the literature of the Neo-Avant-Garde and “Cognitive Poetics”; he teaches at the Institute of German Studies at the University of Vienna and oversees the literature section at kunsthaus muerz. In addition, Eder is an editorial board member of the journal wespennest, a literary event organizer and educator, and heads the Department of Corporate Identity, Communication Design, and Publications at the Federal Chancellery of the Republic of Austria.

Recent publications include: Oswald Wiener’s Theory of Thought. Conversations and Essays on Fundamental Issues in Cognitive Science, ed. with T. Raab and M. Schwarz, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter 2023; The Vienna Circle and the Vienna Group, ed. with K. Kokái, Vienna: NoPress 2024; Hölderlin’s Ode “Blödigkeit.” Text, Interpretations, and Essays, ed. with R. Heinrich, Paderborn: Brill | Fink (in press, to be published in 2026 as Volume 6 of the series “Hölderlin-Forschungen,” ed. by J. Robert and M. Vöhler)