The MIT mathematician who founded cybernetics, and one of the strands feeding McLuhan's early-1950s turn. In the dialogues he appears less as a thinker read closely than as a marker in the argument over how cybernetics reached McLuhan — through Theall, as Bob holds, or through Giedion and the MIT circle, as Cameron argues. Start with dialogue 44 for that dispute.
Across the dialogues
His route to McLuhan re-contested — Bob credits Theall with bringing Wiener/cybernetics, while Cameron routes it instead through Giedion and MIT, so Wiener becomes the test case for who introduced McLuhan to cybernetics
Cameron places Wiener among the pileup of influences on McLuhan around 1950–52 — cybernetics one of several currents (Pound, Innis, Carpenter's Eskimo material, Joyce) converging at once.
"There's a whole bunch of things that are going on in his life at that point. Cybernetics, he's communicating with Norbert Wiener."
Bob's version of the transmission — Theall brought McLuhan the cybernetics, lending him the Deutsch/Bateson communication book that came back with McLuhan's annotations.
"Theall introduced the cybernetics to him."
Cameron routes cybernetics to McLuhan through Giedion instead — Giedion's 1950 MIT lectureship and the off-print he sent forcing a rethink of the received Theall-introduced-cybernetics story.
"Sigfried Giedion was a guest lecturer at MIT in 1950. And McLuhan and Giedion were in touch."
Connections
The MIT mathematician who founded cybernetics — the body of work that reaches McLuhan in the early 1950s through the Giedion and Theall channels.
One strand of the "thundercloud of ideas" (Innis, Pound, cybernetics, Mallarmé) McLuhan was loading up in 1949–52.